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Chinese Characters Learning through Components

As we all know, the Chinese character components are helpful to understand character meaning and pronunciation. However, the overseas students who study in Mandarin learning courses should pay attention to several points when learning characters by making use of character components. First of all, they should make the best use of the components’ functions of indicating meaning and pronunciation to help Chinese characters learning.

Even though the components that indicate meaning or pronunciation have some differences with the meaning or the pronunciation of the character after several thousand years’ development and evolution, generally speaking, the character components have important function of cueing the meanings and pronunciation of Chinese characters. The characteristics of Chinese characters structures make one component govern many characters. For examples, among the 7000 commonly used characters, 378 characters have氵, 304 characters have 艹 and 275 has 口.

There are so many characters in Chinese language with the same components and the components have relationship with either the pronunciation or meanings of the characters. If you lean Chinese online free, you should know the characters with扌like 打, 扶, 拉, 摸, 抓, 推, 扔and扛are all related to actions of hands. The characters with 马like 吗, 妈, 码, 骂and码have the pronunciation of “ma”. Therefore, the learners should make full use of the functions of the components to learn characters.

Of course, much attention should be paid to the conditions that the components do not indicate the meaning or pronunciation. First of all, the students should be able to tell apart the components indicating the meanings and those indicating pronunciation. For instance, 锦has the same element with铜, 银and钢, but it has nothing to do with metal. Besides, they should be clear that some components are from the changes of characters’ forms. From example, 肩is different with 房and启.

One point that the foreign students who learn Chinese language should know some elements are formed after omitting the forms or pronunciation like 炊, which has 欠 but different with 歌, 吹and 饮 which are related to open the mouth. If the students pay attention to the points mentioned above when they learn Chinese characters by making use of character components, they will find it is effective. 

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