I’m constantly looking for ways to refresh and consolidate my knowledge of the Chinese characters I’ve learned from Heisig. I nominally know 250 but I am prone to forgetting them if I don’t study and I need to connect them to other aspects of Mandarin, so from now on I’m having character of the day and sentence of the day, until further notice. If you are looking for ways to use characters in a sentence, both Skritter and Pleco will supply them.

Character of the day is mái, which is a verb meaning to bury, hide or cover. If you use Heisig’s Remembering Simplified Hanzi, it is character 181.

Today’s sentence is “this gentleman will pay for everything”, which is a clever use of “cover” – to cover the bill, to cover everything and make the bill go away.

Zhè means “this” and adding weì turns it into a polite form of “this person, this bloke”.

Xiānsheng is another polite word, meaning gentleman or Mr. It breaks down into something like elder generation (xiān), generate or give birth to (sheng), so we can see how it is a respectful term.

Dān as a noun can mean bill or list and will often have something preceding it for clarification. In this case, it is máidān – pay-list, so the list is in fact a bill, a list of items that need to be paid for. Alternatives could be càidān 菜单 – dish list, a list of dishes, a menu, or míngdān 名单 – a list of names.