Chinese characters are based on pictures or logograms. It has kept the ancient people’s way of denoting their daily life. Chinese characters are the foundation of other Asian languages’ writing systems, including Japanese and Korean. Therefore Chinese characters are the most popular written language in the world based on the number of people who use them. Learning to recognize and write basic Chinese characters can open up a whole world of possibilities to you.
There are two types of character: one-component characters and two-component characters. One component characters are simple, and function like latin root words that are the building blocks for the word. The two-component characters are composed of two or more one-component characters. One part of the two-component character tells the reader a general idea what this character means. The other part of the component(s) tells the reader the approximate pronunciation of the character.
In this article, I am going to show you alphabetically by PinYin how to recognize and pronounce some common Chinese characters. (This article will grow and evolve as time passes and wisdom expands.)
Lu 露
Lu 露, like most Chinese characters, has two parts to it. The sound part tells you how to pronounce it. The meaning part tells you the general meaning of the character. 露 has two parts. The top part, 雨, represents rain. The bottom part, 路, lets you know that the character is pronounced “Lu”.
Even if you have never seen this character before, you know it has something to do with rain and is pronounced “Lu”. In fact, 露 means “water droplets on the grass in the morning”.
