tian di

My husband Joe says I'm working very hard at learning Chinese. "Not hard enough," I grumble to myself. I was never really good at memorizing vocabulary for foreign language, and it's harder at 57, especially with an ideographic writing system where it's necessary to memorize characters as well as words.

These days, I do best learning things connected to what I know. I happen to have a Chinese Bible. I looked at verse 1, chapter 1. It was generally incomprehensible; rather like a densely worded menu in a Chinese restaurant. But at the end of verse 1 were the two symbols you see above. I seemed to remember that the first was 'heaven'-- da or big with a line on top. Could the second one mean earth? With a little web research, I learned that it was: tian di-- heaven and earth. Phrases are much easier to remember when connected to familiar text.