New Words … Chinese lesson ahead.

I am constantly surprised by the Chinese language. What is most fascinating and amusing to me is when I come across words, which when broken down into their component parts, just make sense.

This probably needs an example to illustrate my point. My favorite word for today is the word for “restless”. It is composed of two characters, each character using the “heart” radical, the first character combines it with the radical for “up” and the second character combines this with the radical for “down”. So together it all means that the heart is going up and down. So simple, but so full of meaning!

Once you’ve tackled the some 250 radicals (the core symbols whose combinations form much of the 10,000+ words), the characters start to make a lot more sense and become significantly easier to remember. Still, with all the complexity and nuance of each character I think I’ll be studying this all my life. At least my brain won’t go turn to mush.