Based on the origin of Chinese characters, they have four main categories, the pictographic characters (象形字), the indicative characters (指事字), the associative characters (会意字) and pictophonetic characters (形声字). We will explain the pictophonetic characters in this lesson.
Though Chinese is not a phonetic language, many two-components Chinese characters have one component to indicate the sound, named as the sound radical (声旁), while the other to convey the meaning, named as the meaning radical (形旁). For examples, “女” in the character "妈" carries the meaning and "马" indicate the sound. Characters like this are called pictophonetic characters and the two components are generally called as radicals (偏旁).
We give you more examples below. Can you tell in each character which component is the sound radical and which is the meaning radical? (Answers can be found in the next lesson)
1. 妈 (mā, means mother)
2. 们 (men, suffix to show plural)
3. 种 (zhǒng, means seed)
4. 近 (jìn, means close, near)
5. 机 (jī, means machine)
6. 钱 (qián, means money)
7. 注 (zhù, means to pour)
8. 想 (xiǎng, means to think)
From the examples above, we can easily see that pictophonetic characters are the compounds (合体字).
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