A phonetic compound consists of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, semantic radical indicates its semantic field and phonetic radical its pronunciation.

The meaning component of semantic-phonetic compound Chinese character is also called 'radical'. For example, ' 足 ' is a popular Chinese radical that means 'foot'. The meanings of those characters that contain this radical are related to 'foot' in a certain way.

The phonetic component indicates at least part of sound. Characters that contain same phonetic component tend to have similar sounds.

For example, for character ' 跳' ( jump ), right part ' 兆' indicates sound. They share same vowel.

Phonetic Loans

The phonetic loan is another way of using existing characters. It is an internal borrowing on basis of pronunciation: a character is used in a new meaning which is expressed by a similar sound in spoken form. In this way an existing character has acquired a new meaning, but no new character is created.

For example, character自in Oracle-Bone Inscriptions was originally pictograph and referred to nose, but it is now used in sense of "self" as a result of phonetic loan. The character 来 in Oracle-Bone Inscriptions was also a pictograph, referring to wheat, but is now used in sense of "come" as a phonetic loan.

Rosie From Learn Chinese Language Online (http://www.learn-chinese-language-online.com)

The goal of Learn Chinese Language Online (LCLO) is to reduce the Mandarin Learning curve, promote and introduce the most efficient way to grasp the broad foundation of Chinese language.

Show up to exam site early. The SAT alone can get you pretty flustered, so last thing you want is to show up late and not have plenty of time to get settled in and relaxed. Check night before to make sure you have everything ready that you’re going to need in morning. Then, when you wake up next morning, rather than run around house frantically looking for things you need, you can take a nice hot shower and relax. Obviously end goal of all of this is to make sure you’re able to do your absolute best work on test.

Read all of directions. Even if you think you know what you’re supposed to do, take a few seconds to at least skim over them. Taking 20 seconds to read directions will make you lose much less time than if you complete section of SAT and realize at end you did it all wrong.

When you’re taking test, don’t get bogged down on one question. If you come to a question that you can’t work out right away, do not get flustered. Just skip it and come back to it. Unless you find yourself skipping a lot of questions, on SAT it is usually best to skip question rather than guess and then come back to it. You are penalized for every wrong answer you give, whereas leaving a question blank really has no huge impact on your score. Again, don’t leave very many questions blank as that lowers score that you can potentially earn.

Review your answers with extra time you have left at end. You might not have time to review all of questions you had trouble with, but at least go over as many as you can. Be careful not to second-guess yourself too. It seems that more often than not our first impressions are correct, so don’t change an answer unless you have good reason to.

Eat ice cream. But wait until after you have taken test and done your best. Hard work and effort on your part should almost always be awarded with some kind of frozen dessert with high concentrations of sugar and fat.