The Most Overworked Character in Chinese

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]There's a character in Chinese that's used to express hitting, calling, playing, opening, knitting, typing, planning, sweeping, breaking, injecting, snoring. And that's not even half of it.

[00:00:13]Today, I'm going to do a deep dive on this one character, and by the end, you'll see exactly why learning Chinese character by character is so powerful.

[00:00:20]Because this single one unlocks over 50 very useful compound words. Once you understand how it works, Chinese gets a lot less intimidating. and a lot more logical. It's so worth going deep on characters like this. So, let's get into it. The character is da to hit. That's how everyone learns it, right? Hit maybe strike. You pick it up early and you file it away as hit and you move on. But hit is barely the beginning. This character is doing so much more than you think. And once you see the full picture, a lot of Chinese that used to feel random will suddenly make sense.

[00:00:54]So, we're going to start with the usage that genuinely surprised me when I first came across it because da also covers things that your body does completely on its own. So, in Chinese, da is used for sudden involuntary physical actions or eruptions your body produces without asking for your permission. Yawning, sneezing, hiccuping, shivering, snoring.

[00:01:17]In English, each of those gets its own verb. In Chinese, they all use da. So the logic actually makes sense when you think about it. A sneeze is an internal explosion. A yawn is a sudden eruption.

[00:01:29]And a shiver is your body convulsing on its own. These are all involuntary strikes if you like from inside your body. Let me run through them real quick. The haten to yawn. Is onia. It sounds kind of like a yawn, right?

[00:01:45]I mean I I guess it kind of sounds like it. I guess it was this bordering on not sounding like it, but pretty much onatia there. That punty is sneeze. There's another one on a matapia. Punty is kind of explosive. Sounds kind of like a sneeze I guess. And also dag. Dagger is an interesting one. Dagger means both hiccup and burp. G is kind of on as well. And it's completely contextual which one it means. There's no separate Chinese word as far as I know for hiccup and burp. Dul hu. Hulu is another one.

[00:02:15]Hulu is supposed to be on a mat for snoring. Okay. So to means to snore. So those are all kind of soundbased. Really hard to forget those ones.

[00:02:26]Is to doze off. So this specifically is the involuntary kind of sleeping that you do when you don't really mean to.

[00:02:33]You're just sort of going to bed. That's But if you're in a meeting and your head starts dropping, that's so the da there tells you it wasn't on purpose.

[00:02:44]Is to shiver, to tremble. Could be from cold, could be from fear. depends again on the context. Okay, so da covers your body's involuntary eruptions. That's surprising enough, but da is also the default verb for a massive range of handdriven action. Making, fetching, bundling, holding, playing, things that your hands do. Let's run through four groups of these words, starting with ones related to making, building, and crafting. And the first one's dal means to create or make. So da means to forge to build something. Here da is providing that kind of hands-on idea even though it's a relatively abstract term. So for example it's used for pimp to build a brand which is not like building a house. It's more of an abstract concept isn't it? A brand is more literal. It's a physical idea of forging iron. And this gives us the idiom it's really cool idiom which we have a similar one in English.

[00:03:46]Maybe the English came from the Chinese most likely. But here is strike while the iron's hot. We could also say to knit a sweater. So your hands are working with the needles. You're looping the yarn. It's it's a hand action. So we use to lay a foundation. And this one can be literal or figurative. Laying the foundation of a relationship. So for example, you could say right to lay a Chinese foundation in terms of learning a language. That's the abstract one. Da is another one. So where I live in Dali here in Yuno province is a very popular tourist spot for Chinese tourists primarily. And dha is a very touristy term. So originally dhaka was the physical motion of punching a card to clock in and clock out of work. Literal striking action.

