Importance of Knowing Chinese Radicals

[phoneticsem]

I knew only few radicals say 100. I keep forgetting them or confuse some radicals with others. I generally learn meaning by breaking down into smaller components. When I do not know many components, it is taking too much time to learn all components and making the learning difficult. 

 

So I want to learn all building blocks of Chinese Characters. I decided to start with Radicals first and learn them, so that you never forget. I searched Anki Deck for all 214 Radicals and found the below.

 

Chinese Radicals (All 214) : Free Anki Deck

 

Alphabets to English and Radicals to Chinese all learners should know them at the beginning. Without knowing all Radicals you can never grasp Chinese. I will learn Writing, Meaning, Pronunciation of all 214 radicals and update my observations below. Please help share your views, if I am not on right track. I keep editing this first post. 

 

1. Some People’s Opinion: The Radicals are just Section Headers.These are not complete set of Building Blocks of Chinese Characters.

=> Radicals might not be complete set of building blocks of chinese characters, but they are Core Key Values. Learn them first.

 

2. Some people’s opinion: Some Radicals, they can not be used on their own and for them no need to learn their pronunciation:

=> But make a habit to learn the pronunciation and meaning both. These are Core Chinese Characters and 214 only. In future you have to learn many more. Do not break the habit.

=> When a Radical is used as a Phonetic Component, then we can know the pronunciation of that word.

 

3. Sometimes Anki giving known words repeatedly, it is wasting my time. I want to learn only failed words and save time.

=> Go to the deck and press on failed words,  dotted rectangle appears when selected, then press on review, you can review those failed words only. If you know this already good. I just learnt.

 

Did you notice any difference before learning all radicals and after learning all radicals? Do you have any suggestions on how to identify all Building Blocks of Chinese, Please share your thoughts.Thank you.

[phills]

214 is way too many.  I would guess I know around 40 of them.

 

Almost everything in language follows a Power Law / 80-20 rule.  20% of the examples will cover 80% of the cases.  20% of 214 is around 40.

 

Edit: Looking at the list, I sold myself short.  I don't know the really simple ones, but I know most of the rest.  So now I estimate I know about 150 of them.

 

https://www.archchinese.com/arch_chinese_radicals.html

 

But I learned most of them while drilling characters.  I probably knew around 40 of them to start off with, before I committed to drilling characters.  The main left hand sides 亻彳 氵木 犭王 禾 纟衤讠辶 饣忄扌etc, and a few right hand sides.

[alantin]

Why do you think you need the pronunciation of the radical? they are atomic parts of characters created for indexing paper dictionaries and never appear on their own.

Characters do have phonetic components, but radicals are a little different and I guess they won't map.

 

My take on this is that you should know the meaning and writing order of most or all radicals, but you can spend your study time a lot better than drilling their pronunciations. Talking about them with someone is a bit easier if you know their names though.

[malazann]

Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals | Hacking Chinese

 

this article has a link to an anki deck with 100 characters. usefully it also shows some alternate versions of the radicals + whether to bother learning the pronunciation. I believe the radicals where you should learn the pronunciation, are often characters themselves 

The most useful part about radicals is to helpo with character recognition though. It breaks up those confusing pictures into separate chunks

[phoneticsem]

On 1/22/2022 at 3:51 PM, alantin said:

Why do you think you need the pronunciation of the radical? they are atomic parts of characters created for indexing paper dictionaries and never appear on their own.

Characters do have phonetic components, but radicals are a little different and I guess they won't map

 

Agree with you. Pronunciation does not matter much with radicals and so edited my post to writing and meaning.

 

Do you have any chinese word comprised any other character than these radicals? Even english characters does not appear on their own except a, i..

 

[phoneticsem]

I know:            124 Radicals

I do not know:  90

 

Last few years learnt here and there and could not study for the last 6 months. Lot of radicals I forgot. This year when I started again, lot of new radicals are appearing, which i did not know and some I forgot. Learning remaining radicals now

 

On 1/22/2022 at 1:36 PM, phills said:

I don't know the really simple ones, but I know most of the rest.  So now I estimate I know about 150 of them.

