Radical 禾

8 strokes

1. grain 禾 (126a) + mouth 口 (5) = with 和

2. grain 禾 (126a) + mouth 口 (5) = mix 和

和 hé means “with” in the sense of “along with” and is often translated simply as “and”.

[和好 (18) héhǎo become reconciled]

1.

The cowboy rolls the grain around in his mouth and says, “This needs something to go with it.” / The fairy says, “Try it with some of my herbs.”

2.

(A baby alien has sneaked aboard the spaceship) They find it sitting on the storeroom floor, stuffing grain in its mouth and getting all the carefully-labeled grain samples mixed up. / The ghostly fairy who protects the planet comes to fetch the alien and take it home.

You’ll want to consolidate this progress so that you don’t “lose” the characters you’ve learned. One way is to keep up with the “Test Yourself ” blocks such as the one below, whenever you meet one in the book. You can also test yourself on the characters more systematically by writing out the characters from each chapter on a piece of paper or card (good writing practice too!).

When you forget a character (it happens), go back and visualize the story again. You will almost certainly find you had read through it previously without letting it sink in. Visualize it again and try and add one or two details to the scene to make it “your own”.

beret (89a) + tree 木 (10a) = grain 禾

Notice how “beret” differs from “label”.

The meaning of “grain” embraces all cereal plants, including rice.

The beret (that they’d been using as a frisbee) is now stuck in a tree and they won’t be able to retrieve it without trampling the grain growing around the tree. (Who’s going to be the one to ask the farmer if they can get it?) / [No pronunciation needed]