I need to learn what?

I like that joke

Working on your submission for 黃花 over on CEDICT, btw... (it has more meanings than you thought)

Actually, 物 to my mind often implies the object of an action. So it's more natural that 猎物 refers to the hunted, just as 猎者 refers to the hunter.

獵 means hunting, second characters says what object is doing the hunting.

Learners should probably learn early on not to conclude the existence of such neat patterns, even if it's relatively justified in the case of 猎.

But my point is that you can not guess from just looking at 獵物 whether the meaning is things that hunt versus things are are hunted. Which is a pretty big difference.

Being able to conclude that 猎物 means "hunting-thing" is already a big step towards obviousness. Once you've learnt it means prey, you probably won't forget (at least if you understand that 物 often refers to objects).

I think there are better examples of words whose meanings can't be easily figured out from knowing the individual characters. 关照, for instance, or 包含 in the "excuse" or "accept" sense.

or 包含 in the "excuse" or "accept" sense.

I suppose it is 包涵, no?

Being able to conclude that 猎物 means "hunting-thing" is already a big step towards obviousness. Once you've learnt it means prey, you probably won't forget (at least if you understand that 物 often refers to objects).

I agree that Chinese is easy to learn in the sense that if you know the individual characters, once you are told the meaning of the word it is often easy to remember. All I'm saying is that going the other way, trying to figure out what a word means based on its component characters, I don't think is as easy as if often stated.

I think there are better examples of words whose meanings can't be easily figured out from knowing the individual characters. 关照, for instance, or 包含 in the "excuse" or "accept" sense.

Thanks for the topic ideas!

I suppose it is 包涵, no?

Woops, sorry! 包涵 it is :S

All I'm saying is that going the other way, trying to figure out what a word means based on its component characters, I don't think is as easy as if often stated.

I really don't think this is often claimed, not on these forums at least...most commonly, people advocate learning words instead of characters.

At the same time, the learner becomes increasingly able to make educated guesses about unfamiliar words composed of familiar characters, especially for words that are (in a sense) abbreviations of longer expressions. In no way are these unfamiliar words "obvious", though.

"If olive oil is made by pressing olives, how is baby oil made?"

See also: Shepherds Pie.