Lesson 3 The radicals

All chinese characters contain a particular component called "radical" or "side". this is the basic part of chinese character,These elements were once characters themselves, but some are no longer recognizable as such. Learning the radicals helps to categorize and memorize characters; if you know each radical,it's easy for you write chinese character in the future. the presence of a certain radical can even suggest the meaning of the whole character, which often relates to the original form of the radical. On the other hand, the non-radical component of the character often suggests its pronounciation, or viceversa.

Chinese dictionaries contain more than 200 radicals, but you will easily memorize the most common ones. In the following lessons we'll present 60 radicals, each of them followed by three characters that contain them, by compounds and notes on their use.

Please note that the shape of a radical changes according to its position in the character, and that the same radical could well be found at the top of a character and on the left side of another: our examples couldn't always show all of the possibilities. As for the pinyin transcription, we didn't put the tones (pronounciation doesn't really concern us by now) nor the umlauts that certain syllables have.