苦
Tap the pinyin to hear it
bitter; hardship; pain; to suffer; to bring suffering to; painstakingly
- HSK 3.0
- Level 3
- Old HSK
- Level 4
- Strokes
- 8
- Radical
- 艸 +5
- Structure
- Top–bottom 上下
- Traditional
- 苦
- Common rank
- #421
- Unicode
- U+82E6
Sound it out + =
Formation & memory
Break the character into parts you already know.
How to remember it
suffering · Heisig RSH #229
flower + 古 ancient
Keyword method from Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi.
Words with 苦
The most common words first — learning a character in context makes it stick.
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 有苦说不出 | having unspeakable bitter suffering; (often used after 啞巴吃黃連|哑巴吃黄连[ya3 ba5 chi1 huang2 lia… | |
| 吃得苦中苦，方为人上人 | one cannot achieve glory and wealth without having been through trials and tribulations (p… | |
| 苦日子 | hard times | |
| 苦中作乐 | to find joy in sorrows (idiom); to enjoy sth in spite of one's suffering | |
| 苦水 | bitter water (e.g. mineral water containing sulfates); suffering; digestive fluids rising … | |
| 苦头 | sufferings | |
| 苦心 | painstaking effort; to take a lot of trouble; laborious at pains | |
| 苦海 | lit. sea of bitterness; abyss of worldly suffering (Buddhist term); depths of misery | |
| 苦行 | ascetic practice | |
| 苦力 | bitter work; hard toil; (loanword) coolie, unskilled Chinese laborer in colonial times | |
| 苦口 | lit. bitter taste (cf good medicine tastes bitter 良藥苦口|良药苦口); fig. earnestly (of warning, … | |
| 苦主 | (old) the family of the victim in a murder case; (Tw, HK) victim (of a crime, misfortune e… | |
| 苦事 | hard job; arduous task | |
| 皮肉之苦 | physical pain; lit. skin and flesh suffer | |
| 苦活儿 | erhua variant of 苦活[ku3 huo2] | |
| 苦菜花 | Bitter Herbs, 1958 novel by Feng Deying 馮德英|冯德英[Feng2 De2 ying1], made into a film in 1965 | |
| 苦工 | hard labor (in penal code); coolie | |
| 吃苦头 | to suffer; to suffer for one's actions; to pay dearly; to burn one's fingers | |
| 自食苦果 | see 自食惡果|自食恶果[zi4 shi2 e4 guo3] | |
| 倒苦水 | to pour out one's grievances |
Sound family
Characters sharing the sound component 古 — compare how they read.
| Character | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 古 sound part | old, classic, ancient | |
| 胡 | recklessly, foolishly; wildly | |
| 居 | to live, to reside; to dwell; to sit | |
| 故 | reason, cause; happening, instance | |
| 固 | to solidify; strength | |
| 估 | merchant; to estimate, to guess, to presume | |
| 咕 | mumble, mutter, murmur; rumble | |
| 鸪 | species of Taiwan pigeon | |
| 沽 | to buy and sell; of inferior quality | |
| 蛄 | mole cricket | |
| 辜 | crime, offense, sin | |
| 祜 | blessings, happiness, prosperity | |
| 怙 | to rely on; to presume; father (formal) | |
| 钴 | cobalt; clothes-iron | |
| 罟 | net, snare; to implicate | |
| 诂 | explanation; to comment, to explain | |
| 骷 | skeleton | |
| 嘏 | felicity, prosperity; large and strong | |
| 轱 | wheel; to revolve, to turn |