If you have studied Chinese or are studying Chinese now, you may have heard of “Self-explanatory Characters” when learning Chinese characters.

The pictographic character for knife is “刀” (dao), isn’t it look like a big knife? So in order to obtain the character “刃” (ren, “blade”), all we need to do is to add a dot to the character “刀” to indicate the blade’s location. The character “木” (mu) means “tree”. How can we use Chinese characters to denote the root of a tree? We just need to add a horizontal stroke beneath “木”. The result is the character “本”(ben, means “root”).

The character-formation method is known as the ideographic method of character formation. Characters formed in this way are known as “self-explanatory characters”. Comparatively, the self-explanatory characters are quite few. The shape looks like the Chinese character “二” (er, “two”) with two horizontal strokes. Placing “?” on top of the character, we get “上” (shang, “above”); placing “?” below the character, we get “下” (xia, “below”).

Pictographic characters and self-explanatory characters are both independent characters. Although they are limited in number, they serve as the foundation of the Chinese character system; they can be used as character components to form compound characters, the number of which far exceeds that of independent characters. There are two kinds of compound characters: associative characters and pictophonetic characters.