good news is that learning compound words can help you to learn the characters. For example, you may know (from your Chinese lessons) that xīng qī means “week”. So when you see that this word is written 星期, you will know that 星 is pronounced xīng, and 期 is pronounced qī —even when these characters are forming part of other words. In fact, you will find that you remember many characters as half of some familiar word.
When you see a word written in characters, you can also often see how the word came to mean what it does. For example, xīng qī is 星期 which literally means “star period”. This will help you to remember both the word and the two individual characters.
What is a stroke count?
Each Chinese character is made up of a number of pen or brush strokes. Each individual stroke is the mark made by a pen or brush before lifting it off the paper to write the next stroke. Strokes come in various shapes and sizes—a stroke can be a straight line, a curve, a bent line, a line with a hook, or a dot. There is a traditional and very specific way that every character should be written. The order and direction of the strokes are both important if the character is to have the correct appearance.
What counts as a stroke is determined by tradition and is not always obvious. For example, the small box that often appears as part of a character (like the one on page 32, in the character 名) counts as three strokes, not four! (This is because a single stroke is traditionally used to write the top and right-hand sides of the box).
All this may sound rather pedantic but it is well worth learning how to write the characters correctly and with the correct number of strokes. One reason is that knowing how to count the strokes correctly is useful for looking up characters in dictionaries, as you’ll see later.
This book shows you how to write characters stroke by stroke, and once you get the feel of it you’ll very quickly learn how to work out the stroke count of a character you haven’t met before, and get it right!
What are radicals?
Although the earliest characters were simple drawings, most characters are complex with two or more parts. And you’ll find that some simple characters appear over and over again as parts of many complex characters. Have a look at these five characters:
All five of these characters have the same component on the left-hand side: 女, which means “woman”. This component gives a clue to the meaning of the character, and is called the “radical”. As you can see, most of these five characters have something to do with the idea of “woman”, but as you can also see, it’s not a totally reliable way of guessing the meaning of a character. (Meanings of characters are something you just have to learn, without much help from their component parts).
Unfortunately the radical isn’t always on the left-hand side of a character. Sometimes it’s on the right, or on the top, or on the bottom. Here are some examples:
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