Memorizing the Chinese character for “beer”
April 1st, 2009I think most people who are studying Japanese or Chinese are already familiar with Heisig’s system for memorizing characters. We got to the chapter in Boya Chinese where Dàwèi goes to the store to buy alcohol, and the Chinese word for beer seemed to lend itself especially well to this system.
The second character means “alcohol” and I already know it from Japanese. The first character is composed of a mouth 口, a drop ‘, a rice field 田 with an abnormally crooked centerline, and the number ten 十. It took just a second to come up with, “If I open my mouth and take one drop of beer, I will plow a crooked furrow ten times”.