读书
dúshū · HSK 1
study
📖 读书 = read + book
读 (dú) means to read; 书 (shū) means book. Together the compound covers reading, studying, and by extension attending school — the everyday activity of working through books.
读 — speech radical 讠 + 卖 (mài, sell)
读 is a semantic-phonetic compound. The left side 讠 (speech) gives the meaning, since reading is tied to speaking words aloud. The right side 卖 originally provided the sound; in the traditional form 讀 the phonetic was 賣 (yù/dú).
书 — hand 又 holding brush over 曰 (say/speak)
Originally a pictograph of a hand gripping a writing brush above a mouth or vessel, depicting the act of writing speech down. The traditional form 書 shows 聿 (brush) over 曰 (to say). Simplified 书 preserves the brush-in-hand shape, and the meaning extended from 'to write' to 'writing' and then 'book'.