Lesson 18 · Foundational Components

Eye, Ear, Foot: 目 / 耳 / 足

A second body-part trio, picking up where Lesson 11's hand and heart left off: three pictographs, each an extremely common component slot. 目 covers the eye and seeing, 耳 the ear and hearing, 足 the foot and moving. Between them they build "to look," "to run," "road," and — with one deliberate exception — "to hear."

Your three new components

目
 
mù
eye
5 strokes
耳
 
ěr
ear
6 strokes
足
𧾷 (left, compressed)
zú
foot, leg
7 strokes

Quick recall — click each card to flip it:

目
mù — eye
耳
ěr — ear
足
zú — foot, leg
目 vs 日 — two rectangles, don't blur them. Wiktionary describes 目 as a pictograph of a human eye, rotated 90 degrees from its original horizontal orientation (compare the Egyptian hieroglyph 𓁹). The modern glyph is a tall rectangle crossed by two internal lines, 5 strokes. 日 (sun, day — Lesson 1) is a shorter rectangle crossed by one internal line, 4 strokes. Kangxi radical 109. (Wiktionary: 目)
耳 — a straightforward pictograph. Wiktionary's definition is simply "an ear," and the glyph's evolution from oracle-bone script keeps the outline recognisable at every stage. Kangxi radical 128. (Wiktionary: 耳)
足 narrows to 𧾷 on the left, without changing shape as much as 氵 or 忄 did. Wiktionary calls 足 "a pictogram of a leg,". Kangxi radical 157. When it sits as a left-side component — as in today's 跑 and 路 — it keeps the same outline but is drawn narrower and taller to make room for its partner, formally distinguished as 𧾷. Unlike Lesson 7's 火→灬 or Lesson 12's 言→讠, this is a squeeze, not a redraw. (Wiktionary: 足)

Stroke order

目 — 5 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 目, 5 strokes
目 — 5 strokes
▶ watch animated

耳 — 6 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 耳, 6 strokes
耳 — 6 strokes
▶ watch animated

足 — 7 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 足, 7 strokes
足 — 7 strokes
▶ watch animated

Examples using these components

Starting with 目: 看 reuses 手 all the way back from Lesson 11:

看kànto look, to see, to watch

手+目=看

An ideogrammic compound: Wiktionary describes it as "to put a hand above the eyes to gaze afar" — 手 (hand, semantic) shading 目 (eye, semantic). Both pieces carry meaning; neither is phonetic. (Wiktionary: 看)

眼 goes back to a semantic-phonetic split:

眼yǎneye

目+艮=眼

目 (eye) is semantic; 艮 (gèn, a trigram name today) is phonetic only. In modern speech, standalone 目 has mostly retreated into compounds and set phrases — 眼睛 (yǎnjing, "eye(s)") is the everyday word, and 眼 is the character you'll meet as its first half. (Wiktionary: 眼)

Wiktionary classifies 艮's role in 眼 as sound only, on the strength of an Old Chinese rhyme match (艮 *kɯːns, 眼 *ŋrɯːnʔ) — the normal, sound-driven way phono-semantic compounds get built. Whether that choice also owed anything to 艮's own ancient composition is a fair question the sources simply don't address either way. That composition: Wiktionary describes the ancient graph as an ideogrammic compound of 目 (eye) + 人 (person, from Lesson 1), literally "a person looking back," with an old sense of resistance or disobedience — a reading the modern glyph no longer visibly preserves. Today 艮 survives mainly as the name of one of the Yijing's eight three-line 卦 (guà, "trigram") symbols, the 八卦 (bāguà, "eight trigrams") — specifically the mountain trigram — itself a separate, later sense. (Wiktionary: 眼, Wiktionary: 艮)

足 builds two very common characters, both by the same pattern:

跑pǎoto run

𧾷+包=跑

足 (foot, semantic) is narrowed to 𧾷; 包 (bāo, "to wrap" today) is phonetic only. (Wiktionary: 跑)

路lùroad, path

𧾷+各=路

Again 足 (foot, semantic) narrows to 𧾷; 各 (gè, "each" today) is phonetic only. A road is, at root, where feet go. (Wiktionary: 路)

听 looks like it should contain 耳 — it doesn't. Simplified 听 (tīng, "to listen, to hear") is not a redrawing of traditional 聽 (tīng, same meaning), which is built from 耳. Instead, the PRC's simplification scheme repurposed an unrelated pre-existing character, originally 口 (mouth, semantic) + 斤 (jīn, phonetic) with an old meaning close to "to smile," reassigning it to carry 聽's modern sound and sense. 耳 is not a component of 听 at all, even though the character means "to hear." (Wiktionary: 听, Wiktionary: 聽)

闻, by contrast, does use 耳 — and reuses 门 all the way back from Lesson 13:

闻wénto hear; to smell

门+耳=闻

Here Wiktionary marks 门 (door) as the phonetic element — Old Chinese *mɯːn is close enough to 耳-driven wén to carry the sound — while 耳 (ear, semantic) supplies the meaning. The same double-duty Lesson 17's 禾 showed inside 和: a taught component playing the sound role instead of the meaning role. (Wiktionary: 聞)

Stroke order for today's characters

看 — 9 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 看, 9 strokes
看 — 9 strokes
▶ watch animated

眼 — 11 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 眼, 11 strokes
眼 — 11 strokes
▶ watch animated

跑 — 12 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 跑, 12 strokes
跑 — 12 strokes
▶ watch animated

路 — 13 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 路, 13 strokes
路 — 13 strokes
▶ watch animated

听 — 7 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 听, 7 strokes
听 — 7 strokes
▶ watch animated

闻 — 9 strokes

Stroke order diagram for 闻, 9 strokes
闻 — 9 strokes
▶ watch animated

Check your recall

目 differs from 日 by having:

足 becomes which compressed form as a left component?

看 (手+目) means:

Does 听 (tīng, "to hear") contain 耳 as a component?

In 闻 (门+耳), which piece is the phonetic element?

跑 and 路 share which taught component?

Go further

Etymology sources for every character above are linked inline. For the rigorous version of any of them, including the full phono-semantic analysis of 闻, see the Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters.

Out in the world: 好看 (hǎokàn, "good-looking" — 好 from Lesson 2) and 好听 (hǎotīng, "nice to listen to," said of music or a voice) are both fully readable now, built entirely from glossary characters. 路口 (lùkǒu, "intersection, crossroads" — 口 from Lesson 1) labels junctions on street signs. 听说 (tīngshuō, "I heard that…, it's said that…" — 说 from Lesson 12) is one of the most common ways to open a sentence reporting hearsay.