37 Fresh fruits, nuts and grain
A Basic Introduction to Mandarin Chinese
This illustrated dictionary presents 1,500 frequently-used Mandarin Chinese words and phrases, including those that students need to know to pass the Advanced Placement Chinese Language and Culture Exam, and Levels 1–3 of the official HSK government proficiency exams. The dictionary is organized into 38 themes, each of which presents 25–35 words. Each section also has five to eight sentences demonstrating the usage of the words. The words and sentences in the dictionary all appear in the following order: Chinese characters (Hanzi), followed by the pronunciation in standard Hanyu Pinyin romanized form, followed by the English meaning.
The Chinese characters
It is often said that Chinese characters (Hànzì 汉字) are pictographs or ideographs, meaning that they literally represent a picture or an idea of something in stylized form. Long ago, this may have been true, and it is still true for a small number of basic characters, though most of these characters have changed quite a bit over time. Here are some examples to give you an idea of how these characters have changed:
Most Chinese characters quickly evolved towards abstraction, as different elements or pieces of characters were combined or fused together to form new characters that no longer provided a literal picture of something. As a result, only about 4-5% of the Chinese characters currently in use are actually pictographs or ideographs. Most of the characters are more abstract in nature, although certain elements of the characters may retain a core pictographic meaning.
For example, the character shù 树, meaning “tree,” has the pictographic character mù 木 (representing a tree) on the left side of it. In fact, many characters having to do with wood or things made of wood contain the mù 木 element (this is commonly referred to as a “radical” or “root”). Here are some examples: lín 林 (forest), lán 栏 (railing), yǐ 椅 (chair), and bǎn 板 (plank, board). Sometimes in the modern meaning, the link to “wood” can be hard to see, however. For example, duǒ 朵 has the 木 radical, but means “earlobe”. It is used in combination with the character ěr 耳 to mean “ear” (ěrduō 耳朵). The old meaning of duǒ 朵, however, is “flower” or “blossom,” like one you would see on a tree or bush. An earlobe might thus be thought of as “the flower of the ear.”
One reason Chinese characters became more abstract has to do with pronunciation. The Chinese language long ago developed different regional dialects which over time became separate languages—as different from one another as the languages of Europe. As these languages changed and new words developed, people needed to know how to pronounce the characters used for those words. Thus, for example, an existing character which had the sound shù 尌 was added to mù 木 to represent a new word meaning “tree” which was pronounced as shù 樹. Here, the element 木 indicates that 樹 means “tree,” while the element 尌 shows how it is pronounced—as shù. In more recent times, the complicated traditional form 樹 was simplified to 树. Today, about 80% of all Chinese characters combine a semantic element (something which gives meaning) and a phonetic element (something which gives a clue to pronunciation). Here are some examples:
water radical 氵(a variation of 水) ＋ phonetic yáng 羊 (sheep) ＝ yáng 洋 (ocean)
woman radical 女 + phonetic mǎ 马 (horse) = mā 妈 (mother)
rain radical 雨 + phonetic lìng 令 (to order) = líng 零 (falling [rain]; zero)
grass radical 艹 (from the old character
In the characters above, the phonetic element adds nothing to the meaning: it just provides the sound.
As they became more complicated, Chinese characters