The purpose of radicals in characters
mrdtait
December 11, 2007, 08:47 PM posted in General DiscussionI wonder if anyone has any good resources on learning about the structure of characters specifically about the purpose of radicals, what they are and what they mean.
I think that it is a good idea to learn about radicals early on in learning about characters because my understanding is that every character has a radical but this is where my understanding finishes.
I would like to learn what each radical is and what it means before I continue learning new characters and when I say learn I really mean make it second nature so that I no longer need to think about it. I am not yet at this stage with numbers but I am getting there. Baby steps...
bazza
December 31, 2007, 03:49 PMhttp://www.geocities.com/chinesevenice/scrittura/scrittura3.htm
obitoddkenobi
December 12, 2007, 02:41 AMThanks Robert, I found that very useful.
calkins
December 15, 2007, 02:01 AMNot sure if you've read the Wiki article on radicals, but it's a good resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character) Also, a great "clickable" radical table: http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals
calkins
December 15, 2007, 02:02 AMP.S. You'll have to copy and paste the entire Wiki link, including the "(Chinese_character)" part.
goulnik
December 15, 2007, 09:30 AMI think that it is a good idea to learn about radicals early on in learning about characters because my understanding is that every character has a radicalPretty much every character has a radical, but most characters have a phonetic component too (90% of them being semantic+phonetic compounds). So, by the same token, one should also learn the phonetic part. The main reason for learning radicals is the same that led to having them in the first place, i.e. organizing dictionary entries. With the availability of electronic dictionaries and character recognition, I would argue this has become a lot less important - not unimportant, but as with everything else, it's a matter of priorities. The trouble with phonetic components (themselves characters in their own right) is the sheer number, 858 according to L. Wieger in Chinese Characters (and listed in 利氏汉法大字典. Not sure whether the list is available online, but again this is useful for guessing the pronunciation of characters.
mandomikey
December 15, 2007, 05:35 PMI've been using the McNaughton book that Dominic mentioned, it definitely got me started. The problem I had with it, however, is that by following it in sequence, you tend to get bogged down with infrequent-use characters that also have have such high resemblance to each other (i.e.- 莘 and 幸, 无 and 尤) ... everything starts to look the same to the untrained eye. I've found it's been much more effective for me to page through the book and learn characters that look "most different" from the others, and cherry-picking those that are within my existing verbal vocabulary. I once remember seeing somebody comment with a link to the 100 or 200 most frequently used characters, but have lost track of where that is. Anyone?
RJ
December 11, 2007, 11:39 PMI use this one - there are 214 http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php
bryan
December 15, 2007, 06:13 PMI concur with goulniky. I'm very early on in my character study, but from what I've read by other more seasoned students, it would seem that one can "pick up" the radicals quite naturally through the first several hundred characters of study. Additionally, I agree that handwriting recognition and web-based tools and plugins does make it less important (not unimportant) to know and pick out the radical from each character (especially when doing lookups).
mei3hou2wang2
December 16, 2007, 04:43 AMBesides being essential to use a paper dictionary (I use mostly a printed dictionary, chinese only), the radical is VERY helpful for me to help me remember the word. Body parts and organs usually have 月such as 肺 lung，腿 leg，胳膊 arm，脖子 neck，脚 foot，心脏 heart，脸 face，胸 chest，肝liver and many more. Most illnesses have 病,癌症 cancer，瘫痪 paralysis，疾. Plants and trees often have 木 such as 梅 ，松，柳. Similar patters for liquids, grasses, gases(气,氧，）, I can't imagine trying to remember characters without the radical. I now know between 3000 and 5000 characters, and more and more often I can guess the new, less frequent characters I encounter. Especially with the rare ones, they tend to follow more consistently the pattern of radical+phonetic element. So you can sometimes guess both the pronounciation (with some margin of error) and with a bit of luck the meaning (sometimes). By the way it does get easier the farther along you get. The first 2000 characters are the hardest :-)
AuntySue
December 16, 2007, 05:37 AMMy favourite way to use the McNaughton book is to look up a character that I'm interested in, find its place in the book, then flip back a page or two earlier, to where that character's components are introduced, then work forward quickly until I reach the character.
heruilin
December 31, 2007, 03:32 AMIts interesting that goulniky mentions the large number of character phonetics. If he means the stroke grouping separate from the character's radical, then phonetic might be too strong a term. I say this as for some reason lately I have been noticing that a new character I am learning has the same "phonetic" as another all ready learned group of characters. Surprisingly, many times this common part is of no help whatsoever in helping how to guess the characters pronunciation: e.g., 错 ，借，醋，惜 cuo4, jie4, cu4, xi1 等，待，特,诗，痔 deng3, dai4, te4, shi1, zhi4 I purchased a tool called Clavis Sinicas a number of years ago with a very unique feature that allowed one to find all characters with the same phonetic (called the "additional root" in the program). It seemed amusing at the time as I only knew at most a hundred characters, but as my list of characters grows towards 700, its becoming more useful. 再见， 何睿林
goulnik
December 31, 2007, 08:28 AMwell, those components are not always helpful for pronunciation, but in most cases those the phonetic part. It may be that it relates to a old or dialectal pronunciation... Based on what happens in many European languages, I would that pronunciation (resp. writing) is more likely to have evolved for commonly used characters/words and would explain your 'exceptions' above. But in general the phonetic part can still give you a useful hint. BTW, Wenlin also has the functionality you mention, where in fact any component or part thereof is hyperlinked to characters containing it.
goulnik
December 31, 2007, 08:30 AMsorry, some words seem to have gone from my previous post, '... those *are* the phonetic...' and '... I would suggest that ...'
bryan
December 15, 2007, 06:05 PMmandomikey, That's an interesting point you brought up about following them McNaughton's sequence and how it can cause problems. John B who runs the http://88groups.com/character-insanity group mentioned that he encountered similar problems with studying similar characters at once in one of his comments. I see the merits of learning some compounds when learning a character as well as breaking down a character into smaller parts, but maybe lumping too many similar characters at once during study will just create confusion rather than make them "cheaper by the dozen"...
dominic
December 11, 2007, 09:17 PMThis book is mentioned tons of times here in these threads, 'Reading and Writing Chinese, Simplified Character Edition' ISBN 0-8048-3509-9. People work through it from start to finish. But I came to it after having learnt a few charcters already, So I just looked up each new radical as I met it in the characters in the Cpod dialogues. I also took a photocopy of the pages containing the simplified radicals, and ringed them each time a saw a new one. The book it self has stroke diagrams for high frequency characters and most of what it classes as the the 227 modern radicals (1000ish diagrams in total) and explanations/guesses as to why they are the way they are. I would like to pose the question- is there an agreed list of modern radicals - I ask this because my electric dictionary has a similar, but not exactly the same list of radicals- e.g. it does not consider 不 to be a radical. Can this list be found on the internet?