油 (yóu: “oil, fat, grease”)

I cribbed 油 from the ventilator hood over our stove, which has a large advertising sticker proclaiming it to be a 吸油烟机 (xīyóuyānjī: lit. “grease smoke sucking machine”). All the appliances in our apartment were new or newish when we moved in, and neither our landlady or the previous tenant (or, indeed we) had removed the showroom stickers touting their virtues.

油 takes the radical 水 (shūi: “water,” in radical form simplified as two dots and a stroke on the left of the character), which usually signifies a fluid or body of water. The sound part, helpfully, is 由 (yóu: “from”). So in the case of 油, both the radical and sound-part are actually useful.

Spectators of sporting events shout 加油！ 加油！ (jía yóu: lit. “add oil”). This is also how you say “fill one’s car with petrol.”

每 (měi: “every, each”)

每 is one of those characters I see everywhere and had, until ten minutes ago, no idea what it meant. It also turns out that I knew the word 每 as a compound with days of the week: e.g. 每星期三 (měixīngqīsān: “every Wednesday”), but never knew how to write it.

My dictionary (a bright yellow Langenscheidt’s Pocket) is unhelpful about this character. I think the radical is 人 (rén: “person”), but I don’t seen an overhead configuration for 人 in the radical index. The sound-part is 母 (mǔ: “motherly”), which I knew already from other contexts but which is also not in the radical index.

This is one of the hardest things about learning Chinese: you can’t learn just a little. Chinese is very contextual: the meaning of a sound like mei will vary dramatically by context, as does a series of shapes like 人 and 母. It takes a long time to gain some traction in that context. If I were translating a Chinese text and encountered 每 for the first time, and didn’t already know it meant “every,” Langenscheidt wouldn’t be able to help me either, and I’d languish in ignorance. Only by using Google can I turn 每 into “daily,” and then use Langenscheidt to find měi in reverse.