Weather天气
Hot, cold, rain and sky — small talk essentials.
Weather is prime small-talk territory in Chinese, just as everywhere else, and its characters are unusually pictorial. 雨 (rain) still looks like drops falling past a window — one of the clearest surviving pictographs in the modern script. 天 (sky, day) tops the character 大 (big) with a horizontal stroke: the thing above everything big. 天气 — sky-breath — is the weather itself.
The adjectives here demonstrate a handy grammatical fact: Chinese doesn't need 'to be' before qualities. 今天很热 — today very hot — is a complete, correct sentence; 热 (hot) and 冷 (cold) act as verbs on their own. Master this tiny pattern with weather words and you can suddenly comment on food, rooms, people and everything else that has a temperature or a quality.