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The ancients were so wise
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Only a small number of chinese characters (usually ones like these that signify basic things and concepts) are ideographs or Pictographs
Most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, which are kinda a bit of a mix between phonographs and ideographs
Oh, here I thought life was going to be easy for once
This is a good thing. The pictographic basic characters tend to have the pronunciation you learn by rote, but then they become the components of the the phono-semantic characters.
With the phonosemantic characters one side tells you the rough pronunciation, the other side gives you a ballpark e.g. 火 is fire (imagine a burning campfires) 包 is pronounced bao and then if you add 火 fire to 包 you get {炮|pao} meaning cannon. If you add the bamboo radical over 同 tong you get {筒|tong} meaning a barrel. So 炮筒 paotong means the barrel of a cannon.
Many Chinese words are made up of two characters, so by context you can have a decent guess what they mean.
Yay! Ty ty
It's actually easier than I thought to learn the characters.