Chinese Characters

Characters are used as components in other characters. Most Chinese characters contain two components, one indicating meaning and the other indicating sound. There are around two hundred Chinese characters that are used as the meaning part of the component. These two hundred characters used are called radicals. Radicals are important because they are used to organize Chinese characters in many of the Chinese dictionaries. To look up a Chinese word in the dictionary, the easiest way is to know the radical. Using radicals is a way of classifying characters into meaning groups. There are a total of two hundred radicals. There are twenty common radicals used. For example, the radical person appears in fifty-four of the one thousand characters. Comparing the appearance of some characters with their appearance as radical components, there is a difference in strokes of the radical component. The last stroke of the radical component is written slightly differently to accommodate the other component. Many radicals have two forms, original form and variant form. Radical variant forms cannot stand-alone. When a radical is a character component you will encounter its variant form more often than its original form. Nine of the twenty common radicals have variant forms. Variant forms were developed so that the meaning component and sound component of a character would not look like two separate characters. Every radical has a meaning and a pronunciation. All radicals have official names. Many radicals also have unofficial nicknames usually the radicals with variant forms. The officials names and nicknames of radicals will be useful when trying to verbally describe a characters. Radical nicknames often vividly suggest a radical variant form. Some nicknames are made by describing the strokes of the radicals. Knowing how radical variants got their nicknames will help memorizing them. There are a number of other radicals with nicknames. In an unfamiliar character it can be