Food & Drink饮食
Eat, drink, order tea and talk about everyday meals.
Food characters come with a built-in logic lesson. 吃 (eat) and 喝 (drink) both carry the mouth radical 口; 饭 (rice, meal) and other food characters share the food radical 饣. Once you notice this, menus stop being random symbols: the radical tells you the category before you've identified the character. 米饭 is cooked rice, 茶 is tea — a character that has traveled the world, since English 'cha' and 'chai' both descend from it.
Culturally, this is the vocabulary of connection. 吃饭 (eat a meal) is the anchor of Chinese social life, and 你吃了吗? — have you eaten? — historically served as a casual greeting, the equivalent of 'how are you?'. Learn these characters and the everyday warmth of the language starts showing through the writing system.