Chinese Radicals: The 螞蟻 Goes Marching
June 20th, 2009 | View Comments
I keep failing this item in my flashcard study (I use Anki) despite its relative obviousness, so I thought I’d make a post about it because you remember things best when you try to teaching them to someone else.
ant
ma2 yi3
Hurrah, hurrah.
Why do I say this one should be relatively obvious? Because of the two-part structure of each word. We first discussed radicals in the espresso edition of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook.
Both 螞 and 蟻 have the same radical: 虫. In simplified Chinese, this character by itself means “insect” (in traditional Chinese, three of them get stacked together to form the character for insect: 蟲). When it appears in radical form it usually is marking an insect-related term. Other examples include:
butterfly
hu2 die2
honeybee
mi4 feng1
So that’s the first reason why it should be relatively obvious.
The second reason has to do with the right sides of the characters: 馬 and 義. These characters, which I should already know, are pronounced ma3 and yi4.
The third reason is that I’m already pretty fluent in Chinese. “Ant” is one of those words I absolutely know how to say, if not necessarily how to write or read.
So put that all together.
- I see a Chinese phrase with the bug radical.
- I see the right sides are ma3 and yi4, respectively. So this must be an insect word that sounds like ma yi.
- I know that “ant” in Chinese is pronounced ma2 yi3.
Why do I keep failing this item?
Yvonne posted this on June 20th, 2009 @ 10:52pm in Chinese, Reading, Vocabulary | Permalink to "Chinese Radicals: The 螞蟻 Goes Marching"
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Maybe because you have a bug phobia?
So the right sides of the characters are “horse” and … what is that other character? (yi4) I’m not familiar with that one. I’m trying to learn some characters but I haven’t gotten that far yet.
yi4 means “dignified, proper” or “justice”. I most commonly see it as part of a compound with the other yi4, as in yi4 yi4—meaning.
(Sorry for the lack of proper characters; I’m typing on a computer that doesn’t have Chinese installed.)