Picking Up Pictograms

When learning to read traditional Chinese, pictograms are the simplest to remember, as they were created to reflect the shape of physical elements.

But because pictograms can't represent every object known to man they only make up about 5% of all Chinese characters.

Still, they're fun to learn because with a little imagination it's easy to see what they mean. For example, take 山 (pronounced saan in Cantonese), the character for hill or mountain: it looks like three peaks rising from the horizon. Another example is the pictogram for fire: 火 (fo), which looks like crackling flames.

I find that neat.

And in some cases characters are combined to form a compound word to name other objects or concepts. In this instance, hill fire (山火) literally means hillfire, or sometimes wildfire. But when reversed as fire mountain (火山) it has an obvious meaning: volcano.

Now when I watch a show about volcanos on Discovery or the National Geographic channel, I always notice 火山 in the subtitles. Yet I'm not patting myself on the back for that, because when a volcano's name comes up the additional characters are often so complex they blow right by me; five-year-olds read better than I do.

So for the time being I'll stick to learning easier characters, such as tree (木), and forest (森林).

Or even forest fire (林火).

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