 

thanks for sharing. Hope learning /revising the 64 simple ones will really help. Please post once you learnt all. 

On 1/22/2022 at 4:17 PM, malazann said:

The most useful part about radicals is to helpo with character recognition though. It breaks up those confusing pictures into separate chunks

 

thanks. Pronunciation of radicals is not required.I agree. Ollie Linge posts are very useful to motivate chinese learners. you can think of learning remaining 114 radicals and they definitely helps in recognising new words

[Publius]

English letters have names: F -> eff, H -> aitch, etc. Similarly, for Chinese radicals, you need to know the name by which they're referred to, e.g. 反文, 提手, 斜玉, 走之, etc, not the often obscure and archaic "pronunciation".

 

Also Western learners tend to confuse radicals with semantic components. They are different concepts. The Chinese term 部首 means nothing more than "section header" under which a character is listed in a dictionary. By that definition, every character must have a "radical", even indivisible characters such as 也 (not a radical itself by the way).

[phoneticsem]

On 1/22/2022 at 5:37 PM, Publius said:

The Chinese term 部首 means nothing more than "section header" under which a character is listed in a dictionary. By that definition, every character must have a "radical", even indivisible characters such as 也 (not a radical itself by the way).

 

@Publius  you are spot on. Pleco has defined it as the combination of these 3 characters or radicals

 

   也 = 乛 + 乚 + 丨. So that will be placed under one of the section header. 

 

Radicals are Section Headers and Pillars of Chinese characters we need to give respect to the Radicals as Building Blocks.

 

“Nothing more than “section Header” is reducing the importance of Radicals and demotivates new learners. 

[alantin]

On 1/22/2022 at 1:07 PM, phoneticsem said:

@Publius  you are spot on. Pleco has defined it as the combination of these 3 characters or radicals

 

   也 = 乛 + 乚 + 丨. So that will be placed under one of the section header. 

 

Those are strokes.

https://www.digmandarin.com/chinese-strokes-list.html

 

[alantin]

On 1/22/2022 at 1:07 PM, phoneticsem said:

Radicals are Section Headers and Pillars of Chinese characters we need to give respect to the Radicals as Building Blocks.

 

“Nothing more than “section Header” is reducing the importance of Radicals and demotivates new learners. 

 

I think you are misunderstanding the point. Radicals were defined for indexing characters in paper dictionaries so you could identify a radical the character was indexed under, then count the strokes in the character and then use those pieces of information to find it in the dictionary. That's it. If you don't need a paper dictionary, you basically don't need radicals and I personally haven't used radicals to find characters in paper dictionaries anymore in probably 15 years. Specifically the 214 radicals that you are drilling seems to be the indexing list version of the Kangxi dictionary.

The semantic and phonetic components referred to above are different. Especially 15-20 years ago while studying Japanese (as far as I remember) all the talk was about radicals and not components, so I personally mix the two terms up a lot, but there is a significant difference. Don't waste you time on the radicals and concentrate on the components and additionally getting the stroke order and the balance of the character right if you're practicing hand writing.

Here is a good looking article that explains the basic difference:

https://blog.skritter.com/2015/03/understanding-chinese-characters-components-and-radicals/

 

[phoneticsem]

Indexing characters  Or Section Headers =  building blocks of any language. (unless you have some specific characters which appear only at the middle or at the end and will never appear at the  beginning of the word)

 

The Number of radicals varies between times, it seems 201 principal and 100  associated components as per latest

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)

 

 

 

[Jan Finster]

I probably know between 0-5 and I do not believe they are necessary unless you want to learn how to write. I can imagine they might come in handy then.

