Culinary Chinese 101: Your First Character… | Sybaritica

Last month, in an article entitled ‘Culinary Chinese, Anyone?’, I proposed doing a series of posts about Chinese characters related to food with a view to having my readers join me in my progress as I learn the rudiments of reading a Chinese menu. I received quite a few expressions of interest and so I am going to finally get things going…

In the original post, I introduced the character you see appearing (and circled) three times in the above picture. I have chosen this particular character to start off with because, as I mentioned, it is something you will almost have certainly have seen at one time or another (even if you weren’t aware of it) as it appears frequently on restaurant signs, menus, on food packages and on signs in Chinese grocery stores. It may, at the moment, look to you like nothing more than obscure squiggles but the whole object of this very first exercise is to get you to recognize it wherever it appears… 

I am going to first break the suspense by telling you that this very  ubiquitous character has three meanings (which is why you come across it in so many food related situations). These meanings are:

• Vegetable;
• Dish (as in a prepared meal item rather than an actual platter); and,
• Cuisine.

Don’t  worry about the meaning too much as we will be covering this later posts. For now, just examine the character closely so as to help fix it in your memory.

The actual structure of Chinese characters is a complex topic that we will need to deal with at some point but I don’t want to overwhelm you with a lot of detail too early on. For now, just note that this particular character can be viewed as being composed of three separate groups arranged vertically. Identifying and recognizing these groups, or components, will help you recognize this, and other characters…

So, what’s with the ‘grass’, ’claw’ and ‘tree’ labels?

Giving names to the individual components helps fix them in your memory. Possibly, these three individual shapes may suggest something else entirely to you…  a worn out comb, a rake, and a squashed bird, for example. However, while making up your own mnemonic devices is fine, it is much better to use the component names formally in use already.  We’ll look at this in a little more detail on another post so just trust me on this for the moment…

If you try, you can probably come up with a memory device to help connect the components with the meaning of the character… maybe: The GRASS fed chicken CLAWS beneath the TREE and helps the VEGETABLES to grow?

Okay, so that’s not the greatest mnemonic, but you get the general idea. Just keep repeating ‘Grass, claw, tree … grass, claw, tree’ to yourself as you search for the character in these first simple examples:

The English identifies the contents. Can you see our character? What particular meaning do you suppose it has in this context… vegetable, dish or cuisine?

This restaurant appears to serve Manchurian, or North-east Chinese CUISINE…

Our character is plainly printed but a little more difficult spot here. Can you see it?

This one is a bit tricky at first… the top component of our character is split into two pieces. This is a pretty common variation though and we still read this as ‘grass, claw and tree’.

One of the things you will have to get used to is the variety of styles (or fonts, if you like). The examples we have just seen are all pretty straightforward so let’s ‘ramp it up a notch’ with some harder ones…

Our character appears twice on this restaurant sign. The one to the right is still pretty easy to read but it also displays the ‘split grass’ component.

Here, our character is very stylized… where is it?

Can you see it here?

There are two instances here … you may need reading glasses to find the second example but, as a hint, look for the dish you might select if you were a bit short of money…

This is our last example and the most difficult of all. Handwritten signs are the most tricky to read but our character does appear here. Hint: Look in the middle of the top line. Can you find it now?

Anyway … that brings us to the end of our first exercise. As this post appears on a Sunday, I have decided that I will make Sundays my Culinary Chinese Day from now on. Next, we will have a quick look at the pronunciation of our character and, in follow up posts, look more closely at the meaning in different situations…

 Previous Lesson | Lesson Index | Next Lesson

…