How to learn a Chinere word How to learn a Chinese word If we want to learn a Chinese word from its phonetic and semantic components, it seems to me we'd better trace back the traditional Chinese character. For example, the word hear / listen in traditional Chinese is represented as 聽, but it is written as 听 in simplified. From the traditional character 聽, we see it is composed of 耳 and 㥁, and it is also an associative compound word that sounds like its phonetic component 壬(ting2). The most important thing is the form － 聽 is composed of an ear 耳 and a person who is sitting well with hear心. This also implies you have to open your ears and listen with your heart if you want to truly listen to something or someone. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I cannot find as much meaning in the simplified character 听. I know learning simplified characters is the trend since it is easy and also widely used. But if you want to involve the advance levels in mandarin, the traditional characters will be something that you have no way to ignore.