[phoneticsem]

On 1/23/2022 at 4:25 AM, Jan Finster said:

 

I probably know between 0-5 and I do not believe they are necessary unless you want to learn how to write

 

 

the people who just listen to and learn and does not want to write, babies who are learning to speak language etc.. for them Radicals might not be of great help, i think. (leaving just few radicals, which can be used as a word). Point well taken

[phoneticsem]

On 1/22/2022 at 1:17 PM, phoneticsem said:

I found Anki Deck for all 214 Radicals and practicing. 

 

Chinese Radicals (All 214) : Free Anki Deck

 

I want to update my downloaded Anki Deck with my notes. Anki is not allowing me to update my notes for these downloaded Deck( Decks i had created can be updatable by me). I am using iPhone. Any one can suggest? 

[alantin]

The phone version of anki is quite stripped down version of it, but you can modify the decks however you like with the desktop version. You should be able to find what you're looking for in the Anki documentation: https://docs.ankiweb.net/

 

[mungouk]

It's repeated in many places on the Internet and IMHO it's just not helpful: drilling radicals isn't useful in and of itself.  Unless you need to use a paper dictionary as already mentioned.

 

In particular, knowing how to pronounce a radical on its own is of very little use, especially to beginners. I started this way and it made me waste a lot of time when I was trying to get to grips with Hanzi. 

 

What you need to do is start to identify common components (which are sometimes, but not always, radicals), and to understand how the meaning components and sound components of common characters are used. (Since at least 80% of characters are picto-phonetic, which include both types of component.)

 

Olle Linge's Hacking Chinese website has loads of good resources relating to this.

 

This is a good starting point: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/ 

 

 

 

 

[889]

My first reaction was, why of course you should know the radicals: they're a foundation of written Chinese. You can't consider yourself a serious student of Chinese unless you know the radicals!

 

Then I realized that with abandonment of the paper dictionary, what's the point?

[phoneticsem]

On 1/23/2022 at 10:37 PM, 889 said:

Then I realized that with abandonment of the paper dictionary, what's the point?

 

Point is “214 radicals to rule all characters” whether they are developed for Indexing or Standard Header or Paper Dictionaries extinguished. 

 

Fact Is: Knowing 214 radicals will ease your process of learning Chinese. Why? Because when you know the radicals, you can remember more easily how they combine with each other to form more complex characters. Radicals can have one of the following functions, or both:

semantic, providing part or whole of the meaning;

phonetics, giving the sound to the character, or something very close to it.

 

https://hsk.academy/en/learn/the-chinese-radicals

 

[幽默感]

It looks like you are trying to put too much emphasis on radicals.

I can see why learning components first in a vacuum might seem attractive, but here's a different perspective.

I think what is more fundamental is how to go about memorising entire characters.

If you find yourself repeatedly forgetting or confusing character components then I would recommend you give mnemonics a try.

Have you tried Heisig for example?

It's not for everybody but you can read in various places online about the method used by James W. Heisig in his books "Remembering Simplified Hanzi How not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters" volumes 1 and 2.  I think the first few entire chapters of book 1 can be found online. Don't bother with book 2. There are also loads of Anki Heisig decks, but one needs to fully understand the method of making up a story for each character to effectively use them.

I didn't learn the radicals up front but I know thousands of characters and am confident of never forgetting them or mixing them up. I found I naturally picked up the component versions of characters as I learnt more characters. This is why the order you start to learn characters is important.

I wouldn't follow Heisig's book blindly though.  I think for most people that would also be a waste of time. With Chinese hanzi, as opposed to Japanese kanji which is what Heisig originally wrote about, I argue that it makes sense to learn the character readings when you learn the characters. So I combine the pronunciation into my mnemonic stories.

 

 

[幽默感]

On 1/22/2022 at 5:37 PM, Publius said:

Also Western learners tend to confuse radicals with semantic components. They are different concepts. The Chinese term 部首 means nothing more than "section header" under which a character is listed in a dictionary. By that definition, every character must have a "radical", even indivisible characters such as 也 (not a radical itself by the way).

Yes!  Exactly this.

Almost always when people (even teachers who should know better) use the term radical they actually mean components.  It's unfortunate.