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All about 部首

 What is 部首?

部首 or also known as Chinese radicals, are the components of the Chinese characters, they are used in Chinese dictionaries and in some cases can help you figure out the meaning of unknown words. Radicals are taught in kindergarten (just like in the west we learn the alphabet) and in a way they are the base of the Chinese writing system.

Why radicals can be useful as Chinese learners?

This depends on your approach to learn Chinese, you can easily go through your Chinese language path without really caring about radicals. But there are some cases where radicals could quite help you, for example: if you want to learn both traditional and simplified Chinese, or if you want to understand Chinese names, but its main use is to be able to remember characters and have a more profound understanding of them.

Previously I have already given my best tips to remember characters, so if you are interested on that you can check the following: How to remember characters, however those tips are mainly based on my experience. If you are looking for the method that has the most backup and research then it would be to learn radicals. It's important to mention that if you believe that the best way to learn a language is to do it the same way that a kid will, then this would be the way to do it in Chinese, because when it comes to writing the first thing kids learn are: radicals and then the characters, but if you are like me and never saw radicals until you had been learning Chinese for quite some time don't worry, because it's never too late to learn them.

How can you use 部首 to remember characters?

This method can be quite helpful for some people and for others it's a bit more complicated, but it all depends on whether you are a visual person or you learn best by memorizing, etc. So this might not be the best method for everyone, but you can give it a try and see how it goes.

This method consists on dividing the character into different parts, for example: The word: 忘了 (forget) is made up by the radicals 亡 and 心, 亡 means dead and 心 means heart, so based on the radicals you can know that 忘 means a dead heart (without a heart) and to understand this better we need to take into consideration the word 用心 (use the heart) means to pay attention, so if we don't have a heart or don't put our heart into things then we don't pay attention and what happens when we don't pay attention we forget things. 

So in the following example I was able to deduct the meaning of a word just using its radicals, and this is what you can do with unknown characters, but it's important to know that this won't always be the case. 

Where can you learn 部首？

There are a lot of resources online, but you can first try using the following:

Learn Chinese Radicals, in the following link you can find a list of 100 radicals and its also has some information and the history behind them.

Basic Chinese words and their radicals, The following website will mostly be helpful for beginners as it introduces a lot of basic words and their radicals.

Dictionary of Radicals, the following website has all radicals, and it gives some examples, etc. also it's in English, so it's quite easy to use.


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