The Chinese Radicals

What is Chinese made of?

Chinese is made of words, which are made of characters, themselves made of one or more radicals among 214. See the four examples of radicals below.

214 radicals to rule all characters

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.

The concept of key

Every character has one and only one radical with the function of "key", which allows to find a character into a dictionary. In many cases, the radical on the left or on the top of a character is the key. However, with the increase of the use of digital dictionaries on smartphone, in which you can draw the character, knowing keys become less critical.

Examples

爸 bà, which means dad, is made of 2 radicals:

• 父 fù (father), is the semantic radical, and also the key
• 巴 bā (to wish), is the phonetics radical

好 hǎo, which means good, is made of 2 radicals:

• 女 nǚ (woman), is the semantic radical, and also the key
• 子 zi (child), is a component with a semantic function (because to express that something is good, we associate a mother and a child), but there is no phonetics function of the radical to help for the pronunciation.

Work your own way to remember each of them

Each of us has his personal idea, history, conviction or preference when it comes to mnemonics to remember things.

For instance, in our previous exemple for 好 hǎo, we could think of it this way:

女 + 子 = 好

woman + child = good, well (好 hǎo)

"When a woman sticks to her child, it is good"

Sometimes, you have ideas, sometimes you do not. HSK Academy supports you and will keep delivering means to remember more easily radicals and characters, just as for the four ones on the top of this article. Stay tuned by following our facebook page.

As soon as you'll be ready, get your copy of the official HSK lists and start to prepare!

In the meantime, review this list regularly:

The complete list of radicals

A good way to remember these radicals is to see what they represent. You can do that with most of them, either by checking the etymology of radicals (from the oracle bones and how they have transformed to their current forms) or by using your own imagination and taking notes of it, which is certainly the most efficient way.

For instance, how to do that for 山 (shān: mountain)?

How to do that for 鱼 (yú: fish)?

How to do that for 囗 (wéi: enclosure)?

Check on the HSK 1 list if you recognize some radicals within characters, or discover more with the principles of the chinese language. You can also come back to our home page.