[00:04:38]And then gradually over time now if someone says daka they're talking about going to a specific very popular tourist destination to sort of clock in. So if you go to Rome you've got to go to the coliseum right you just have to you can't go to Rome and not go to the coliseum. You have to punch in at the coliseum. Now let's get into another category of da words in something involving the hands which is to do with fetching or acquiring. So dash is to go and get water. We don't really do this much anymore. Again, funny enough, where I live, people do this quite a lot still because there's lots of natural spring water everywhere. You'll always see like usually older generation people walking around with big jugs of water going up a mountain to collect water. They're going to dash hit water. It's not literally hitting, of course. It's just the idea of da here. It's just simply using your hands to do something. Dan is another one that's very popular. You'll see that in the cantens, say like, you know, Chinese universities or well any anywhere with a canteen, maybe a prison as well. You go to da fan. You'll line up and they'll use their hand to scoop the fan the food into your tray. Dango is another one literally to buy soy sauce. But the da here is is again filling it up. So you would traditionally you would go to a soy sauce place and with with your own bottle and they would fill it up. And there's some places that still do this in more rural parts of China. But usually, of course, people just buy it online or buy it from a shop in a bottle already. The reason why I'm mentioning it here is cuz it's got quite an interesting backstory. So, in 2008, a TV reporter in Guangjo asked a random passer by what he thought about a celebrity scandal of some kind. And he just said, he said, "What's it got to do with me?

[00:06:19]I'm just here to get some soy sauce."

[00:06:22]And so, this went viral. And ever since this means it's none of my business is to pack up. Super common one. So if you're a restaurant in China and you want to take leftovers home, you just say so hit wrap is to put something in a bag with your hands. Put it in a doggy bag if you like after a meal at a restaurant. We've also got is a knot and is to tie a knot. Very straightforward.

[00:06:50]Ling is your tie. Same logic. your hands are tying a tie ding. And finally, dan is to hold up an umbrella when it's raining. Simple. Now, next we have playing sports. And again, if you've been learning Chinese for any length of time, you'll have noticed this already in a lot of sports names to verbs of actually playing sports. Balancho is to play basketball.

[00:07:13]Wango is net ball. It's tennis. So, it's very common with any sports involving the hand. tennis, ping pong, ping pong cho, badminton, but football that's using the feet, right? So you say, you don't say. And once you see that pattern, it stops being random. You also got other games that you play with your hand like to play cards or to play. I think that's how you say I don't how you say it properly in English.

[00:07:40]To play computer games. Again, it's using your hands as well. Right now, all of these involve the hands directly. And there's tons more really common examples. Look at these right here. So that's over 40 compound words from one character all connected by the hands.

[00:07:52]And that's just one usage. So so far every usage we've covered has involved either direct physical contact, your hands on something, or at least the implication of that in an abstract sense. Now that takes a step further away from its original strike meaning.

[00:08:06]This is where it starts to sort of mean sending or emitting or launching something outwards. Think about it this way. So when you strike something, you're applying force that sends energy in a direction. Da extends that idea to anything that sends, fires, emits or projects. So we have to make a phone call. We have to type your fingers striking keys and yeah, the computer or the typewriter is actually making this the stuff, making the words, but you know, your hands, I guess, are starting the action and you're emitting out that energy. D is to print. Dajun is to get or give an injection. Sort of thrusting, striking into skin. We've also got dallay. That's kind of nature striking, isn't it? No humans involved there.

[00:08:52]Certainly no hands involved, but it still uses that idea of emitting something outwards due to a force applied. And finally, we've got dang, which is to fire a gun, send out a bullet. So far, you've seen da for body actions, hand actions, and sending out things in some way. This next batch might be the one you use most in daily life because it covers what happens when da meets a result. So when you combine da with a result complement, a second character that describes the outcome of the action, you get some of the most common verbs in everyday Chinese. So the da here provides the force if you like and the second character tells you what happened as a result of that force. So for example, we have d to open, to turn on, to switch on. K means open. So you strike it and it opens. This is probably one of the top 10 most common words in Chinese. You use it for doors, for apps, for electronics, uh for bottles, conversations even. DO means to break or to smash. Poor means broken, right? So to hit something until it breaks, but it's used usually in the abstract sense.

[00:09:58]So for example, to break a record or to break convention. The physical smash though becomes a mental. This is why learning characters and learning words is not enough. Right? You need to see the words in context of sentences and hear them in context a lot. Okay? And then you'll get these nuances of how and when these words are used. Is to hit until something breaks off or cuts off.

[00:10:23]Right? So it's usually used in in the way of saying interrupted.

[00:10:27]For example, don't interrupt me while I'm speaking.

