Dan - Egg-zactly

I mentioned that zi 子, though it can mean egg, is not the character used for egg in Chinese dishes. The character for egg is dan 蛋.

You'll see it on Egg Drop Soup 蛋花湯 (which actually means "Egg Flower Soup"), and on the package of egg noodles I just bought today: 雞蛋面. (Pop quiz -- you've seen two of those three characters. What kind of eggs were used to make the noodles, and which of those characters must mean "noodles"?)

A great way for English speakers to remember dan is to look at the upper right corner. The strokes form a capital E, for "egg". Unfortunately, you can't always see it when the character is small. So I am also going to point you to the bottom half, which is our next radical: Chong, which means insect (and that will lead us to seafood).

The Pinyin spelling is dàn or dan4 (fourth tone).

Chun - A Quail of a Tale

The last of the common poultry I'm going to mention is quail. Not because it's common of itself (I've never actually come across it in a restaurant) but because the eggs are pretty common. More on eggs soon.

I'm also going to use quail to illustrate an interesting element of spoken Mandarin Chinese -- every word is one syllable. And that's limiting, even when you have four musical tones to add meaning. There are a whole lot of homonyms in Chinese. (Homonyms are words that sound exactly alike but mean very different things). If you go to Mandarin Tools and search their dictionary for "ji" (chicken), you will find 142 entries. Yikes!

Luckily for us, the written version is quite clear, because different meanings use different characters. So if you look at their 142 entries, you will see that only words with closely related meanings have the same character. But even though it's clear when you read it, it's not clear when you speak it, so the Chinese will often use two words together to clarify what they mean. (They also use a lot of puns and metaphors, because, after all, everything you say could refer to something else.)

This is why beef is "cow meat" 牛肉. And it's why with some poultry and most seafood, you will see a lot of repetition. So...

I've most often seen quail as the character at the head of this post: Chun 鶉. But you might see it as An Chun 鵪鶉 - and both characters mean "quail."

How to remember: Well, it's got the bird radical, and it isn't chicken or duck. Soon you will learn a character that will help you remember Chun at least. The left side of Chun is a character that means "enjoy" 享. The top is the same top as for "palace" and "capital city" - a lid over a box. But the bottom half is what might help you remember quail: it's zi 子 (pronounced "dzuh") and it's the word for "little thing". It's an important food word, and we'll get to that before we even get to eggs. It helps us remember quail because quail are little things.

The pinyin spellings for quail is ān or an1 (first tone), and chún or chun2 (second tone).

Ya - Duck Season

Duck is a popular luxury dish, and most Chinese restauants will have at least one special dish, if not several. Peking Duck, Tea-smoked Duck, Crispy Duck. You name it, it's probably tasty.

The radical is the "bird" 鳥 symbol, on the right again. On the left, the part that means duck looks more like a lollipop than a duck. I remember it by picturing a head-and-neck close up of the Aflac Duck, looking straight at you screaming "AFLAC!"

The Pinyin spelling is yā, or ya1 (first tone).

Ji - A Tale of Two Chickens

Just as there are two symbols for bird, there are two for chicken 鷄 and 雞, and they both stand for the same word: ji. The difference doesn't hold much meaning -- it's just which radical they happen to use at a particular restaurant. You'll notice that the radical in this case is on the right.

The part on the left is the part that indicates it's a chicken and not some other bird. It's made up of three stacked characters. Claw 爪, thread 幺 and big 大. I'm thinking it means "big scratcher bird." But that doesn't make it so easy to recognize.

A friend thought the second version looks like chickens scratching around outside a hen house. And that, I think, is the best way to remember it. It's common enough that you can just make a point of identifying it on any menu, and you'll learn it. (Assignment: find a takeout menu with Chinese on it. Which version does that restaurant use?)

The Pinyin spelling is jī, ji1 (first tone).

Niao and Zhui - Two Birds in the Bush

There are two characters for "bird". Both are radicals for Chicken and various other poultry, so it's good to be able to recognize them. Just to confuse you, these radicals generally appear on the right rather than the left, as you will see in the next post about chicken.

Niao 鳥 just means "bird" and it is the most often used. It looks a little like fish 魚, which I'll get to later. It doesn't really look much like a bird to me, unless I see the top as a bird's head, and the bottom as a spread-out wing. (And that helps you separate it from fish, because the four dots underneath are enclosed by the wingtip.)

Zhui 隹, according to most dictionaries, means "short tailed bird" which is odd, because (for food birds at least) it only seems to be used for chicken -- and roosters have long tails. Whereas ducks, which never seem to use zhui, always have short tails. The best way to remember it is that it looks like a hen house.

The Pinyin spelling is niǎo, or niao3 (third tone), and zhuī, or zhui1 (first tone).