Chinese Characters and Radicals: How Hanzi Are Built

Most Chinese characters are not pictures. They are sums: a radical that hints at the meaning plus a sound part that hints at the pronunciation. 妈 (mā, mum) is 女 (nǚ, woman) plus 马 (mǎ, horse), borrowed for its sound. Learn the parts and a new character becomes a combination of things you know.

Characters are built from parts

The colours stay the same all page long:

There are three kinds of character, and the third is the one that matters:

人 (rén) was once a drawing of a person, 日 (rì) of the sun. 好 (hǎo, good) puts a woman beside a child: two meanings, no sound part. Pictures and idea compounds are memorable, and textbooks love them, but they are the minority.

Across a large dictionary, roughly eight characters in ten, by some counts more, are meaning-plus-sound compounds. The share is lower among the commonest few hundred, because the oldest words, 人 (rén), 大 (dà), 上 (shàng), 一 (yī), are often pictures or simple ideas. By your first thousand characters, compounds are most of what you learn.

So the useful question about a new character is never "what is this a picture of?" but "which two parts is it made of?".

Radicals: the part that hints at meaning

The radical is the part a dictionary files a character under, and usually the part that hints at its meaning. Many radicals have a squeezed form that sits on the left. These nine cover a large share of what you read early on:

A radical is a hint, not a definition. 口 (mouth) on the left of 吗 (ma) and 吧 (ba) marks a sound you make, not anything about mouths. 没 (méi, not have) has water in it because it first meant "to sink".

The same radical can change shape with its position. 心 (xīn, heart) stands full size under 想 (xiǎng, to think) but squeezes into 忄 on the left of 快 (kuài, fast) and 忙 (máng, busy).

Sound components: the part that hints at sound

The other half of a compound hints at the pronunciation. The clearest family is built on 马 (mǎ, horse):

The sound part says "something like ma"; the radical says which ma. Other families you can already read:

Look at the tones. The sound part gives the syllable, roughly; it often does not settle the tone: 马 (mǎ), 妈 (mā) and 吗 (ma) share a part and have three different tones. Three thousand years of sound change have blurred many families, so the hint gives the exact modern reading well under half the time.

她 (tā) is younger than it looks. The linguist Liu Bannong proposed it for "she" in the late 1910s, and it spread in the 1920s; before that, 他 (tā) covered everyone.

Simplified and traditional characters

Mainland China and Singapore write simplified characters, introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau write traditional characters. The spoken Mandarin is the same either way.

The radicals simplify consistently, which halves the work of switching: 讠 is always 言 in traditional writing, so 说 (shuō), 请 (qǐng) and 谁 (shéi) become 說, 請 and 誰. Plenty of characters, like 你 (nǐ), 好 (hǎo) and 人 (rén), are the same in both systems.

Kilo Lingo teaches simplified, the standard on the mainland and in the HSK exams. Every word page also shows the traditional form.

How to learn characters

Recognise first; write later. On a phone or keyboard you type pinyin and pick the character from a list, so recognition is what reading and typing both need.

1. Split every new character into its parts. Say them out loud: 请 is speech plus qīng.
2. Learn characters inside words. 中文 (Zhōngwén) and 中国 (Zhōngguó) teach 中 (zhōng) twice.
3. Use the parts to guess, then check. A guess you confirm sticks better than a fact you were handed.

Two sentences worth having from the start:

• 这zhè个ge字zì怎zěn么me说shuō？ (Zhège zì zěnme shuō?) - How do you say this character?
• 这zhè个ge字zì是shì什shén么me意yì思si？ (Zhège zì shì shénme yìsi?) - What does this character mean?

Mistakes learners make

What to do next

1. Next time a new character turns up, name its radical before you read the gloss.
2. Look at the traditional form on a word page you already know, such as 说 (shuō).
3. Learn the four tones, since the sound part cannot be trusted for the tone.