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How do you form a Chinese word? Chinese is written with characters which are comprised of radicals. Each character is a pictograph which contains one or many smaller pictographs called radicals. Radicals usually represent elements or basic things existing in nature.

Each character has one and sometimes several meanings and is pronounced with one syllable. In modern Chinese to form a word two characters are combined. For example, to get Beijing one combines the characters Běi (北), which means north and Jing (京), to get the word Beijing.

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