I don’t want
to linger on the topic of strokes too long because you will have a better
understanding of the big picture when you see how the parts work as a whole.
When a combination of known strokes is used over and over again, it is likely
to be a radical. As a recap, radicals are the basic forms to create a
character. I went ahead and did a little research on the definition of a
radical.
4. Forming a basis
or foundation.
The Free
Definition by Farlex:
4. Linguistics Of or being a root: a radical form.
1b : of, relating to, or constituting a linguistic root
I think if
we mesh all three definitions together, it explains “radical” the best.
Radicals are the basic foundations or roots for each Chinese character. Without
them, we might as well be scratching our heads while looking at symbols that we
can’t decipher.
REFERENCE
LINKS:
Many
radicals are semantic, which means that the radical itself has a meaning. Others
may be phonetic or what Wikipedia states as “artificially extracted”
from another character, which normally does not exist by itself. The
Chinese dictionary also includes artificial extractions or “glyph extractions” as is
explained in Wikipedia.
I have not
forgotten from our previous stroke post that our mission here is to be able to
find a word in a Chinese dictionary. A standard Chinese dictionary has 214
radicals in the section header (部首
bùshǒu) and these radicals are indexed by
using the stroke count method. Thus, radicals with one stroke count are listed
first. Throughout history, the number of radicals in the section header kept
changing depending on how a character should be classified and how many
characters end up being classified in the section of a radical.
Even if you
recognized the radical from a character, you may still have trouble finding it
in the dictionary because there is constant debate over the placement of a character in the correct radical section. What if a character has more than one radical? Which
one would dominate? What if a radical from a traditional character is now gone in
the simplified version of that character? So many questions and the only answers
are to eliminate the possibilities and start with the best guess. The character
has to be listed somewhere under a radical so we’ll find it…eventually.
I also want
to mention that there is a great debate over the usage of the term radical to
as a way to index the dictionary. It would have been nice if the
classifications were set in stone, but it isn’t. Apparently, the word “radical”
has a variety of meanings for the purposes of indexing a dictionary by acting as the root, semantic, or a artificially extracted component of a
character. People are confused when they can’t tell the difference or assume all the indexers in the dictionary are radicals roots. Wikipedia calls the radicals
section of the dictionary, “section headers” instead. When I speak of a
radical, I am referring to the root definition and not the semantic component
definition for the time being. Don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about. All you need
to know now is the definition I have given to you in this post when it comes to
radicals.
To recap, there are three types of radical indexers listed as section headers of a Chinese dictionary:
1) Radical Root (the one and only)
2) Semantic Radical (a borrowed radical root just for sound or pronunciation purposes)
3) Artificially Extracted Radical (a part of a radical which has no meaning by itself)
The radical of a character can be any of the three categories above for the purposes of classification in a dictionary.
In
order to find out which section header or radical section a character is
classified in, we must make our best guess and look into the section header or
radical section the character is most likely to be in first. Our success rate
in finding the character on the first try will be much higher.
My tips in finding the correct section header is to find the radical in this order:
1) Does the character have a dominant radical on the left side?
2) Does the character have a dominant radical on the top?
3) Does the character have a dominant radical on the bottom?
4) Does the character have a unique or rare radical in it?
I just gave
you an fuzzy overview of radicals, but what are the radicals? I'm sure you want to know what all 214 radicals look like!
I searched around Google and found that this website is the best when it comes to listing all the radicals or section headers.
Go ahead and study it. It acts as a great guide for radicals.
If you want to go in depth, this is a great site for further study of the individual radicals.
Once you are more familiar with the radicals or radical parts, you can officially start looking up characters in the dictionary using your stroke counting powers and radical detective skills.
You need to guess:
1) What radical would this character most likely be associated with? What is the stroke count of this radical?
2) How many strokes does this character have in total?
There are a bunch of online dictionaries out there to search for a character by using the stroke count method. Let's use this website to look up our characters:
Let's say, we see the word 好 and we have no idea what it is. (For intermediate or advanced students, let's just pretend we don't know!)
好
What is this?
I know! I'll consult the dictionary...
Now, if I had to take a wild guess, radicals are usually on the left side if there is a left side available.
What do we have in the left side? The character: 女 (pronounced: nǚ)
If you have no idea which part of the character is the main radical, try to figure out the stroke count of one radical and go from there.
How many strokes does 女 have?
Answer: 3 (piědiǎn stroke, piě stroke, and a héng stroke)
Checking the nǚ at the archchinese.com website above, you'd see that it is radical number 38.
(Note: If you happen to mess up and thought 子 (zǐ) was the main radical, you would have searched and realized that it was radical number 39, but if you try looking in that section, you wouldn't be able to find the character 好.)
Going back to the 好 character we were so curious about, let's figure out the total stroke count.
Answer: 6 (女 = 3 strokes as previously covered, 子 = 3 strokes)
If you didn't know the answer, you're just going to have to take your best guess and then go from there. Perhaps, you can add or minus a stroke or two if you were wrong the first time.
If you clicked on the 女 radical link, you will arrive at the following page:
Next to stroke count #6 section, we will see, to our delight, the third character is the 好 character. Clicking on the character will give you all sorts of information such as definition, audio pronunciation, pinyin, stroke order, useful words, etc. Excellent..or, err... 好 (hǎo)!
This concludes our mini tutorial on how to look up words in the dictionary. Use this power well.
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