Can you believe it? The Hanmoji Handbook is out in bookstores! Check it out in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and online, or swing by your local library to pick up a copy.
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
🧩 This week’s puzzle
In issue 04, we talked about 口 (pronounced kǒu in Mandarin and hau2 in Cantonese), or the mouth 👄 radical, and we’ve got a tough one for you. What do you think this one means? It’s not immediately obvious.
🚶🏽👄
One hint is that the emoji 🚶🏽represents 人 (rén/jan4), or person. So this hanmoji has something to do with people, but we’ll give you a hint that it doesn’t have too much to do with mouths. (Or maybe it does!)
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🚶🏽👄 stands for 人口, which means population.
It’s not the most intuitive word for an English speaker. We sometimes say “getting the head count” in English to refer to counting the number of people at a party one head at a time.
In Chinese, 口 can mean mouth (a noun), but it can also function as a measure word, or a way to count objects. In English, we sometimes say “ten sheets of paper,” or “five bars of chocolate.” One wouldn’t say “bars of paper” or “sheets of chocolate”. The words “sheet” and “bar” function as measure words. In Chinese, 👄口 is sometimes used as a measure word for people (especially when talking about people in families).
So if you want to know the population, just count the mouths. 🙊
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
Our Toronto in-person book launch is on! Come meet us at Another Story Bookshop on September 16. More details here.
Our book is now out! Order it now on IndieBound 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, Blackwell’s 🌏, Barnes & Noble 🇺🇸, or Indigo 🇨🇦.
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.