Enjoy and Fun Learning Chinese Characters(Part 2)

             6.      火(huo)= fire

It came from the picture of a flame .

 Than, the two flame beside the biggest flame simplified to be like this . 

Finally, we got this character火.

7.        口(kou)= mouth

The simple picture of human face.

 The part with the red circle is mouth. Then, it became 

and became more like rectangular口.

8.            目(mu) = eye

Word “mu” is just like an eye that written vertically.

  

Then became,

  After that, It’s written more rectangularly . 

At last, it’s written vertically and became character目.

9.       手(shou) = hand

手

10.       川 (chuan) = river

川

11.       門(men) = gate, door

 It came from a pictogram of an ancient China gate

 that evolved and became character 門.

12.       爪(zhao) = claw

爪

13.       田(tian)= rice field

A picture of a rice field 

It became character 田.

14.       羊(yang)= goat

 It came from the picture of the head of goat

 and then be just like this 羊.

15.       魚(yu)= fish

The picture of fish 

魚

16.       車(che)= vehicle

Ancient Chinesepeople wrote vehicle character from the most popular vehicle at that time. Of course it wasn’t a car, a motorcycle, or the other modern vehicles. The most popular vehicle in ancient China was a cart. From up above, the cart it seems like the picture below...

From the picture that you have seen above. Ancient Chinese create a pictogram like this .

 After some transfomation, this character become simpler and have a shape like character  “dong”(east). The modern word for vehicle is 車. It often combined with character

汽(qi) and become 汽車( qi che) that means car.

17.       天(tian)= sky

Character “tian” came from this following picture...

This is the picture that illustrate how a person see the sky high.  And than it becomes more simple like this .

After that, it standardize and becam this modern character for sky 天.

Just for some addition, the modern Chinese character “天” have two horizontal lines. The first line is shorter than the second. In fact, if we  see this character seriously and see how this character became we’ll know and realize that the  first line must longer than the second. How can the sky smaller than the man that look at the sky? 

18.       老(lao)= old

This is the illustration of an old person. 

This illustration was modificated by ancient Chinese and became 老.

19.       刀(dao)= knife

It formed by the modification of the pictogram shaped like knife. The pictogram is like this.

Then, it modificated and formed this character 刀.

20.       止(zhi)= stop

Pay attention with the picture below

Compare it with this one

止

Is it clear enough?