Articles tagged with ‘Radicals’
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The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters
A vast majority of Chinese characters are compounds, and understanding how the components fit together and which function they have, will make learning and remembering characters a lot easier. This article explains the most important types of compounds you’ll encounter and how you can use that knowledge to learn characters more easily.
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The building blocks of Chinese, part 2: Basic characters, components and radicals
Most Chinese characters are compounds consisting of two or more components, but some components are in themselves compounds that can be further broken down. But how do you know where to stop? And how do you learn and remember the most basic building blocks?
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The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell
Learning to read and write Chinese is a daunting task, but the challenge becomes more manageable if you focus on learning the building blocks, learning how components form characters and how characters form words. This article is the first part in a series helping adult students make sens of Chinese characters.
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How to not teach Chinese characters to beginners: A 12-step approach
This is a guide for how to not teach Chinese characters, based on more than a decade of observing terrible teaching and worst practices. Which of these have you seen?
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How to look up Chinese characters you don’t know
Looking up an unknown character in Chinese is much trickier than looking up unknown words in most other languages. This article discusses various ways of looking up Chinese characters, including paper dictionaries, handwriting input, OCR and more.
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7 things you were taught in Chinese class that are actually wrong
Some things your Chinese teacher tells you or you read in your textbook are well-meant simplifications. This is okay, because the whole picture might be overly complicated and not very helpful. Some other things your Chinese teacher tells you or you read in your textbook are just wrong, though. This article lists seven examples of things that are often taught in Chinese class, but are actually incorrect.
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Should you learn the pronunciation of radicals?
Learning character components in general is good, but should you learn the pronunciation of radicals? The answer can be both “yes” and “no” depending on what you mean!
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Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components
Learning about the structure of Chinese characters can help enormously when learning the language. This article is an in-depth look at functional components, i.e. parts of characters that give the whole character either its meaning or its sound. It’s also a discussion about why we really shouldn’t talk so much about radicals when learning Chinese.
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Focusing on radicals, character components and building blocks
How much should you focus on learning building blocks? If you don’t focus enough, you will remain in the tourist phrase book. If you focus too much on building blocks, you will end up living in brick yard rather than a house.
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Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals
This is a list of the 100 most common radicals among the 2000 most common characters, meaning that it’s excellent for beginners who want to boost their understanding of Chinese characters. The list contains simplified, traditional, variants, meaning, pronunciation, examples, helpful comments and colloquial names.
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