NinchaneseThe Chinese character 青
And its phonetic component form
青
qīng
- green (or blue)
- greenish black
- youth
- nature’s color
青 is both a character and a phonetic character component
In addition to being a character on its own, 青 is often used as a phonetic component in other Chinese characters.
When used as a component in a Chinese character, the phonetic component 青 brings its pronunciation “qīng” to the words it’s in, or the words sound close to “qīng”. In fact, as a rule of thumb, most words that contain 青 will either be pronounced “qīng” or have the same pinyin, but a different tone, like “qǐng” or “qíng”.
These characters all contain 青 and are pronounced either “qīng”, “qǐng” or “qíng”:
Another possible pronunciation for the character component 青 is “jing”
The Chinese language is over 5000 years old, so, unsurprisingly, some characters’ pronunciations have evolved a little over time.
In addition to sometimes being pronounced “qing” with a different tone, 青 the phonetic component will also be found in Chinese words pronounced “jīng” or “jìng”, two pronunciations which are only one letter off from the sound “qīng”.
Sound “jing”
You can find the character component 青 being pronounced “jing” in words like:
睛 jīng: eye; eyeball
靖 jìng: quiet; peaceful; to pacify
靓 jìng: to make up (one’s face); to dress
You’ll also find the phonetic component 青 in many other Chinese characters. Browse the full list here.
All 80,000+ Chinese characters share the same character components. Chinese character components are therefore essential for Chinese learners: they are the building blocks of Chinese. Character character components help tremendously with understanding a character: they provide information on its meaning or on its pronunciation. In short, knowing character components will help you analyse, learn and remember each Chinese character much better.
Join us on Ninchanese as we teach you everything about the Chinese character components you need to know, little by little.