The ancient Chinese incorporated their observations and awareness of nature into the shapes of Chinese characters.

Learn Chinese: 雨(yu, rain)

The character for “雨” offers a clear depiction of rainfall. The horizontal line on top represents the sky, and the outer structure looks like a house which represents a layer of clouds covering the world, so it is going to rain. And the dots in the “house” represent raindrops falling down.

Also, when it is raining, the motion of the raindrops can’t be absolutely vertical, so the dots were written in that way. over the course of thousands of years, the Chinese people used their naked eyes to observe rain falling from the sky. Amazingly, the results of their observations are the same as those can ne obtained today using scientific instruments. The character “雨” was also used as a character component(denoting meterorological phenomena) to create the characters such as “雷” (lei, “thunder”), “雪” (xue, “snow”), “雾”(wu, “fog”) and “霜”(shuang, “frost”).