Chinese radicals: how to learn them

A radical, 部首 bùshǒu, is the part of a Chinese character under which a dictionary files it. The word means "section header", and that is the whole job description: every character is assigned exactly one, so that it can be found in a book that has no alphabet.

Radicals often hint at meaning as well, which is why learners are told to study them. That advice is half right. This page sorts out what radicals are and are not, lists the 28 that repay the effort first, and explains how much of the full list of 214 you can safely ignore.

What are Chinese radicals?

Take 媽 (妈) mā, mother. It is built from 女 nǚ, woman, on the left and 馬 (马) mǎ, horse, on the right. The woman tells you roughly what the character is about. The horse is there only for its sound. Dictionaries file 媽 under 女, so 女 is its radical.

Most characters work like this. Well over 80 per cent are phono-semantic compounds: one part points to a field of meaning, another part points, often loosely, to pronunciation. The radical is usually the meaning part.

Many radicals change shape when squeezed into the side or top of a character. Water, 水 shuǐ, becomes 氵; hand, 手 shǒu, becomes 扌. Chinese speakers have everyday names for these forms: 氵 is 三點水 (三点水) sāndiǎnshuǐ, "three drops of water", and 亻 is 單人旁 (单人旁) dānrénpáng, "single person at the side". If you want to announce your new hobby, the sentence is 我在學習漢字的部首 (我在学习汉字的部首) Wǒ zài xuéxí Hànzì de bùshǒu, "I am learning the radicals of Chinese characters".

Radicals are not the same as components

This is the point most introductions get wrong, including an earlier Kungfucius text on the subject, which claimed that radicals give clues to pronunciation. They generally do not. Four terms are worth keeping apart:

• Component: any recurring building block of a character. A character can have several.
• Semantic component: the block that hints at meaning.
• Phonetic component: the block that hints at sound. 青 qīng gives its sound to 清 qīng (clear), 請 (请) qǐng (to invite), 情 qíng (feeling) and 晴 qíng (sunny).
• Radical: the one component chosen as the dictionary heading.

In that 青 family, the radicals are the other halves: water, speech, heart and sun. So radicals do most of the work for meaning, and the phonetic components, which appear on no radical chart, do the work for sound.

The radical is also not always the semantic part. 問 (问) wèn, to ask, looks like a door character, but traditional dictionaries file it under 口, mouth, because the door 門 (门) mén is only the phonetic. And some characters have no sensible meaning part at all, so the dictionary makers simply picked a stroke. A radical is a filing decision first and a clue second.

How many Chinese radicals are there?

The standard answer is 214, the Kangxi radicals. The number has a history:

• Around 100 CE, Xu Shen sorted characters under 540 headings in the Shuowen Jiezi, the first dictionary organised this way.
• In 1615, Mei Yingzuo cut the list to 214 in his dictionary Zihui and ordered both radicals and characters by stroke count.
• In 1716, the Kangxi Dictionary adopted his 214, and the name stuck.

Dictionaries of Traditional characters, Japanese kanji dictionaries and Unicode still use the Kangxi set. Mainland dictionaries of Simplified characters use shorter, adapted lists, and the official mainland table of 2009 has 201 principal radicals. The differences between the two scripts are covered under Simplified and Traditional characters.

Of the 214, a few dozen do most of the work. Many others head only a handful of characters, such as 龠 yuè, flute, a 17-stroke radical you may never need in your life.

The most useful radicals to know

These 28 turn up constantly in beginner and intermediate vocabulary. The Pinyin is the reading of the radical as a character. Simplified forms are in brackets.

