用英語學中文:六個令人驚訝的“怪異”角色

編者按：用英語來學習中文，作者推薦了六個詭異的中文角色，並附加上了詳細介紹，我們一起來看一看六個令人驚訝的怪異角色英語版解析。

This week we're going to show some of the most unusual simple characters that look surprisingly and weird. Some of these characters, with six strokes or fewer and you might have never heard of in the daily, hardly look like 漢字(hànzì Chinese character), but they do look exactly like their ve speakers of Chinese might not find these characters at all unusual, but many Chinese learners would be given pause if they encountered these odd characters.

丫- yā

This three-stroke character means "bifricate" or "fork". Not hard to fathom how ancient Chinese people came up with this character. 丫features in words like 丫杈(yā chà, the fork of a tree branch.)

凹凸 – āotū

Together, these characters means "bumpy" or "uneven". 凹 on its own means "concave" or "sunken" and 凸 means "convex" or "protruding". Who says Chinese is a difficult language?

孑孓- jiéjué

孑孓 is comprised of two 了 radicals with a wiggly line on each one, as if 子 (zǐ) decided to cut loose a little. Together the characters in 孑孓 means "wiggler". Originally, 孑 means a person missing their left arm (link in Chinese), and 孓 meant missing their right arm. 孑 also appears in the idioms (成語chéngyǔ) "孑然一身", where it means "lonely" or "to be alone in the world".

孖 – zī or mā

孖 is made up of two 子 (child) radicals next to each other. The meaning here is simple – twins! 孖 is infrequently used compared to 雙(shuāng double) in Mandarin, but it is used commonly in Cantonese on making the word "twins" (孖生 māshēng).

彳亍 – chì chù

彳亍 looks like the radicals of 行 had a bad breakup, but these character actually have their own meaning together, "walk slowly". Used mostly in formal or artistic contexts, "彳亍" was the titled of a recent exhibition by a master abstract artist in 798 Art District, giving attention to these obscure characters that rarely used.

卜 – bǔ

The meaning of this character is "to divine" or "to tell fortunes" (占卜) and it goes back to some of the oldest recorded instances of written Chinese. In a highly simplified form, 卜 depicts an oracle bone breaking – an ancient method used to tell the future.

公眾號：HanFan漢風