This week we explore a kid’s favorite, which, depending on where you stand, is either really tricky or really straightforward. Read on to find out!
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 single Chinese character do you think this set of emoji represents?
👄
👄 👄
Hint: As we learned many issues ago, 👄 is the hanmoji for 口 (kǒu/hau2), which means mouth. So what you’re seeing are three mouths in one character.
⏳
⏳
⏳
Hint 2: The previous hint might be counter-intuitive, so try thinking about the character more visually. Remember that 👄 is written in Chinese as 口, or a square shape.
⏳
⏳
⏳
🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
👄
👄 👄 stands for 品, which is pronounced pǐn in Mandarin, and ban2 in Cantonese. The character means either 1) an item/product, or 2) rank/character. What, you might ask, do either of these definitions have to do with multiple mouths? (As described in the the first hint, 品 is made up with three 口 mouth radicals.)
To solve this puzzle, first convert the three mouth emoji…
👄
👄 👄
Into their corollary Chinese characters separately:
口
口口
Then, having done that, focus solely on the Chinese character you’ve constructed (just above). If you do that, wouldn’t you agree that one square-ish box, sitting atop two square-ish boxes (品) is a pretty good way to drawing some items or products (definition one)? We’re not sure if this is the original intent of the character, but it’s a really useful mnemonic for us. And of course, some items and products are better than others, so of course they need to be differentiated by rank/character (definition two).
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
Our publisher made a Hanmoji Puzzles inspired Tik Tok filter — try it out yourself!
We were featured in the South China Morning Post (one of our hometown papers)!
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.