Watch Your Language Blog

Chinese characters

In last month's Did you know?, you learned that Chinese is not quite as difficult as it might seem at first. After all, it doesn't use plurals, articles, gender, or even verb conjugation. Of course, even with that in mind, Chinese can still be pretty intimidating, especially when dealing with the writing system.

However, even though a Chinese character may look complex (and don't get me wrong, it certainly can be!), each character is actually made up of different, smaller parts that can help you figure out the meaning or at least pronunciation of the entire character as a whole.

Many of these parts are commonly called radicals. Radicals are key structural components of Chinese characters, but they can also often stand on their own as individual words.

Here are some examples of common radicals in Mandarin Chinese.

The radical 亻 is related to the character 人 rén (person) in Mandarin. As a result, many characters that have to do with people contain that radical, including most pronouns (I, you, he, etc.). For instance, look for 亻 on the left-hand side of all of the following characters:

你 nǐ (you, informal)
他 tā (he, him)
仇 chóu (enemy)
代 dài (dynasty, generation)

You will also find the water radical 氵(often referred to as sāndiǎnshuǐ, or three drops of water) in almost all characters having to do with bodies of water or liquids. Except for the word shuǐ (water) itself, 水, to which it is related. 水 is also used as a radical, although it can stand on its own as a word, unlike 氵.

酒 jiǔ (wine, alcohol)
河 hé (river)
浆 jiāng (broth)

On the other hand, radicals can sometimes tell you how a character is pronounced, but not what it means. For example, 妈妈 māma means mother in Mandarin Chinese. This character is a combination of 女 and 马. While the inclusion of the radical 女 nǚ (woman) in the word naturally helps indicate meaning, the radical 马 mǎ (horse) is a phonetic component that helps you to determine the sound of the word, but has nothing to do with the meaning.

And then there are times when radicals do more than just identify general categories like liquids, people, or gender. The character 采 cǎi (to pick), for instance, essentially uses its various components to describe the word's meaning. If you break down its different parts, you can see that it actually depicts a 爫 zhǎo (hand, claw) picking off of a 木 mù (tree, plant).

Not surprisingly, sometimes the relationship between the radical and the character as a whole is not as clear cut as the examples above. Nevertheless, having a good understanding of the most common Chinese radicals can make the process of learning written Chinese a lot easier. Furthermore, while there are a little over 200 radicals in Chinese, fewer than that number are commonly used. And really, learning, say, 40 radicals (or even 200) is a little less daunting than learning thousands of Chinese characters, isn't it?

Tags: characters, Chinese, language, newsletter, radicals
April 25, 2008