What are “radicals”?
Radicals are the building blocks of characters. Sometimes characters are formed of only one radical: the earliest character for “sun”, , is one example. Sometimes characters are made of more than one radical, however. For example, the character for “bright”, , is made up of two radicals: “sun”, , and “moon”, . The sun and moon, the two brightest objects in the sky: bright. There are a large number of radicals in Chinese. They are important aspects in constructing a character and talking about words. For one example of their importance in speech, instead of “spelling” a word like you would in the West, in Chinese it’s frequent for one to talk about how it’s written by describing the radicals that it’s composed of.
