中文挑战

This was hard.

#4 was really hard to figure out

1. 看书

看 = 手 目

书 = 书

2. 双手

双 = 又 又

手 = 手

3. 打篮球

打 = 手 丁

篮 = 竹 监

球 = 玉 求

4. 肥皂

肥 = 肉 巴

皂 = 白 七

5. 刮胡子

刮 = 舌 刀

胡 = 古 肉

子 = 子

6. 潜水

潜 = 水 夫 夫 日

水 = 水

7. 沙发

沙 = 水 少

发 = 发

@jkhsu:

Why did you think #4 was especially hard? Was it because it wasn't obvious that the girl in the photo was washing her legs, or because you didn't know that 月 in 肥 is actually the radical for 肉?

@feihong:

I knew that 月 is the radical for 肉.

I think the problem was I checked the MDBG dictionary for the word "沾" and it said "

to moisten / to be infected by / to receive favors". For some reason, the "to be infected by" definition stood out for me with that photo and for the longest time I thought she had some disease like leprosy or something. So I kept on thinking she had some white scar 白 疤 because a couple of the character components left over were in those words (白 and 巴). It wasn until I just systematically looked up every radical and combined it with the left over components did I realize it was actually soap.

Later, I asked a native speaker to look at the picture with the sentence and she figured out it was soap right away. So I think I was just thrown off. I guess if you had a picture of a bar of Ivory soap, it would have saved me an extra hour! But it was fun!

@jkhsu: That is a really weird but funny interpretation of the picture.