Lesson 8:
Writing Chinese Characters -
Radicals - Part 1
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Lesson 8 Writing Chinese Characters – Radicals –
Part I
Now that you are
familiar with strokes, we can go to the atomic level of Chinese
characters – radicals. Almost all Chinese characters are made
of one or several radicals. Radicals not only help you remember
the graphic features of a character (making it easier for you to
remember how to write it), but also provide you hints on
pronunciation and meaning. Very often, a Chinese character has
multiple radicals where one shows pronunciation and the other
indicates meanings.
Radicals can
take different positions of a character: top-bottom, right-left,
inside-out. We will discuss more about this in the section on
the internal layout of square Chinese characters.
There are a lot
of radicals so we choose to introduce about 30 most often used
radicals at this entry level. For each radical, please make
sure you internalize 3 things: writing, pinyin, and its meaning.
Since some
radicals cannot be used as a single character and so are
impossible to display properly on the page, we will use a
character containing that radical with a note like “the left
part of…”
1.
日
- also a single
character
- pinyin: ri4
- meaning:
related to sun, bright, warmth, positive etc.
- sample characters: 阳 (sun,
‘Yang’ as in ‘Yinyang’) , 春 (spring), 晒 (sunbathing)
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2.
月
- also a single
character
- pinyin: yue4
- meaning:
related to moon, bright, chill, negative, etc.
- sample characters: 明 (moon,
bright) 阴 (negative, cool, ‘Yin’ as in ‘Yinyang’)
3.
禾
- also a single
character
- pingyin: he2
- meaing: grain,
related to agriculture, farming, crops, etc.
