Recognizing radicals

[cintiaghimel]

Are there any rules for recognizing the radical of a character? Like in hao3 好 which one is the radical? nu3 or zi3? This was a simple character I chose but in more complex ones I guess it would be even harder to pick up one as I can recognize several radicals in a single character...if you know what I mean...

[imron]

A general rule of thumb is to try and figure out what sort of character it is (left-right, top-bottom, outer-inner etc). This you can usually determine by looking at the character, e.g. 好 is a left-right character because you can split it cleanly between the left and right parts, whereas something like 草 is a top-bottom character (because it can be split into a top part and a bottom part).

Once you know that, then for left-right characters, the radical is usually the shape on the left, top-bottom characters the radical is usually the one on the top (although note certain bottom radicals that will always take precedence, e.g. 心， 灬 etc) and for outer-inner characters the radical is usually the outer shape. So, for your example, the radical would be 女 because it's the left-most shape of a left-right character.

However there are many exceptions to this rule, and basically it just takes practice to get used to which one is correct.

There are also plenty of characters which are just plain confusing. I remember the first time I tried looking up 磨, and searching through the indexes for the 广，木，石 radicals proved to be no help. It was only after much frustration that I finally found out that 麻 is also a radical, and is in fact the radical for 磨. There are lots of other problematic characters too with no obvious left/top/outer shape, like 舞, where the radical is 丿 or 整, where the radical is 一, and for these, it's really just practice that will let you know which is the correct radical.

[cintiaghimel]

I see..I've been trying to learn all the radicals (characters, pinyin and meaning). Maybe this way it would be easier to figure out which part of the character is the radical.

[thph2006]

Try this. It really helped me. I found a couple bugs and errors when I first tried it (which I submitted to the owner) but overall I thought it was very good.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/sobelman/yic/radicals/index.html

[cintiaghimel]

Thanks for the link! I guess I really have to learn the radicals first, before trying to write the characters. That page about the easily confused radicals showed me that... not knowing the radicals would make my hand writing more suscetible to mistakes, which btw is the hardest part of learning mandarin chinese for me.

[thph2006]

One way to use that website is to forget about studying and just go straight to the "quiz this set" links on the right side. It only takes a few times through the quizzes (which are really more like matching games) to get a good feel for finding the radical. Hey, why study when you don't have to, right?

[cintiaghimel]

Yes, the quiz is really nice and addicting... and that made me wonder..it's probably a stupid question, but anyway...are the characters made up of radicals? I mean, I couldn't recognize the radicals on a character, but now that I can (some) I have the feeling a character is build up of a couple of radicals...please don't laugh, ok?

[flameproof]

I think recognizing radicals is not practical. It's useful to know the 100 or so most common ones, because if you know how to write them you can basically write all characters.

But I think other then that there is little value in knowing what radical a character is using, at least for a beginner. I went that road before, as said, interesting, but of little practical use.

[cintiaghimel]

"I think recognizing radicals is not practical. It's useful to know the 100 or so most common ones, because if you know how to write them you can basically write all characters"

Mmm..I see..yes, it makes sense. Maybe I shouldn't waste time decorating all of them at once, plus I probably know half of this list of 100...thanks for the tip.

[flameproof]

have a look at this old post:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=98453&postcount=23