Comments on: 40 most common radicals

By: David Porter

David Porter — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:39:58 +0000

There’s a new Chinese Radical Test on the Clavis Sinica website that allows you to test your knowledge of the most commonly used 57 radicals. There’s also a free flashcards tool you can use to increase your knowledge of the radicals. For more details, see http://clavisinica.com/resources.html .

By: Hacking Chinese · Creating a powerful toolkit: Character components

Hacking Chinese · Creating a powerful toolkit: Character components — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 09:35:42 +0000

[...] list of all the 214 radicalsA list of 40 commonly used charactersA more detailed introduction to [...]

By: Hendrik

Hendrik — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:46:35 +0000

Hi Claire,

thanks for Your comment, while 又 is a pictograph of the right hand, it indeed means “both” and “again”. I just checked with zhongwen.com

By: claire

claire — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:31:46 +0000

I’m a Chinese, happen to find a mistake here in your list. 又 doensn’t mean right hand side, it means again. 右with exactly the same pronunciation means right hand side.

By: Derek Read

Derek Read — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:23:13 +0000

McNaugton’s book (updated with help from Li Ying) goes through the 214 Kangxi radicals (and talks about the ’226′), but many are used only in more ‘advanced’ characters. The 40 here are a very good place to start, as they are found in many very commonly used words that beginners need to know (ie: the first 1000, 2000 or even 3000 characters you should learn would mostly be based on these). That having been said, use this list AND get McNaughton’s book because it gives you the historic meaning, variations on the writing for each radical and lots of other info. The book also has a student ‘study guide’ section that tries to guide you with learning things in an order that is helpful.

By: Chinese learner

Chinese learner — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:31:20 +0000

Hi!

Thanks for this!

By: Zhongguoist

Zhongguoist — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:04:17 +0000

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.