Radical	Variant forms	Pinyin	Meaning	Example characters
人	亻	rén	person	你, 他, 們 (们), 休
口	none	kǒu	mouth	吃, 喝, 叫, 嗎 (吗)
女	none	nǚ	woman	媽 (妈), 好, 姐
宀	none	mián	roof	家, 室, 安
心	忄	xīn	heart, mind	想, 意, 忙, 情
手	扌	shǒu	hand	打, 找, 推, 拿
日	none	rì	sun, day	明, 時 (时), 早, 晚
月	none	yuè	moon	期, 朋, 有
肉	written like 月	ròu	flesh, body	腦 (脑), 腿, 肚, 胖
木	none	mù	tree, wood	林, 樹 (树), 椅, 桌
水	氵, 氺	shuǐ	water	海, 河, 洗, 湯 (汤)
火	灬	huǒ	fire	燒 (烧), 燈 (灯), 熱 (热), 煮
犬	犭	quǎn	dog, animal	狗, 猴, 狼, 獅 (狮)
疒	none	nè	sickness	病, 痛, 疼, 瘦
示	礻	shì	altar, spirit	神, 禮 (礼), 祝, 社
竹	⺮	zhú	bamboo	筷, 筆 (笔), 籃 (篮), 等
糸	糹 (纟)	mì	silk, thread	紅 (红), 線 (线), 紙 (纸), 給 (给)
艸	艹	cǎo	grass, plant	茶, 花, 草, 菜
衣	衤	yī	clothing	襯 (衬), 褲 (裤), 被, 裙
言	訁 (讠)	yán	speech	說 (说), 話 (话), 語 (语), 請 (请)
貝 (贝)	none	bèi	shell, money	貴 (贵), 財 (财), 費 (费), 貨 (货)
足	⻊	zú	foot	跑, 跳, 路, 踢
辵	辶	chuò	walking, movement	進 (进), 送, 近, 遠 (远)
金	釒 (钅)	jīn	metal, gold	錢 (钱), 銀 (银), 鐵 (铁), 鐘 (钟)
門 (门)	none	mén	door	間 (间), 閉 (闭), 閃 (闪)
食	飠 (饣)	shí	food, to eat	飯 (饭), 餓 (饿), 餃 (饺), 餐
阜	阝 on the left	fù	mound, hill	院, 陽 (阳), 除
邑	阝 on the right	yì	town	都, 那, 部

Three traps hide in this table. The "moon" on the left of body parts such as 腿 (leg) is really a flattened 肉, flesh. The ear-shaped 阝 is two different radicals depending on which side it stands. And 說 (说), to speak, belongs to speech, not to mouth, however much talking is involved.

Should I learn radicals first?

No, and certainly not all 214 as a block before your first character. A list of abstract shapes with no words attached is hard to remember and of little immediate use. Kungfucius has met learners who could recite the radical for "flute" and could not yet order tea.

A better order:

1. Start learning characters through real words straight away.
2. After the first few dozen characters, learn the 28 radicals above, each with two or three characters you already know.
3. From then on, whenever a new character arrives, look at its parts and name them: which one is the meaning hint, which one the sound hint.
4. Pick up further radicals as they appear. By a thousand characters you will know most of the common ones without ever having sat down to memorise the chart.

Books built on components can help if mnemonics suit you. The best known are Remembering Simplified Hanzi and Remembering Traditional Hanzi by James Heisig and Timothy Richardson, the Chinese counterparts of Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which is a Japanese course and not the right volume for Chinese. Olle Linge of Hacking Chinese publishes a list of the 100 most common radicals for learners who want a slightly longer menu.

How radicals help with dictionaries and guessing meaning

Radical lookup, 部首檢字 (部首检字) bùshǒu jiǎnzì, is the classic way to find a character you cannot pronounce. You identify the radical, find it in the chart, count the remaining strokes and scan that section. It is slow on paper and it is still worth doing a few times, because it forces you to see how a character is put together. On a phone, handwriting input has taken over most of this work.

Guessing is the more useful everyday skill. A character with 氵 probably involves liquid, 疒 an illness, 犭 an animal, 釒 (钅) a metal. On a menu, 艹 suggests a plant and 魚 (鱼) a fish, which narrows things down before the dish arrives.

Keep expectations modest. A radical gives you a category and never a definition, and meanings drift over two thousand years. 貝 (贝) is in money words because cowrie shells once served as currency, which is charming and not something you could have guessed. Treat the radical as a memory hook and a tiebreaker between similar-looking characters.

Are radicals still important?

Less than they used to be. Originally you needed radicals to use a dictionary: you found the radical, counted the remaining strokes and searched the index. That is no longer the case. With Pleco and similar apps you draw the character with a finger, point the camera at it or type its Pinyin, and the entry appears.

So Kungfucius would no longer tell a beginner to memorise the radical table. What remains useful is the idea behind it: the common components give a hint of meaning and make characters easier to tell apart and to remember. Learn the twenty or thirty most frequent ones as you meet them, and leave the rest to the dictionary.

Tools and what to do next

• Pleco: the dictionary app offers lookup by radical and by handwriting, and its character entries show the components of each character. A paid add-on from Outlier Linguistics goes further and labels which component gives meaning and which gives sound.
• Skritter: a subscription app for practising handwriting with spaced repetition, where writing the strokes yourself makes the components hard to overlook.
• Flashcards: if you use Anki, add the meaning component and the sound component to the back of each character card instead of making separate radical cards.

For this week: learn the first ten rows of the table with their example characters, then go through the last twenty characters you studied and name the radical of each. After that, the wider overview of how the writing system works is on the page about Chinese characters.