1.7 How to memorise and combine characters
In Chinese, some characters can look a bit like the objects they represent and so often a good way to memorise the characters is to imagine them pictorially.
For example, the character for a person ‘rén’ is 人, which looks like a person walking:

To learn how to write this character, download the Chinese@OU app to your mobile device and go to Lesson 3, writing section.
A second example of how Chinese characters can be turned into an image that relates to its meaning is the word for ‘big’. Imagine a person with their arms wide open to signal something is big; the character for big, ‘dà 大, looks just like that.

To learn how to write this character, download the Chinese@OU app to your mobile device and go to Lesson 6, writing section.
Activity 5 Word combinations
Based on what you have learned so far in this course, select the correct word combination for the definitions given.
Adult/Big person (dà rén)
We (wŏ mén)
China (Zhōng guó)
A power (a dominant country) (dà guó)
Doctor (yī shēng)
Study Chinese (xué zhōng wén)
OpenLearn - Beginners’ Chinese: a taster course Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.