Words

While Chinese is a monosyllabic language - each character is a syllable - that does not mean that each syllable/character is a word. While some characters are in and of themselves words, most Chinese words consist of two characters. There are also some three character words, and quite a few four character terms.

Note that as a result, knowing the characters is not sufficient to understand the language. Naturally enough, knowing the individual characters will help the learner to understand the meaning of words.

Take the character 学 and the related words: 学生 学校 学习 学到 学期 学分 学会 学问 学位 学院 好学 难学 小学 中学 大学 文学 科学 数学 化学 开学 留学