Radical 氵

9 strokes

water 氵 (78a) + ahead 先 (137) = wash 洗

[干洗 (124) gānxǐ dry cleaning]

There’s only limited hot water in the rooming house so she races to get to the bathroom ahead of everyone else and have a good wash. / But Teddy has beaten her to it, and is washing his sheets in the sink.

A word about how you can make use of the compounds we give with the characters. the compounds show you how the character in question combines to make words, when used together with other characters you’ve already learned. So you can use compounds as a revision aid for characters you’ve already learned: look at the compound and see if you can remember what the component characters mean. Sometimes it’s interesting and instructive to see how the meaning of the compound as a whole relates to the meanings of the characters which make it up. A good example is that the literal meaning of 先生 is “ahead [in] life” (i.e. “senior”).

You can also turn this around and use compounds as another way of remembering how to pronounce characters. You will probably recognize many words (such as xiānshēng) which you’ve come across in your Chinese language lessons. If you now realize that 先 is the first character in xiānshēng then you know it is pronounced xiān. Of course the soundwords are there to help you with pronunciations, but there’s no such thing as too much help!