BeginChinese
every character tells a story
The ancient form
Today

jiàn · gin3

to see; to perceive

Where it comes from

A giant eye balanced on top of a pair of kneeling legs — the moment someone looks up and truly perceives. That eye is the same wide almond shape you already know from 目, now put to work as a verb instead of a noun. Character families like this run through the whole script: 目 draws the eye, and legs beneath it turn merely having an eye into the act of using it.

A piece of culture

Seeing is worth a hundred hearings
Around 61 BCE, Emperor Xuan of Han asked the aging general Zhao Chongguo how large an army he would need to put down a rebellion on the western frontier. Rather than guess from the capital, the general asked to go and look at the ground himself, and answered with a line that has outlived every one of his campaigns: 百闻不如一见 — "a hundred hearings are not worth a single seeing." The proverb is still what a Chinese teacher says when a photo, or a map, will never quite replace standing there in person.

Use it in a real word

再见
zàijiàn ·
goodbye — literally "see (you) again"; the natural bookend to 你好
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