Chinese Characters.

Learning Japanese implies that one has to learn Chinese in some way. How is this? Well, the thing is that the written Japanese uses a lot of Chinese characters, or more precisely Traditional Chinese characters. For me, this is one of the most difficult things about Japanese, but at the same time is the most fun part. I love that there are single characters, which have some specific meaning, then they can be put together to form more complicated word, which contain the meaning of the individual original characters. Actually all the languages have such kind of construction of words, probably what it makes it more fun in the Japanese-Chinese language is that they use the pictograms instead of words, and many times they are very creative. In these posts, I would like to show those things. I hope people get to enjoy it as much as I do.

I will start with some technical words related to the astronomy field:

天(heaven,sky)、文(word)、学(study)、星(star)、雲(cloud)、日(sun)、月(moon)、食(to eat)、流(stream)、惑(perplexity)、小(small).
 
天＋文＋学＝天文学(astronomy)
星＋雲＝星雲(bright nebula, e.g. Orion Nebula)
日,月＋食＝日食(solar eclipse),月食 (moon eclipse)
 流＋星＝流星(shooting star, meteorite)
惑＋星＝惑星(planet)
小＋惑星＝小惑星(asteroid).