23 What happens at Thanksgiving stays at Thanksgiving 🔥
We hope you ate your fill of fire chickens
This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. 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
Folks in the US celebrated Thanksgiving last week, which is generally known as the national holiday for gathering up the extended family, cooking and eating a giant turkey, conversing awkwardly with far flung relatives, and watching men hurdle into each other in a televised game of American football.
As you might recall, we celebrated Thanksgiving on this newsletter last year by introducing the hanmoji for turkey, 🔥🐓, which maps directly onto the Chinese characters for fire (火) and chicken (雞/鸡). This year we have another fiery hanmoji puzzle for you.
What Thanksgiving activity do you think this emoji combo represents?
🗣🔥🔥
Hint: Breathing fire is not one of the traditional practices of an American Thanksgiving.
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🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🗣🔥🔥 stands for 談 in Traditional Chinese and 谈 in Simplified Chinese, which means to talk, chat or discuss. It is pronounced tán in Mandarin and taam4 in Cantonese. And if you celebrated Thanksgiving with your family last week, we’re sure you did a lot of 談 谈 tán taam4.
Let’s break it apart some more. 言 or 🗣 represents the radical on the left side of the character. By itself, it’s pronounced yán or jin4, and it simply means speech, words or language. On the right side of the character are two 火 or 🔥 stacked on top of one another, and you probably don’t need us to tell you that 火 (pronounced huǒ or fo2) means fire.
So if 言 (🗣) and 談/谈 (🗣🔥🔥) are both about talking, how do we remember which is which? One way to think about it is that 談/谈 (🗣🔥🔥) is a casual kind of chatter, where you’re spitting multiple fiery phrases at other people, riling them up or tossing compliments their way. In contrast to this, 言 (🗣) is a stiffer, purer form of speech, solitary and serious.
🥳 Updates from our parent project, The Hanmoji Handbook
Little Kozzi organized a bulk pre-order program for our recently-released paperback edition.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee included The Hanmoji Handbook in their 2024 Great Words, Great Works books list.
The Howard County Public School System put us on their Middle School Summer Reading List 2023.
You can get our paperback and hardcover editions on Bookshop.org 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, and Blackwell’s 🌏.
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.