[00:10:31]Another one is this one is the opposite.

[00:10:34]It's almost always literally like physically breaking something to smash to pieces. So means shattered. So hit it until it's shattered.

[00:10:45]You broke the glass. Is another one means to fall over. So again to hit something until it falls over. And this is used in the physical and the abstract sense. So it's often been used for example in various political movements in the past. You know saying down with blah blah blah. uh they use the word da da for that. But you can also just say to hit to knock someone means loss or defeat. So to defeat someone is to strike them until they lose. Means to get through means through or connected as in unobstructed. This works primarily for phone calls.

[00:11:23]I could I finally got through. The line is finally clear.

[00:11:28]This one like on the surface it looks super violent actually to hit something until it breaks. J is usually what the term you would use for break for primarily for bones and things like that. So it's quite a visceral word but actually it just simply means to give a discount.

[00:11:45]Here's a funny thing about discounts in China. It's the opposite of English or Western discounts. So we might say 20% off. So we focus on what is off, right?

[00:11:56]that that free bit. That's what we focus on. But in Chinese, they focus on what's left. So they would say 80% discount.

[00:12:03]That's actually 20% off, but they' say your remaining price is 80% of the original price. So they would say or so is eight is the broken part. So he's saying like eight portions basically of the original 10 if that makes sense. So was five. So that's 50% off. That's one.

[00:12:25]So that means 90% off. So the lower the number, the bigger the discount. And once that clicks, you'll never get confused shopping in China again, hopefully. So with these, you learn that once and then every time you learn a new result character, you've basically unlocked a new word. That's the compounding effect of learning characters properly. And keep this verb result structure in mind because it's about to show up again in more abstract forms. This is the one I've been building to because up until now you've been able to trace data back to some kind of physical action even if it was getting more and more abstract. This final section is where that connection it gets really stretched. Some of these words you can still kind of figure out.

[00:13:05]Others you're going to need to get more creative with pneummonics and learn them that way using visualization so on. And that's okay. I'll explain why at the end. So what's happening here is that da is still doing something. It's still marking that an action is being performed of some kind. But the specific meaning of hit or anything to do with hands or even force has kind of faded to the point where it's more just like a general purpose action marker or verb marker. So think of da here as saying something is being done rather than something is being hit. Let me show you the full spectrum of this from traceable all the way to fully abstract. So duen means to plan or to intend to do something. Swan means to calculate. And this one actually has a specific origin.

[00:13:47]So in preodern China, right, calculating meant physically flicking beads on an abacus. So you can use that if you like as a kind of pneummonic to visualize this word. The swamp or the swampan is the abacus. So it's literally to hit the abacus. That's another way of sort of saying your plan, but in a very negative sense. So for example, you might hear the sentence, he's hitting his little abacus. That means he's scheming and plotting for his own benefit. So these two words dasan and daswan pattern are kind of heavily related historically. Daffen is to grade or give marks. So you you'd ask that hey give me your opinion. Give me a daffen like daffen for me like give me a number out of 10 what you think of my meal that I just cooked or it could be used in more official situations like in the Olympics where they're rating people's performance. Fun means points or marks.

[00:14:39]To dong someone is to move someone emotionally. But dong actually is just by itself. It's just the physical sense of move. Ding. It's an interesting one.

[00:14:51]Is to inquire or to ask around. Ting means to listen. So you could argue you are I don't know striking up conversations. I guess striking to gather information. But honestly that's a stretch. That's more of a pneummonic sort of link that you could create just to remember the word. So at this point, da is really drifting into fully abstract territory. Dalang is to size someone up like where you look them up and down in that way. So leang means to measure to actually like get a tape measure out and measure something. So to someone is to kind of visually measure them scanning them from head to toe.

[00:15:26]Is to greet or say hi to someone. Dho means a greeting or a call of some kind.

[00:15:31]So maybe you could say, "Oh, I'm striking up a greeting. I'm initiating contact. But again, the hitting idea is generally gone there.

[00:15:41]To deal with or have interactions with someone is dealings or relations. And that word also makes sense if you look at the characters. For example, means to intersect. So you could sort of imagine a network like sort of crossing over.

