回国 - 你在桃花村做什么？ Chinese characters

As we studied before, there are four ways in which Chinese characters were (and still are) created:

1. Pictograms are characters that depict what they represent. The oldest Chinese characters are pictograms.

2. Indicatives are characters that indicate abstract ideas.

3. Associatives are compound characters that combine indicatives to give a new meaning.

4. Pictophonetics are also compound characters formed by one component that gives you a hint of the meaning and another that gives you a hint of the pronunciation. Most of Chinese characters are pictophonetics.

Now take a look at the characters below, and then classify them according to the way they were created.

水 山 手 木 女

上 一 中 你 名

字 明 码 和 妈

爸 马 城 饭 物

大 家 友 飞 分

高 狗 好 火 尖

看 烤 吗 男 朋

汽 本 人 日 下

机 田 网 安 想

......

I am sure that you remember what a radical is...

You don't?! : (

Oh, I'll tell you very quickly:

A radical is the component that gives you the hint of the meaning of a pictophonetic.

For example, what's the radical of 钟?

Right! It is 钅（金）, because it is the component that tells you that 钟 is a metal object. 中 instead, gives you a hint of the pronunciation (zhōng).

Now go ahead and write the radicals of all the pictophonetics from the list above.

......

Done?

Good!

OK, one last thing...

Do you remember that some Chinese words are monosyllables and some are disyllables?

Well, why don't you try to form at least 5 disyllables with the characters above?

Good luck!