How To Write Chinese Characters & Chinese Radicals
In this video lesson we'll learn Chinese Characters zhu, jia, bei, jing, xiao, suo, su, she and jian. We'll learn how to write these characters with a better understanding of their construction. And we'll also learn the Chinese Radicals used in these characters.
- Chinese Radicals: 匕 亠 门
- Chinese Characters: 住 家 北 京 所 校 宿 舍 间
CHINESE RADICALS
| HSK | RADICAL | PINYIN | ENGLISH |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 匕 ① | bǐ | spoon; knife |
| 1 | 亠 ② | tóu | - |
| 1 | 门 | mén | door |
NOTES:
① 匕 means "spoon" as a Radical and "knife" as an independent character.
② There is no agreement on the meaning of 亠 and characters that have 亠 as their Radical don't have a commonly shared meaning, so we can say the meaning of 亠 is "undecided".
CHINESE CHARACTERS
| HSK | CHARACTER | PINYIN | ENGLISH |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 住 | zhù | to live |
| 1 | 家 | jiā | home; family |
| 1 | 北 | běi | north |
| 1 | 京 | jīng | capital |
| 1 | 校 | xiào | school |
| n/a | 所 | suǒ | measure word for institutions |
| 5 | 宿 | sù | to spend the night |
| 5 | 舍 | shè | house |
| 1 | 间 | jiān | measure word for rooms |
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I, for my part, am glad that there are no traditional characters. I think it’d we be a bit confusing and I prefer to learn the simplified characters well instead of trying both and mixing them together. So if you consider to give support for traditional characters I’d appreciate a button in the menu to choose which types I want to see. I really appreciate that you name the measure words for each noun. I have already learnt all the vocabulary for HSK 1 and 2 and asked a Chinese friend for all the measure words because they are normally not listed in the vocabulary lists to find in the internet. So please go on and tell us all the measure words for future nouns! I appreciate that a lot! Yellow bridge is a great dictionary to look for measure words but for a beginner it’s often difficult to choose… Read more »
Dear Lili and all the others in the community, Maybe one further comment to make it clear what kind of problems I have when I am learning characters. I don’t have this problems usually when I am typing characters with the keyboard because I can very “safely” choose the right one out of a choice. But when I am writing the characters by my hand, then I have no choice to choose from and need to remember every stroke all by myself. Typical mistakes I tend to do when writing characters by hand is something like 名子 (wrong for míngzi, instead of 名字) or 汉话 (wrong for Hànyǔ, instead of 汉语）. I think it’s obvious why I am doing this kind of mistakes: Even though I can divide 字 in it’s radicals 宀 (mián = roof) and 子 (zǐ = child) when seeing the character, I have no really good… Read more »
Where can i get all Chinese radicals? How many radicals exists in Chinese?
Thanks for the inquiry. I might make a list of all common Chinese Radicals and include it in our premium content in the future. Please stay tuned.