"He is not a student."

Translation: 他不是学生。

[Ethan179943]

I actually love learning Chinese, but I dont understand it....

[Hsn626796]

Lol; i wish they be more clear in the tips and notes

[sebasgaravanok]

Same happens to me

[Hsn626796]

We need explanation in the tips & notes for things we can only understand, unfortunately, when asking people things here in the comments

[super-dupe]

We say ta bu shi yi ge xue sheng

[RoseQueen310]

You're Chinese person ?

[huongly0806]

The characters are difficult to remember :p

[Elbert478713]

I agree. Some characters resemble what they mean sometimes. Thats how i remember 水. It looks like many tributaries flowing from one big river.

[kyleesullivan06]

I don't understand why the words can also have like four meanings

[akavel]

Does it mean first character is both "he" or "she"?

[Keith_APP]

In modern Chinese, a character 她 has been created for she. Probably nobody use 他 to represent a female nowadays. But in older literature 他 was used for both genders.

[oVoFeng]

No. He is 他， she is 她 . Both characters have the same pronunciation

[ssdd_1744]

They sound the same, but
"He" is "man too", so 人 + 也 = 他
"She" is "female too", so 女 + 也 = 她

[Hsn626796]

Why "too" ?

What is its need ?

[Keith_APP]

也 is just a phonetic part, added to the semantic part of 人 man/person/human.

她 was invented based on 他 when Chinese intellectuals got in touch with western languages more. The first directly related discussions are said to be about a hundred years ago. It is a relatively "young" character in Chinese.

About the phonetic property of 也 ye, we can find closer relevance to 他 in Cantonese. They are 也 ya and 他 ta respectively. Cantonese usually preserves to a larger extent old phonetic properties. Many poets that no longer rhyme in Mandarin, still rhyme in Cantonese.

[keshavgold9841]

Most Chinese characters have a semantic and a phonetic part. The 也 in 她 and 他 is the phonetic part, meaning these characters should probably be pronounced as yě (or something similar in a different tone).

But since there are exceptions to every rule, these make one of the exceptions. There are also others characters with the phonetic part 也 that are in no way pronounced as they “should”. This happens due to phonetic shifts through history.

[Keith_APP]

Thanks for this message. I wondered what "He too" was about but I realize now... LOL

[sercalero]

As far as I know, this is how it goes: 他 is masculine while 她 is feminine (he, him-she, her) both are to be pronounced tā.