Learn Chinese for Free—Lesson 36
Today's Chinese characters:
林木胡古月
The other Chinese characters contained in this lesson have already been studied previously. You can just click on them and go back to the corresponding lesson.
Today we introduce the concept of radicals.
| Character Knowledge Meter |
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32.8%
Today with this lesson your knowledge of Chinese characters will reach 32.8% of all the Chinese language usage! |
Characters' Essentials
| - | Forest, woods, grove |
| - | Lin, a surname |
| - | Moustache, beard |
| - | Hu, a surname |
Description and Examples
Dialogue 35
Radicals
Dictionaries adopt a number of different criteria to classify Chinese characters.
In the body of the dictionary, characters are usually sorted out alphabetically according to their pinyin. But what if you don't know a character's pronunciation? In that case, the pinyin classification alone would be useless. That's why almost all dictionaries contain two specific (and cryptic, as they appeared to me the first time I saw them) tables with all the characters sorted according to their "radicals".
Simply said, a character's radical is a part of the character. It may be a single stroke or a complex figure. For example, the radical of the characters 她, 好, 妈, 姐, and 姓 is their left part 女. 女 is radical to itself as well. Or, another example, the radical of the characters 李 and 林 is 木. 木 is also radical to itself.
Therefore, how can you use those two tables?
In the first table you find the list of all radicals sorted by number of strokes. Guess which part of your character is its radical, then follow the reference to the second table page where all characters with that radical (characters with less strokes come first) are listed. Here, if lucky enough, you'll find your character and its pinyin (or the dictionary page number where the character is).
I said "guess" and "if lucky enough" because I know from experience that many times it has been difficult for me to find which part of the character was its radical.
A counsel I can give you is to get acquainted with the list of radicals and to try first the character's left or upper part.
Good practice: Half English, Half Chinese!What if you don't know how to say in Chinese some words, but you do know the Chinese sentence structure? For example, you already well know how to structure the Chinese sentence for "the radical of 妈 is 女" (or "妈's radical is 女"), but you still don't know the Chinese word for 'radical'. No problem! Just insert the English word 'radical' into a Chinese sentence! The habit of doing so is very useful for learning to think Chinese. Example in "Chinglish" 妈的 radical 是女。 |
The following dialogue shows how the component parts of Chinese characters are often an object of conversation.
Dialogue 36
How to say: How do you spell it? "Smith, ess em i tee aitch!" The surname Smith is made up of five letters. To clear up all doubt on how to write it, we just read it letter by letter. Chinese surnames (actually all Chinese characters) are not made up of letters, but of strokes, figures, parts. How can we ask to and actually "spell" a Chinese character? Chinese people "spell" a character in two ways:
Example 1 Question: 什么 hu2？ That is: Out of those characters whose pronunciation is hu2, which one? Answer: 古月的胡。 That is: The character, whose pronunciation is hu2, that is composed by the symbols 古 and 月. Example 2 Question: 什么 míng？ That is: Out of those characters whose pronunciation is míng, which one? Answer 1: 日月的明。 That is: The character, whose pronunciation is míng, that is composed by the symbols 日 and 月. Answer 2: 明天的明。 That is: The character, whose pronunciation is míng, that is contained in the word 明天. |
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