40 most common radicals
November 10, 2007 – 1:31 amWhen I started learning Chinese my teacher gave me a list of the most 40 common Chinese radicals. Might be helpful for anyone.
人 rén - man, person
刀 dāo - knife
力 lì - power
又 yòu - right hand side
口kǒu - mouth
囗 wéi - enclosure Used as a radical only, not as a character itself
门 mén - door
土 tǔ - earth
夕 xī - sunset
大 dà - big, large
女 nǚ - female, woman
子 zǐ - son
寸 cùn - inch
小 xiǎo - little, small, young
工 gōng - labor, work
幺 yāo - tiny, small
弓 gōng - bow
马 mǎ - horse
心 xīn - heart
戈 gē - dagger-axe
手 shǒu - hand
日 rì - sun, day
月 yuè - moon
贝 bèi - cowry (shell)
木 mù - wood
水 shuǐ - water
火 huǒ - fire
田 tián - field
目 mù - eye
示 shì - to show
糸 mì - fine silk, Used as a radical only, not as a character itself
耳 ěr - ear
衣 yī - clothing
言 yán - speech
走 zǒu - to walk
足 zú - foot
金 jīn - metal, gold
隹 zhuī - short tailed bird
雨 yǔ - rain
食 shí - to eat
To the newbie learner: These are only radicals, often they are not used as words. For example the last one 食 shí means “to eat”, however most often You want to use 吃 chī - “to eat” when You are building a sentence where something is eaten.
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One Response to “40 most common radicals”
There’s a book called Reading + Writing Chinese Characters by William McNaughton which at the front has like 200-odd radicals organised by stroke and I thought they were really good. Your list doesn’t include all the different variants eg the fact that there are 3 people radicals, that the knife radical can also be written as it is in 利 at the right hand sign and the way that the water radical is almost never written like that but written as 3 dots, 2 for ice etc.
Good luck with the Learning chinese I’m not sure how long you’ve been learning it. I’ve been learning in total a year and a half but it gets better all the time.
By Zhongguoist on Mar 19, 2008