The Building Blocks of Chinese Character (Chinese Radicals 101)

Let's talk about Chinese radicals. This list of a hundred Chinese radicals is probably the most important list to learn. Why? Because by learning Chinese radicals, it will actually enable you to pick up new characters faster, and it will enable you to decipher their meaning. So if you're wondering what is a Chinese radical, it's a key component of a Chinese characters. Chinese characters are usually made up of various components, and this is the most important component, as it usually indicates meaning or sometimes sound. Now before I show you how cool Chinese radicals actually are, and how much they can help you with your learning, I just want to say that it is worth your time to invest in this list. Often people jump straight into studying characters, or even in schools, often we don't have too much time to pause and study radicals properly. But it is worth your time. If you have a solid foundation of Chinese radicals, trust me, it will pay off in the long term. When we first start studying Chinese, especially its writing, it can seem very daunting. A character that looks like this or this just seems impossible to tackle. There are so many strokes and so many components to it. But actually, the more you study, especially if you study radicals, you'll realize they're just different combinations of these common occurring radicals. But the great thing is there's only a finite amount of radicals. Also, the simple radicals are characters themselves. So you're actually learning tons of characters. So it's not so much of a detour. In fact, it's a worthwhile investment of time. In the beginning, I mentioned that radicals indicate meaning, or rather, they give us a clue of what the character represents. Let me give you some very clear examples. This is the water radical. Anything that you see with these three dots usually indicates a liquid or water element to it. Let's look at the characters river or ocean. Isn't that handy? So anytime you see that, you know already immediately that it has something to do with water. The same goes for the fire radical, the grass radical. But of course, human society has moved into the abstract. So you'll find tons of radicals that don't just represent fire, water, or wind, or whatever. You know, let's say the person radical that will often indicate things that are man-made. Or let's say even the walking radical. So that's kind of an action. So that could represent a journey of some sort. So by learning these radicals, you're often already halfway there. And the more characters that you learn, you'll get a better sense of what the meaning component is, and what the sound component is. And actually, people often think that Chinese characters are not phonetic. They are. So native speakers, when they come across, or even learners, when they come across a new character, you actually have a good sense of how to say it and what it means. A little bit of cultural learning here. Chinese radicals is actually how the Chinese dictionary, I want to say, was organized. It still is organized in terms of radicals. But of course, with modern technology, looking up characters is way easier. But before, let's say when I was in primary school, I wanted to look up a character in the dictionary, I would first have to identify its radical. At this point, I really encourage you to go study this list. But if you have a bit more time, stay with me, and I'll show you how cool Chinese radicals can be and how important they are to influencing the meaning of a character. I want to preface this by saying some of these characters are more common than others, more useful than others. And some of these are quite obscure. But this particular combination will illustrate how cool characters are. Alright, let's start. So if you kind of dig a bit deeper into the character Yi, it can represent a lot of something. And this will come in handy when we start adding the radicals. If you add a grass radical to it, it becomes a type of pearl barley. And there's tons of tiny bits of these pearl barley. So that's what it means. By adding a heart radical to it, it comes to represent memories. And of course, we have tons and tons of memories. By adding a Mi radical, remember we talked about it, it represents textiles, it becomes a type of silk band. By adding Ren, the person radical, it becomes a numerical unit. By adding a water radical, it's actually the name of a river in China. And this particular Yi can be paired with so many more radicals, such as the fire radical, the woman radical. And why this particular example is so neat is that the sound remains the same. This is not the same for all other characters. But I thought it was really cool. And I really wanted to share it with you. I'll see you at the next video. Good luck with the list. Bye!