Learning Characters Through Sound Components

The majority of Chinese characters are formed by combining two parts: meaning components (radicals) and sound components. When forming meaning-sound component characters, a set of common characters are used to indicate the sound of a new character. However, the study of sound components has not been valued in teaching Chinese. This may be because after thousands of years, the sound of a sound component may have changed a great deal and thus it no longer resembles the sound in its modern pronunciation. Fortunately, there are still a group of sound components that are either the same, or close enough to modern pronunciations of the characters.

This set of materials focus on introducing to you the characters that belong to sound components. We believe that learning these sound components is an effective strategy to learn and memorize new characters more effectively. Similar to radicals (meaning components), a set of sound components reappear in many characters and thus, studying sound components as chunks of characters, will be useful in facilitating memorization of characters.

In this set of materials, you will learn 112 sound components, organized by alphabet of their pinyin initials in alphabetical order. In other words, sound components with ‘b’ initial will be grouped together. Once you click on the alphabet, it will give you a list of sound component characters. When you click on a sound component character, it will give you a list of characters under that sound component. A common vocabulary containing the sound component character and a sentence in which the vocabulary is used will be given. You can click on the audio and sentence to learn the meaning for each of the characters that have the same sound component. You can read the sentences as reading practice.

We encourage you to use this learning tool for extra practice of Chinese characters. Even though sound components are less mentioned in learning characters, it provides yet another method to learn characters fast. We suggest that you learn vocabulary and sentences associated with these sound components. Working on them will increase your knowledge about Chinese characters and improve fluency in reading characters. The materials will also enhance memorization of characters.

For more information regarding the design of this material and how to use it in teaching, please contact Prof. Der-lin Chao. She can be reached at Dchao (at) hunter.cuny.edu.