用英语学中文:六个令人惊讶的“怪异”角色
编者按：用英语来学习中文，作者推荐了六个诡异的中文角色，并附加上了详细介绍，我们一起来看一看六个令人惊讶的怪异角色英语版解析。
This week we're going to show some of the most unusual simple characters that look surprisingly and weird. Some of these characters, with six strokes or fewer and you might have never heard of in the daily, hardly look like 汉字(hànzì Chinese character), but they do look exactly like their meanings.Native speakers of Chinese might not find these characters at all unusual, but many Chinese learners would be given pause if they encountered these odd characters.
丫- yā
This three-stroke character means "bifricate" or "fork". Not hard to fathom how ancient Chinese people came up with this character. 丫features in words like 丫杈(yā chà, the fork of a tree branch.)
凹凸 – āotū
Together, these characters means "bumpy" or "uneven". 凹 on its own means "concave" or "sunken" and 凸 means "convex" or "protruding". Who says Chinese is a difficult language?
孑孓- jiéjué
孑孓 is comprised of two 了 radicals with a wiggly line on each one, as if 子 (zǐ) decided to cut loose a little. Together the characters in 孑孓 means "wiggler". Originally, 孑 means a person missing their left arm (link in Chinese), and 孓 meant missing their right arm. 孑 also appears in the idioms (成语chéngyǔ) "孑然一身", where it means "lonely" or "to be alone in the world".
孖 – zī or mā
孖 is made up of two 子 (child) radicals next to each other. The meaning here is simple – twins! 孖 is infrequently used compared to 双(shuāng double) in Mandarin, but it is used commonly in Cantonese on making the word "twins" (孖生 māshēng).
彳亍 – chì chù
彳亍 looks like the radicals of 行 had a bad breakup, but these character actually have their own meaning together, "walk slowly". Used mostly in formal or artistic contexts, "彳亍" was the titled of a recent exhibition by a master abstract artist in 798 Art District, giving attention to these obscure characters that rarely used.
卜 – bǔ
The meaning of this character is "to divine" or "to tell fortunes" (占卜) and it goes back to some of the oldest recorded instances of written Chinese. In a highly simplified form, 卜 depicts an oracle bone breaking – an ancient method used to tell the future.
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