Why these 12
Ask someone in China what year they were born and you may get an animal rather than a number. The twelve-year cycle runs rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, and the story children are told is that the order was settled by a race across a river — the rat rode the ox and jumped off at the bank to win. The characters are worth learning on their own merit: most of them are ancient pictographs, and several are radicals that turn up inside hundreds of other characters.
For the teacher
What a learner should be able to do afterwards
- Write the twelve animals and say the cycle in order
- Work out their own zodiac animal from their birth year
- Recognise 犭 in 猴 狗 猪 as the mark of an animal
Running it
- Let everyone find their own animal first and write that one. A character about yourself is written more carefully than a character from a list.
- 猴 狗 猪 all carry 犭, the dog radical, which here just means 'animal'. Three characters in a row is enough for the pattern to be noticed without being taught.
- 龙 is the one animal nobody has ever seen, and it is also the shortest of the three-stroke-plus animals at five strokes. It is usually the class favourite.
- 马 牛 羊 are simple enough for the youngest learners and are all still recognisable as the animal. If a session is running short, those three plus the student's own animal is a complete lesson.
These notes were written from general teaching practice; not yet reviewed by a classroom teacher. If you teach and something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than not.
All 12 characters
Questions people ask
It depends on the lunar new year date, not 1 January. Someone born in late January or February needs to check which side of that year's new year they fall on.
No. The Chinese 龙 commands rain and rivers and was the emperor's emblem — a benevolent water spirit rather than a hoarder of gold in a cave.