Language/Mandarin-chinese/Vocabulary/The-Chinese-Bigram

The Chinese Bigram: Why Learning Chinese Characters is Easier in Twos?

What is a Bigram?

A bigram, is according to the Oxford Dictionary, “A pair of consecutive written units such as letters, syllables, or words” In the English language, an example of a letter bigram would be ‘th’, as found in ‘the’, ‘their’ and ‘there’. Bigrams also exist in the Chinese language, because almost all Chinese ‘words’ are made up of more than 1 character. Although a single character has its own meaning, it is often when it is combined with another character that it is used as a word in Chinese.

Let’s look at a few examples:

工 (gōng) is one of the most commonly used characters in the Chinese language and means ‘work’. However, this character is rarely used alone and it more commonly found to create the following words:

• 工作 (gōng zuò) – to work (工 – work + 作 – to do)

• 工业 (gōng yè) – industry (工 – work + 业 – business)

• 工资 (gōng zī) – salary (工 – work + 资 – money)

• 工人 (gōng rén) – worker (工 – work + 人 – person)

Sources

https://www.writtenchinese.com/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2017/05/Chinese-Beginner-Bundle.pdf