教 (jiào): to teach; to instruct

Meanings

1 to teach; to instruct
2 a religion; a faith
3 to cause; to tell (someone to do something)

Characters

教

jiào

to teach; to instruct

Examples

他是一位中学教师。

Tā shì yī wèi zhōngxué jiàoshī.

He is a middle school teacher.

佛教和道教都是中国的宗教。

Fójiào hé Dàojiào dōu shì Zhōngguó de zōngjiào.

Buddhism and Taoism are both religions of China.

这件事给了我一个深刻的教训。

Zhè jiàn shì gěi le wǒ yī gè shēnkè de jiàoxun.

This incident gave me a profound lesson.

Tips

usage

The jiào reading is the bound morpheme inside most fixed compounds: 教育 (education), 教师 (teacher), 教室 (classroom), 教训 (lesson). It also carries the "religion" sense — 宗教, 佛教, 基督教 — and the causative "to cause / to tell sb to do sth" sense found in classical and song-lyric usage (敢教日月换新天).

memory

Heuristic: if 教 is the live verb taking an object ("teach Chinese", "teach class"), use jiāo. If it sits inside a noun compound or names a religion, use jiào. Exceptions are few — 教书 and 教学 (when meaning "to teach as a profession") keep jiāo because the verb sense dominates.

Components

radical

攵 pū

tap; strike (radical form)

Right strike radical — hand holding a stick. The disciplinary image fits the jiào reading especially well: 教训 (a lesson, often a harsh one), 管教 (to discipline), 教导 (to instruct and guide). Same radical anchors other authority verbs: 改, 政, 敬.

semantic

孝 xiào

filial piety

Left component — elder above child, the filial-piety image. For the jiào reading, this side anchors the abstract / institutional sense: values transmitted from one generation to the next become the basis of 教育 (education), 教化 (moral cultivation), and 宗教 (religion — literally "ancestral teaching").