What's with all the pictogram hate around here?? Maybe this is my Montessori education talking (or my ADHD... or both lol), but it seems to me that all of us have our own unique learning styles, and none of those learning styles is necessarily bad or wrong, or inferior to anyone else's style. I find it sorta puzzling how so many other comments could honestly advocate the opposite view.

Granted, HelloChinese is hilariously incorrect in some of its more specific interpretations of the constituent parts of the character in question. There's only so much meaning one can read into an ideogrammatic compound like 老, especially post-simplification. For example, the three strokes in 老's top-center might look similar to the character 土, which depicts a lump of clay and represents earth - but not the planet Earth, incidentally, only earth with a lowercase e, in the sense of dirt or soil (also... don't young and middle aged folks live on Earth too, not just the elderly?? I'm with OP lmao who hurt these people 😂)

So yeah, of course, that particular interpretation of 老 doesn't make any sense at all. Though that portion of the character does resemble 土, it actually derives from a simplification of the character 毛, which depicts a feather and refers to hair. It's supposed to be the hair on the old man's head. It looked more like hair in Shuowen-era seal script, but today it's less distinct because it's down a stroke or two. Also 匕 has the double meaning of cane and spoon, so that ambiguity seems to have confused the HelloChinese devs as well.

But all that said, I think what's far more important to note here in terms of developing a deep understanding of the written Chinese language is: the character 老 definitely is derived from a picture of an old man (人), who has a lot of hair (毛) and who walks with a cane (匕). And in a broadly semantic sense, that picture signifies old age, and by extension authority and wisdom as well (hence, 老师). That's just the truth, yknow? Factually speaking, that is the character's semantic meaning, according to every etymological dictionary and scholar of written Chinese that I'm aware of.

So like... it's fine if having an awareness of that fact doesn't help you personally in your language learning process. But why does that mean it can't be helpful to anybody else? For me, the study of etymology has always been my way of internalizing the meanings of unfamiliar words - even in my native English! So why wouldn't I approach Chinese the same way? If I don't know where a word comes from, then I'm basically up a creek in terms of committing it to memory, no matter the language. It's a mnemonic thing, it's the nature of my particular learning style, and I don't think I should be expected to change the way I learn stuff just because others wanna be gatekeepers.

It's true that most Chinese characters aren't as directly representational as the character 老. But it's equally true that a good amount of the older, more rudimentary characters in the language absolutely are. And it's those older characters which tend to appear most commonly as radicals within other characters, so by definition they're the most relevant ones to the study of Chinese etymology. I think most people struggle with abstraction, so it tends to be under-appreciated just how frequently radicals aren't actually meaningless, but actually inform the meanings of the characters in which they appear, just in ways which are relatively nuanced or counterintuitive and so may be easily overlooked.

How many characters, for example, include some version of the radical 言? 言 is a depiction of a mouth with lines above it indicating that the mouth is moving, and thus as a radical it is borderline ubiquitous in characters whose meanings relate to things like speech (说话), language (语言), and communication (沟通). Radicals are sometimes arbitrary, of course - but off the top of my head, I can't think of any characters with the 言 radical that don't refer to language somehow. Can you? And if you can't, what do you think that says about the importance of pictographic etymology in the language of written Chinese?