Welcome to Hanmoji Puzzles is your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles. Our puzzles live at the intersection of emoji and the Chinese language, but rest assured they are solvable by Chinese and non-Chinese speakers alike.
You are getting this email because you signed up for a newsletter related to our book, The Hanmoji Handbook. We hope you’ll enjoy this format, where we pair book project updates with a bit of fun and games 🤹🏻♀️.
🧩 This week’s puzzle
Are you ready?
3… 2… 1…
📯
What do you think these emoji combinations represent in Chinese?
3️⃣ 🛞 🚗
🔥 🚗
⚡️ 🚗
🐎 🚗
🤜🏼 🚗
For example: 3️⃣ 🛞 🚗 is the hanmoji for 三輪車 (Traditional Chinese) or 三轮车 (Simplified Chinese). It’s pronounced sānlúnchē (Mandarin) or saam1 leon4 ce1 (Cantonese).
3️⃣ 三 means three
🛞 輪/轮 means wheel
🚗 車 means car.
So what do you call a three-wheeled car? A tricycle.
Now do the other four 😋!
⏳
Email us with your answers and we’ll let you know if you got it right. We’ll also unveil the answers in next week’s newsletter too, if you’re willing to wait.
🧠 Hints & background
These puzzles are based on the hanmoji writing system, where each emoji is a stand-in for a Chinese character (or building block “radical” of a Chinese character).
In the case of this week’s puzzle, each emoji simply represents one word in Chinese. So it’ll probably be helpful to first convert each emoji into a single word/concept/thing, and then put the multiple words/concepts/things together to figure out what the overall word/concept/thing is.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We received a ⭐️ from Kirkus Reviews.
Jenny gave a talk about the evolution of emoji, Chinese and hanmoji at ICON 11 (The Illustration Conference) on July 2.
Our book comes out August 30! Pre-order it today on IndieBound 🇺🇸🇨🇦, Wordery 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, Indigo 🇨🇦, or Amazon 🇺🇸.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely pre-order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.