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How to distinguish between characters and words when reading Chinese?
If you are a beginning Chinese learner sometimes you have trouble differentiating between Chinese characters and Chinese words. The problem is that in Chinese writing there are no spaces in between words like English. This means that any two characters next to each other could potentially be a word. In fact, sometimes a word is 3 characters, 4 characters or more!
Quick Briefing: Chinese Characters
Chinese characters are a building block of Chinese words. A single Chinese character can be a word or multiple characters can be combined into one word! An example would be you could call your mom “吗/mā” and this would be a single word. However, you can put two of these characters together to create ”妈妈/Māmā.” This is also a single word. Some characters are almost always single words while others often need at least one other characters to make a word.
Which Chinese characters belong to which word?
Speaking from experience, when trying to read Chinese early on, I was also frustrated at knowing which characters paired together to make a word! One time I tried to read Harry Potter and spent so much time looking up each character only to realize the characters 阿不思邓布利多 sounded out to be “Ābùsī Dèngbùlìduō.” Albus Dumbledore! Aiya! It was just a long wizard name!
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