What's a Chinese radical

Chinese radicals are a very important part of Chinese characters. They mean that it is possible to tell what a Chinese character means. (kind of - see here).

What is a Chinese radical

Radicals make up Chinese characters (hanzi). They can also help with working out what the charcter means or how to pronounce the hanzi. The fire is 火 and so the character for burning hot is 炎. Intuitive!

Kangxi radicals are also used in dictionaries to sort Chinese characters. There are 214 radicals of which 7 of these are in more than 1000 characters and around a hundred are very common. You can see the full list here.

There's TED talk by Shaolan about radicals below. Shaolan went on to publish the book Chineasy.

Pronunciation and Meaning with radicals

More than 90% of Chinese characters have a radical which hints at the meaning, eg; the king radical 玉 is in the character for kingdom (or country) - 国.

But some radicals are in a character where they don't make sense. The cloud radical 云 is in the character for sport - 运. This is because the radical's pronunciation (yún) gives us a clue as to how to pronounce the whole character (yūn).

Why and how you learn them

There are a few key reasons to learn the radicals

1. Can help with remembering a character when you make a story out of the radicals (as we saw with 火 in 炎).
2. Can help with remembering pronunciation (云 in 运)
3. Needed for dictionaries and with some systems for typing in Chinese

There is a list on Wikipedia of all the radicals (also called Kangxi Radicals).
There is also a great list on hackingchinese.com of 100 important radicals

Happy learning!