What are “radicals” in Chinese characters?
The most important thing to realise about Chinese characters is that they are made up of parts just as English words are made up of letters. Each character has a part called a “radical”. Radicals have evolved from simple line drawings representing people, animals, common objects and simple ideas. Some radicals can be used by themselves as “stand alone” characters. Others are only ever found embedded in other characters. Very often a radical will give you a clue to the broad category of ideas to which the meaning of a character belongs. Learning to recognise radicals will help you to see recurring patterns in the shapes of characters. If you can recognise the radical component of any character and count up the number of remaining strokes you can look it up using the radical index of a Chinese dictionary. This takes a little practice, but becomes a great asset when you are learning to read Chinese texts. Of course, if you already know how a character is pronounced it is faster to look it
