to sow grain or manage farm crops
farming workagricultural labor
Verb / NounFormal / LiteraryBound morpheme#agriculture#farming#nature
Sample Usage
庄稼
zhuāngjia
crops / farm crops
农稼
nóngjià
agricultural farming
稼
jiàjia4
|++`(51)
=jià Tone mark placement: Tone mark sits on "a" per main-vowel priority (a > e > o; in -iu/-ui the mark takes the second vowel).
Type: Unaspirated Alveolo-Palatal
Sounds like: soft j sound as in 'jeep'
Airflow Tactile Test: No air puff. Lips spread wide like smiling.
Tongue & Mouth Position: Front part of the tongue touches or comes close to the hard palate behind the upper teeth.
Vowel Group: -a vowel group
Sounds like: -ia rhymes with 'ee-ah'
Mouth Shape Guide: Pronounce as standalone vowel 'yah'.
Common Learner Trap: Keep vowel quality steady across all 4 tone contours.
Tone Pitch & Cadence: Tone 4 starts high and drops immediately and steeply, just like saying 'No!' or 'Stop!' in English.
👂Listening trap: Confusing the third tone jia3 with the fourth tone jià4. Make sure it drops sharply and never dips.
👋Physical Tone Gesture: A sharp, definitive karate chop downwards from head height to chest level, representing Tone 4.
Topology: Left-right · Strokes: 15 strokes
Writing Balance Rule: Keep the left radical (禾) compact and slightly narrower than the right side (家) to maintain overall structural harmony.
Radical 禾 · Cereal plant radical (Grain, cereal plant, crops)
Semantic Clue (形旁): 禾 (Indicates plants, grains, and agriculture.)
Phonetic Clue (声旁): 家 (original sound: jia)
The cereal plant (禾) combined with a household or roof (家) represents the crops cultivated by a family for survival.
- 禾 Grain / Cereal plant (left side)
- 家 Family / Home (right side, providing sound and shelter concept)
Liushu category: Phono-semantic (形声)
Origin: Combined 禾 (grain plant) with 家 (house/home) to show the grains grown by a household to sustain family life.
Semantic Evolution: Originally referred specifically to sowing and harvesting grain, which later expanded to general farm crops and agricultural work.
- In ancient agrarian societies, planting grain was the cornerstone of household survival.
🇯🇵Kanji (Japanese)
On: カ / Kun: うえる
Vivid Mnemonic Story
A family at home (家) steps out into the fields with cereal grain plants (禾) to sow the new season's crops.
家jiāhome, family, householdPhonetic Core (声旁)
嫁jiàto marry (of a woman)+ 女 (woman)
镓jiāgallium (chemistry)+ 钅 (metal)
Lookalikes & Traps (形近字)
嫁(jià)
稼 uses the grain radical 禾 (farming), while 嫁 uses the woman radical 女 (marriage).
8. Mastery
Active Recall Challenge 农民在田里辛勤地[___]庄稼。
Clue: jià
Common Learner PitfallConfusing it with 嫁 (jià, to marry) due to the identical right-hand phonetic component 家.
Memory Prompts
Recognition: What does 稼 mean when paired with 庄 (zhuāngjià)?
Production: How do you write the character for sowing grain (jià) that features a grain radical on the left?
稼jiàto sow grain, farm crop Speed: Searching YouTube for native pronunciation videos...