HSK Guide

汉字

Phonetic Series: How 青 Builds 请 清 晴 情 — and Where It Breaks

One component, 青, sits inside at least seven characters you will meet, and it is there for the sound. This lesson works through the series, states exactly how much of the pronunciation it predicts — the rime almost always, the initial usually, the tone almost never — and then shows the character where the prediction collapses entirely.

HSK 3· HSK 1–4（旧版）15 分钟

What you will be able to do

  • Split a compound character into its semantic radical and its phonetic component.
  • Read the 青 series and say what each radical adds: 讠, 氵, 日, 忄, 目, 米.
  • State the limits of the prediction honestly: expect the rime, not the tone.
  • Use a four-step routine on an unfamiliar character before reaching for a dictionary.

and the family it heads

The great majority of Chinese characters are compounds of two pieces: one that says roughly what field the word belongs to, and one that says roughly how it sounds. The second piece is the phonetic, and characters sharing a phonetic form a series. Learn a series and you learn six or seven characters for the price of one.

The series

qīng means blue-green, the colour of young growth. On its own it is a word. Inside another character it is almost always there for its sound.

  • qǐng — speech + . To ask, to invite, please.
  • qīng — water + . Clear, as water is clear. qīngchu clear, distinct.
  • qíng — sun + . Fine weather, a clear sky.
  • qíng — heart + . Feeling. shìqing matter, affair.
  • jīng — eye + . The eyeball, as in yǎnjing.
  • jīng — rice + . Refined, essence.
  • jìng — + . Quiet, still. ānjìng.

Read the seven aloud in a row: qǐng, qīng, qíng, qíng, jīng, jīng, jìng. Every one ends in -ing. Not one of them lets you predict the tone. And two of them have swapped q for j.

What the phonetic actually gives you

Be precise about the promise, because a promise that is trusted too far turns into a reason to distrust the system.

  • The rime — almost always. If you know is -ing, you know the family rimes in -ing.
  • The initial — usually, within a family. Here q and j alternate, which is not random: both descend from an older sound that split according to what followed it. Elsewhere you will see b beside p ( bāo giving bào and pào), or g beside k ( gè giving gé and kè).
  • The tone — almost never. The series above runs across three different tones and gives you no way to choose.

So the phonetic is a neighbourhood, not an address. It narrows an unknown character from a thousand possibilities to a dozen, which is exactly the amount of help you need to make a sensible guess and to remember the answer once you look it up.

Where it breaks

cāi — to guess — is plus . The phonetic is right there, and the character is read cāi. Nothing in the series predicts it. Two thousand years of sound change have simply carried this one away from its relatives, and no rule will bring it back.

Other series drift as a whole rather than in one member:

  • mǎ is the well-behaved case: mā, ma, mà, mǎ. One syllable, four tones, no surprises.
  • bāo loosens: bào, bǎo, pào, pǎo. The rime holds, the initial wobbles between b and p.
  • gōng has come apart: gōng and gōng stayed, but jiāng, hóng and kōng have gone their own ways.
  • gè ends badly: gé and kè are recognisable, and lù is not.

The pattern is worth naming. A phonetic is a fossil of how the character sounded when it was coined. Where the sound changed little, the series is tight; where it changed a great deal, the series scatters. Nothing is broken; the evidence is simply old.

The routine

Meet an unknown character and do four things in order.

  1. Find the radical. Usually left or top. It gives you the field: water, speech, heart, hand, eye.
  2. Take the remainder as the phonetic. Usually right or bottom.
  3. Guess a reading — rime first, then an initial from the same family, then any tone.
  4. Look it up and correct yourself. Note the tone explicitly, because that is the part your guess could not have supplied.

Two out of five correct is a good score. It is also two more than staring at the character as a picture, and — more valuable than the guessing itself — it stores the character as two known pieces rather than as one new shape.

How to work through it

  1. Read the seven in a rowread

    Say 请 清 晴 情 睛 精 静 aloud in order and listen to what stays the same. The rime never moves. The initial moves once. The tone moves constantly — which is exactly the report you should expect from any phonetic series.

  2. Write the phonetic firstwriting

    Write 青 five times until it is one gesture, then write the four compounds. In each, the radical goes on the left and 青 keeps its full shape on the right — nothing is compressed except the radical itself.

  3. A series that behaves, and one that does notwriting

    Write the 马 series and note that one syllable serves all four, tone aside. Then read 工, 江, 红 and 空 without writing them, and note that the same relationship has stopped predicting anything. Both facts are normal.

  4. Six words from one componentvocabulary

    Six words, and every one of them hides 青. Learning them as a block is far cheaper than learning them apart, because the shared piece carries most of the memory load.

  5. Four steps on five unknown charactersread

    Open any Chinese page and pick five characters you have never seen. For each, run the routine: radical, phonetic, guess, check. Write your guess down before you look — an unrecorded guess teaches nothing.

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