More Specific Uses for Certain Characters: Looking for Ideas

Certain characters in the language have very important grammatical functions that are not reflected when learning the characters. For example, I’m still new, but a bit ago I learned the character 和, which as far as I can tell from readings is mostly used as “and”, but it was defined as “harmony”. I added the definition in myself, but I can’t help but wonder if there if there will be other characters in the future that serve important grammatical functions, for example measure words, that I will not know the use of because of how they’re presented. If anyone has any ideas about how to address this, they would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

The short version is that HH doesn’t teach you to read. It teaches you to recognise the characters/words. It’s a subtle distinction but you will also have to do a lot of reading to actually learn how to read and learn all the ways characters are used and in what contexts etc. You’ll find loads of characters have multiple meanings (especially if you start talking about things like 就 and 才 lol), and you just have to learn how they’re used elsewhere.

Thankfully though, if you know the character though HH, it’s significantly easier to then just learn another meaning/usage for it. So it’s not too bad, but combining HH with something like DuChinese is the way to go.

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