[00:15:56]And dal means road. So it's intersecting roads. It means having dealings or relations with someone. So if you That means you have dealings with someone to disturb or bother. Means to disturb.

[00:16:10]So is to disturb. Simple. This one's super common if you want to just be polite. You know, there's an acquaintance or someone you don't know particularly well. You're in a more formal setting. Perhaps you open the door. Oh, excuse me. Sorry to bother you. And then continue with what you wanted to say. Is to dispel or give up on an idea. Shiao means to disappear or to cancel. So to dash, it's like you're performing the action of making a thought go away.

[00:16:38]That's usually how it's used in context.

[00:16:41]Is used in a couple of different ways.

[00:16:43]You could say and right to just get get rid of someone basically. It's kind of you don't want around. Or you could say which is just to kind of while away the hours, just sort of get spend the time.

[00:16:56]Get rid of the time as it were. This one kind of makes sense because fa means to dispatch. Dong is to work particularly originally manual labor. So that makes sense with the da right because you're using your hands. But now actually it applies to any kind of just contract work just doing some work on the side.

[00:17:15]Even if you work in an office or just you know you work on your computer at home that's also daonging. Okay. So that one's kind of evolved a bit over the last few years. And there's one more worth knowing here. In northern Chinese dialects, which I'm quite familiar with, my wife's northern Chinese, that can even function as a preposition meaning from identical in meaning to right. So for example, is from here go east or go east from here. And means since childhood, literally uh hit small, right? D. That's about as far from hit as you can possibly get at this point. Now whether a word has obvious ethmology or not, you still need a way to actually remember it. And we kind of mentioned this earlier. And this is where a technique we call living links comes in. So what this is is a visual pneummonic, a vivid mental image you create to lock a word into your memory.

[00:18:09]And there are two simple steps to this.

[00:18:11]First, you see or make a connection between parts of the word and the meaning. And second, you visualize that connection. You turn it into a scene in your head. The more vivid, the more ridiculous, the better it sticks. So for words with a clear ethmology, the first step is already done for you. Take Dwan for example to plan. The connection's right there. Someone working in abacus, maybe someone evil punching big abacus beads to the left and right while they're calculating an evil plan of some kind. So you just simply visualize that in some way. It takes just a couple of seconds and you move on. But for the words where the connection isn't obvious, like to dispel an idea, you need to make your own connection somehow. So for example, the ina kind of sounds like small in Chinese. It's a different tone, but whatever that doesn't matter. So is small. So I might imagine that hit small. So that someone has maybe a a thought bubble next to them with maybe just a a yucky green color just to show that it's an unpleasant thought. and they're they're showing just, you know, some sort of distasteful expression. They're just no, I don't like this thought. And so they hit the speech bubble or the thought bubble and it shrinks down. They keep hitting until it gets really small and then they get rid of it. So that really clearly shows the idea of dashing something and it connects to the characters and kind of the pronunciation as well. So yeah, when the ethmology is clear, you use it. When it's not, you just create your own ethmology. You just make it up and then you create a visualization based on that connection.

[00:19:42]And look, the hopefully interesting facts about that that I just shared with you are great. And again, hopefully you remember a bunch of these compound words. But that's not the real lesson from today. The real lesson is what happens when you learn characters. You just watched one five-stroke character unlock over 50 words, including idioms, slang, and even a meme or two. And that's just one character. Imagine what happens when you know a few hundred common characters. And that's why I'd say don't wait to learn them. Don't put it off because it seems intimidating.

[00:20:12]There's a method that works that just takes a second or two, maybe a few seconds to learn any Chinese character.

[00:20:18]I'm talking about the reading, writing, and pronunciation with the correct tone all at the same time. And over the last 10 years or so, we've perfected this system to the point where in just a few months of consistent study, you can learn all the characters you'll need for pretty much any level of Chinese you want to get to. And once you do start to learn characters, the logic of this beautiful language will just open up in a way that nothing else can give you. So characters really are the key.

[00:20:42]Everything else gets easier once you have them. And if you want to try that for yourself, if you want to see what it actually looks like in action and experience what it feels like to go from zero to reading real Chinese sentences in one sitting, we made a video that walks you through the whole thing live, step by step. So watch this one next.