In a way, learning characters is easy. When you know roughly how characters work and how they are composed, learning a new character is not hard. The difficulty comes from the large number of steps you have to take, not the difficulty of each individual step.
However, relating characters to each other is also part of the challenge. How are they similar? How are they different?
The challenges in this article are meant to help you practice that by solving tricky character puzzles. The answers are posted at the very end of the article, but don’t peek unless you have really tried to solve the challenges on your own. Also note that while we only provide one answer here, some challenges could have more than one right answer.
Without further ado, let’s get on with this month’s Chinese challenges!
Chinese character challenges for July 2016
- Which character does not belong in this group? why?
上、本、日、下 - Which character does not belong in this group? Why?
您、你、灯、路 - Which character does not belong in this group? Why?
然、灯、冰、炎 - Which character does not belong in this group? Why?
目、日、六、火
Answers with explanations
- 日 does not belong because it’s the only character that is a pictograph, meaning that it looks the way it does because it resembles the meaning of the character, in this case the sun (originally a circle with a dot in it). The characters are actually rarer than most students think.
- 您 does not belong because it’s a top-bottom construction, whereas all the others are left-right constructions. Of course, when broken down, the top part is itself a left-right composition. Left-right is by far the most common type of character.
- 冰 does not belong because it’s the only character that doesn’t contain any kind of 火 (fire). The reason this component doesn’t look the same in all the characters is that many components change their appearance depending on where in the character they appear. At the bottom, 火 can be written as four dots. You can see more examples in this blog post.
- 目 does not belong because it’s the only character that isn’t written with four strokes. If you get any other result, it’s time to check your stroke order! Remember that boxes are usually written down + right-down + left-right (three strokes). The other characters should be fairly obvious!
As mentioned above, there are probably other possible solutions. Just because you didn’t find the solution listed here doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re wrong.