ANOTHER WAY THAT MANY CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE FORMED 

There are basically six ways that Chinese words are formed (and you can just ignore these terms if they seem like gibberish to you) -- pictographic, simple indicative, compound indicative, phonetic loan, semantic-phonetic, derived characters.  Notice that the first way is what you saw in the previous page.  Also notice that two of the six ways include the word "phonetic."  It is reported that about 97% of Chinese characters are formed based on the Sematic-Phonetic principle. 

What does Sematic-Phonetic mean?  It roughly means that each word has a part (or parts) representing  the "meaning" and a part (or parts) representing the "sound."  This way a lot of words can be learned more easily and their sounds can be roughly "guessed" if you do not know for sure. 

Let's see two examples (click the Reload button on the browser now!) : 

This example shows a common two-unit character. 
The left unit is the meaning base, symbolizing water or liquid. 
The right unit is the sound base, yang (second tone.) 
The combined Chinese character is the ocean, pronounced yang (second tone.) 

 

This one shows another two-unit character that's formed by a TOP and a BOTTOM parts. 
The top unit is the sound base, lie (fourth tone.) 
The bottom unit is the meaning base, symbolizing clothing or clothes. 
The combined Chinese character means TORN, pronounced lie (fourth tone.) 

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