Just to add to the previous post: Vocabulary in Chinese is generally made up of more than one character. Which is also why it's actually pretty easy to learn once you get past the difficult first part. 工人 工作 工厂 工业 工资 打工 分工 开工 And there are many other combinations. Even if I don't give you the translations, you can see that they all have to do with work in one way or another. If I tell you 手 means hand, you can infer that all of these have something to do with that: 手指 手动 手表 手机 Similarly, if I tell you 手 at the end means a person engaged in something (trying his "hand" at something) you can easily learn these: 新手 高手 歌手 助手 杀手 And this goes for the majority of Chinese vocabulary. At some point you will know most of the individual parts and it becomes a matter of correctly interpreting the combinations. Good luck!

1. They're both work, just one is rarely used by itself. 工作 is actual work, 工 is also work but it's usually just used as part of other words, it's more of just a concept of work. That's my understanding of it. (I'm not native Chinese) 2. Radicals are like letters in Chinese. 木is wood by itself, but the fact that it's also the wood radical means it will show up in a lot of other Chinese characters. 来-come 本-basis 想-think 样-manner In all of these characters, you can see the wood radical with other stuff added to it. To be more specific, let's look at 想.You'll see that this word is made up of three common radicals. 木 -wood radical 目 -eye radical 心 -heart radical

1) 工 is short of 工作 2) the ideas of radicals is useless after the invention of writing pads, which recognize the symbols by final picture, not by strokes