Happy belated Valentine’s, Galentine’s and Palentine’s Day, dear readers. In this week’s issue, we look at some of our own thoughts and feelings with regard to this holiday season.
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-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
What sentiment do you think is represented by this pair of emoji?
❤️🟩
Hint: Here, the two emoji combined represent a single Chinese character.
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
❤️🟩 stands for 情, which usually means affection or passion (but is sometimes combined with other characters to refer to “a situation”). It’s pronounced qíng in Mandarin, and qing4 in Cantonese. Strictly speaking, the left half (忄) relates to its meaning, while the right half (青) relates to its sound, but really we think both sides help us remember their meaning. Let’s dive in, shall we?
The left half of 情 is 忄, which is actually one of the Chinese radical forms for 心 ❤️(xīn/sam1), which means heart or mind. And clearly hearts have something to do with affection and passion (情 ❤️🟩)! 心 transforms into 忄when it’s used as a radical on the left side of a Chinese character — you can think of it as a version that’s squeezed a little and bumped to the left.
The right half of 情 is 青, which is a Chinese character on its own. 青 🟩 (qīng/cing1) is used usually to refer to something being fresh, green or young. For example, a 青 🟩 apple in Chinese is a green apple, and a person in their year of 青 🟩 is someone in their adolescence. (Historically, 青 was used to refer to the color of nature and could be both green and blue. Nowadays 青 is mostly green 🟩.)
While 青 🟩 (qīng/cing1) sounds very much like 情 ❤️🟩(qíng/qing4), we also like to use both sides of the character (❤️and 🟩 in 情) to remember the meaning as a fresh greenness of the heart… which you will admit, feels like a fresh passion ;)
Lastly, can you guess what we get when we combine 情 ❤️🟩 with the character for person (人 🚶🏻♀️, pronounced rén/jan4)? That’s right, we get 情人, which means lover. In Chinese, Valentine’s Day is often referred to as the festival of the lover (情人节, pronounced qíngrénjié/cing4jan4zit3).
As we told you before: Happy Valentine's Day!
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
We received five star reviews from both Granite Media and the Canadian Review of Materials ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️!
The Texas Library Association put us on the 2023 Texas Topaz Reading List.
Kirkus has named us as one of their Best Middle-Grade Nonfiction of 2022 picks.
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 order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.