In Chapter 1, you learned that some Chinese words include two, three, or even four characters. For example:

Here's an important word for anyone learning to write Chinese:

This word literally means "middle country." From here, it's a short walk to another indispensable three-character word: literally, "middle country person":

And here's another two-character word you'll use every day:

Before moving on, notice that in this word, 一is pronounced yì rather than yī. Tone changes like these occur from time to time in Mandarin, usually based on the tone of the character that follows.

If you're married, or know someone who is, you'll also find this word useful:

Before moving on, notice here that the Mandarin pronunciation of 太太 is tài tai, with non-tonal second syllable. This negation of the final tone in words with more than one character is quite common, and I'll point it out as it occurs.

Here's another example: This word literally means "big person":

As in the previous example, the final tone of 大人 drops out of the Mandarin pronunciation dà ren.

If you do happen to be an adult, you'll probably need this word to describe how you spend a lot of your days:

This next word literally means "thousand years":

Here's another useful word made from two characters you learned in this chapter. It technically means "left right," which may help you to remember its meaning:

These next two words are related. Although the characters 上 and 下 usually refer to positions in space – roughly "above" and "below" – they can also mean "before" and "after." To keep these clear in my head, I picture a day-planning calendar, where the time "above noon" means "morning," and the time "below noon" means "afternoon":

Here's a common word made from three characters that are all easy to write:

In this word, again you can see two tone changes: first, 一 is pronounced yí instead of yī, and second that the tone in人 is dropped.

Additionally, in Chinese, numbers greater than 10 are built using a relatively small set of characters, many of which you already know. For example:

As you can see, the rules for building multiple-character words for large numbers are relatively regular. When you know the individual characters for these words, even the largest and most complicated number is easy to write in Chinese.