Radical Charts Online?!

Skylee... I like your list of radicals and was shocked to see you posted a simplified version... many thanks from me...

This one is extremely useful

http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/ccs/ccs.jsp#result

As is also this one

http://www.yellowbridge.com/language/radicals.html

After venturing into strange languages I found this link:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_traditioneller_Radikale

Mainly traditional, but very useful. It shows the frequency of radicals in characters too. You can click it, and see where it's used.

Here a translation of an interesting sentence:

3 radicals, Grass 艹 (1902 characters), Water 氵 (1595 characters) and Wood (1369 characters) are together 12.1% of all characters. 128 radicals with the lowest frequency are used together 11.8%. The 10 most common radicals you find in 30% of all characters.

Based an the Kangxi dictionary with 40193 characters.

Note: I copied it into an Excel file and also added a frequency ranking.

radicals.xls

From flameproof: "Here a translation of an interesting sentence:

3 radicals, Grass 艹 (1902 characters), Water 氵 (1595 characters) and Wood (1369 characters) are together 12.1% of all characters. 128 radicals with the lowest frequency are used together 11.8%. The 10 most common radicals you find in 30% of all characters.

Based an the Kangxi dictionary with 40193 characters."

Using such a comprehensive list of characters - which includes a lot of variants of in fact the same entry and a number of rare highly technical characters - is in a sense probably misleading when it comes to appreciating the situation prevailing in "normal" contemporary Chinese usage.

I took as a basis the list of 2200 most common charcters attached to another post in a different thred, and compiled it in http://www.jvgruat.com/Chine/2200.xls.

Most frequent radicals appear to be - in decreasing order - hand 扌, water 氵and person 亻each with a prevalence over 5% (roughly, 100 characters). Between 50 and 100 characters are attached to the follwing 7 radicals. Only 199 radicals are represented, out of which 67 are used for only 1 or 2 of the most frequent 2200 characters (i.e. less than 0.1%).

This, of course, raises some questions about the usefulness of fully mastering the complete table of radicals - when modern technologies and tools available on Internet do allow for simpler identification of unknown characters ...

JVGruat

Statistically it's very similar in your list. The top 100 radicals are in 2000 characters, or roughly 90%.

Anyway, that is more math the language learning. Specially since (at least for me) it's not clear what is radical, and what are "other" characters.

I.e., is 氵 always a radical? Like in 中 , why is I the radical, and not 口 ? (don't reply, just a rhetoric question).

That radical frequency list is more useful as a guide to what characters should be give preference when learning to handwrite.

I realize this post is getting on in years, but I found a few of the charts posted here (the ones that haven't gone offline by now) useful, so I thought I would post links to my favorite Radicals charts, in case anyone stumbles upon this thread and needs some help.

Dofufa

This is one of the best (in my opinion) Radicals charts I have seen. Since it doesn't have the meaning or pinyin of the radical, I use this to quickly find what number the radical is, then I use one of the lists (posted below) to look up the meaning.

Dofufa (part 2)

This is a .png version of the chart linked above.

University of Albany

Here is the list I use for looking up the pinyin and/or meaning when I know what number the Radical is.

China Knowledge

This is a good guide when you're first starting out (or as a refresher) studying Radicals.

Wikimedia

I really like the layout of this page.

I also use the YellowBridge.com list frequently, but that is linked earlier in this thread.