Yes, I also came by to say this (and reply to acabjones below re. Pleco). Pleco has the bottom component as 朩 deng3, reference in image below:
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Edit: that being said, I really admire OP for their curiousity and intuition to break down the characters manually, even if they don't arrive at the correct result every time. It will put them in a fantastic place for the rest of their Chinese learning.
Wait is this a paid dictionary on Pleco? I don't think I have the character breakdown like that.
I haven't paid for any add ons, so this should be one of the free ones? I added the following:
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Huh, yeah I guess I deleted some of them when I was messing around with the settings...
I like this dictionary for character breakdowns: https://www.dong-chinese.com/wiki/茶
According to this it's ⿱艹余, where 余 is a pictogram of a small shelter, an old rendering of 舍 (example 宿舍, dormitory)
Thanks, I was learning from a native speaker, so they may have just misremembered. I appreciate that!
Highly recommend the android app Pleco for character decomposition, and many other things. Extremely useful and fascinating.
Chinese guy 1000 years ago: yeah... Uhh lemme get a cup of them leafy plant guys
China does have its own mythology around how tea as a beverage was discovered
I might be wrong but the 子 radical and 好 was told to me to be good by my Mandarin teacher because it's like, harmony. Like woman and person or woman and child or something. It's like good is when there's a balance and not one extreme or the other.
The app hello Chinese said it's because having a wife and a child is good, lol
I guess the original meaning is lost in 5000 years of history.
Yeah, it does seem to be lost. Wiktionary has a couple theories. Here’s the first one:
The widely accepted meaning of this character is that the characters for “female” (女) and “child” (子) were put together to form a compound because it was good for a woman to have a child.
Tea is one of my favorite characters, there is something so aesthetically pleasing about it. Please keep posting these!
No worries! Make sure you look at the correction someone made below, it is not supposed to be wood.
