Language Note

In this page you will see some compound words (words formed by two characters).  Such words appear extensively in chinese.

Notice how two characters, 火 and 山 are combined to make "volcano" - literally "fire mountain".  This is a common way of making words and the logic of such character combinations is often helpful to students when learning.  It is worth noting though, that Chinese people would just read 火山 as "volcano".  They would not have to "translate" the meaning in their head.  A rough analogy would be that a western reader would not assemble the characters 'c', 'a' and 't' to make "cat" - they would just recognise that particular combination of letters as a word.  More good examples appear in Machines.

You will also see that sky 天,  star 星, moon 月 and sun 日 are given more complex forms than in the first Natural Objects page.  This is because although single characters have a single meaning (or meanings), it is often necessary to clarify the full word.

Finally, note 雪花 (snowflake) - a poetic/descriptive compound word formed by 雪 (snow) and 花 (flower)