To most people, Chinese characters look quite complicated. There are so many of them, with so many different strokes involved – how would you learn all of them?
The good news is that while that is true, a lot of characters are made up of sub parts, which we call radicals. If you have learned these radicals before, then it’s possible to deduce part of the meaning or sound of a character, just by observing the radicals involved.
Let’s start by introducing a few characters, that are also radicals.
If you’re interested in learning how to write characters, you can click on a new character like the one above, to see its stroke order.
By itself, this character means “person”. You may be able to guess that meaning by looking directly at the character. It’s a pictograph of a headless person walking, so that should make it easy to remember.
Now 人 also functions as a radical. In its radical form it looks like this: 亻
So if you ever see a character with 亻on the side, you can guess that the character has something to do with people. Here are examples of such characters. You can hover over a character to see the meaning.
你, 他, 作, 但, 什
Don’t worry – we’ll be studying each of these characters individually in future lessons, so no need to learn them just yet. Note that in some cases, while the reason for having a particular radical might seem obvious (you, he), there are other cases where the reason might seem more obscure (but, what), so a little imagination may be needed.
Let’s see if you can replicate 人 by yourself, by typing it below: (Remember, you’ll need to type the pinyin to reproduce it. The pinyin for this particular character is “ren” The pinyin for each new character is given to you each time a new character (shown in red) is introduced. Type “ren” below and select 人 from the choices).
Good job! Let’s learn a few other base characters, that also form radicals. In the next lesson, we’ll then see how these characters are used in the formation of other characters.
大 means “big”. If you look at the character, you can imagine a man with his arms stretched wide out, to show that something is big!
Here are examples of other characters we’ll study in the future, that have 大 used inside them. Hover over them to see their meanings: 天, 美, 因, 太.
Let’s see if you can type this out by yourself:
The opposite of 大 is:
Unfortunately 小 isn’t as obvious, by looking at the character. It looks like a hockey stick with two small oars on either side.
Here are some examples of characters that use 小 as a radical inside: 少, 你, 際, 示
Try and type out 小 below:
The next character we’ll look at means “hand”:
You can imagine it as a hand stretched out, with two sticks laid across.
In radical form however, it is often expressed as: 扌You’ll see this in characters like: 我, 看, 把, 打
See if you can type out 手 below:
Are you starting to see how this works? Let’s do 3 more:
This character means “woman”. You can think of it as a 人 sitting down cross legged.
Here are some of the characters you’ll see 女 in: 她, 好, 如, 安
Try and type out 女 below. Note that the pinyin here can be replicated by typing: nv
The next character we’ll study is:
This means “child”. You can think of it as a baby lying vertically, wrapped in a blanket (all in a quick swiggle).
Here are some of the characters you’ll find 子 in:
好, 教, 字, 李
Try typing out 子 below:
The last character we’ll study in this lesson is:
This character means “mouth”, which should be easy to imagine from being a plain square. It is used in a lot of different characters:
中, 兄, 如, 和
Try and type out 口 below:
Great job – you can now move on to lesson 3, where we’ll build off these radicals. Enjoy!
