Chinese Character Components

Chinese characters arose from pictures. There are a small number of standardized pictures in Chinese, known in English as radicals. Most pictures are made up of 1 or more radicals.

Once we know the various radicals that are available, it becomes much easier to recognize the combination of pictures that compose a given character. It can still be quite difficult to interpret the picture and understand its meaning, but this is an important start.

By recognizing the radicals, a character can be much more easily recalled as being composed of a small set of known radicals than being simply considered to be a series of unrelated pen strokes.