Huni Cat and Blue Rabbit Teach Toddlers to Read: Happy Kids Volume

Author: Su Zhen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Kids, do you know? Chinese characters are one of the most interesting writing systems in the world. If you observe them carefully, you can find a lot of information in them. Let's take the characters "" (nán) and "" (ān) as an example. The character "" is composed of the top "" (field) and the bottom "" (power), meaning that men have great strength and therefore need to labor in the fields, doing strenuous work. The character "" is made up of the top "" (house) and the bottom "" (woman), where "" represents a house. This tells us that women do not have as much strength as men and therefore live in houses, doing lighter tasks. From these two characters, we can understand that in ancient times, men and women had different roles: men mainly did outdoor work, while women mainly did household chores. There are also many other meaningful Chinese characters. For example, the character "" (cóng) is made up of two "" characters, where the "" (person) behind follows the "" (person) in front, meaning "to follow" or "attendant." Another example is the character "" (zhòng), which is composed of three "" (person) characters, where three people together mean "many." Adding a horizontal stroke above the character "" (tree) creates "" (mò), which refers to the top of a tree, or the tip of the branches. Adding a horizontal stroke below the character "" (tree) creates "" (běn), which represents the lower part of a tree, or the roots. How about that? Chinese characters are very interesting, right? In fact, many Chinese characters have similar characteristics, and from their structure, we can understand their meanings. The construction of Chinese characters is so clever that if we take the time to appreciate it, we can discover many interesting things.