I’m curious to see which character(s) are your favorite. Or maybe you see characters purely as functional ends. But maybe there are some Chinese characters that mean something more to you, however arbitrary.
For example, for some reason I am fond of the character 和 harmony.
It’s mostly arbitrary. Maybe it’s the simple composition.
It’s amusing how combining 禾 grain and 口 mouth results in harmony
Sometimes it seems like a koan to contemplate
Do you have a favorite character? The more strange or arbitrary the better!
I guess it’s hard to say since I’m only at ~600 out of the few thousand common characters. So far I’d say in simplified (my current course) it’s gonna be 感. There used to be a Korean drinking lounge in ktown LA called “Gaam” (i.e. 감), and I have many memories of drinking yogurt soju and lots of Korean drinking food.
In terms of raw aesthetics of the character form, I always like the symmetry of these three:
亞 凹 凸
and those latter two combine to form 凹凸 “bumpy” which is perhaps the only multi-character word in Mandarin that pictorially depicts its meaning! Hence a favorite word of mine.
My favorite in terms of “uniqueness” is probably 龜 since it is so unique relative to other characters, and perhaps the most pictorial.
Lastly, my favorite in terms of meaning are 歪 and 孬, since their meaning is literally just the combination of the meanings of the characters within it.
孬 = 不好
歪 = 不正
Those are the actual primary definitions for both characters within most Chinese-Chinese dictionaries.
抱 is my favorite, partly for the meaning (I love to give and get hugs!) but partly because of the way it’s expressed: hugging really IS wrapping yourself around someone using your hands.
Glowing neon characters at night is something I’ve not thought about recently, it’s a cool aesthetic.
First time I’ve ever heard of a yogurt flavored drink. WIkipedia describes it as:
a combination of soju, yogurt, and lemon lime soda
Having a hard time imagining what that would taste like but must be interesting since it’s a popular option.
The character reminds me more of a dragon for some reason. I was curious to see if there was any link between to two, and was surprised to find the legendary dragon turtle
For the Chinese as well as the Indians, the tortoise symbolizes the universe. Quoting Pen T’sao, “the upper dome-shaped part of its back has various signs, which correspond with the constellations on the sky, and this is Yan; the lower part has many lines, which relate to the earth and is the Yin.”
Seeing a second “hug” character (拥) in the examples made today’s lessons worth it. I added a meaning hint: “You put your HANDS to USE when you HUG.” One semantic question, though: What’s the difference in meaning between 拥 and 抱? (I’ve noticed a duplicated 抱抱 in some content made for children; that construction feels more like “cuddle” than “embrace”!
The more subtle differences I think would be that 拥 has a stronger meaning of hug/embracing/possession (e.g., 拥有 “possess/have”) while 抱 can also mean more simply to hold in the arms (e.g., 抱著小孩子 “hold a child in the arms”).
A great way to get a feel for the differences for the characters is to use a dictionary (like Pleco) and look up the character then view the sentence examples or the words it forms. And as we get more vocabulary in HanziHero this should be more easily doable within HanziHero itself, too. In either case, I’ve found that the more subtle differences in character/word meaning are usually picked up eventually via immersing in the native media. Sort of like how the subtle differences of “hug” and “embrace” (which effectively mean the same thing) can only really be ascertained from the exposure of many many sentences that use both over a long period of time.
I know i’m like 10 months late to this lol BUT my favorite character comes from the Chinese name that I chose for myself 翱 （ao2）。It comes from 翱翔 which means to fly, to soar, and has that “feeling”. My whole Chinese name is 孔翱磊.
For jokes!! My other favorite is biang1 for biang biang noodles lol
From what I understand, many characters cannot really be used on there own at least in speaking. If you say just 拥 or 抱 alone, people wil probably not think that you are talking about hugs. Whereas 拥抱 - Embrace - Simplified Chinese word mnemonic | HanziHero is pretty unambiguously hug. I think the characters’ meanings come from the words they are in. There is also 搂.
Since I started doing pictographs (I am not sure if this is the right word), I have a fav personality for mnemonics,: Zelda. This is influenced by the fact that there are plenty of images and toon like clipart available to use, addressing different view focus and expressions for the character, with all being pretty cute. On the other extreme, I find Xena to be a very hard to address personality, all versions available just show her in the same profile, with the same expression … I strughled to find a smiling Xena for the joy pictograph , but I did find one after browsing many pages of images … lots of fun either way.
It is a nice encapsulation of what a hug is. It’s cool how much meaning can be found in the stroke groups of a character.
hat that a child is wearing. Something like A Hat In Time 
, but I did find one after browsing many pages of images … lots of fun either way.