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:

Figure 4 The character ‘rén 人’, meaning person, looks like a person walking.

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.

Figure 5 The character ‘dà 大’, meaning big, looks like a person standing with their arms wide open.