Learning and understanding Chinese characters takes time and practice. I personally experienced it during my school days. We literally need to memorize each words, even without fully understanding what each words meant.
Most of use were able to pass and survive our Chinese classes through this simple method. But when I was in grade 4 or 5, our teacher taught us how to use the Chinese dictionary. (Yes, it was not yet digital during those years, LOL)
Our teacher will write a Chinese character on the board, and we need correctly fill out all the questions needed for each Chinese character; examples of these questions are what is the radical, how many strokes for the radical, how many strokes for the word, and what page is the Chinese word can be found.
At first, I find it confusing because you need to know how to count the strokes for each radical and word-- which means you need to know how to write each word with the correct radical. That is why know how to write the basic strokes is the fundamental pillar for the writing skills. You can review some of these basic strokes on the video below.
Another confusing part is finding the correct radical for each word and because of this, I get to know what radicals are. I won't deny the fact that I started memorizing as many Chinese words as possible that is being taught in class during my school days, but as I get older, more complicated words can be seen in books and needed to be memorized. Then I somehow understood or even guessed correctly the meaning of some words by simply checking the radicals of some words, and that's how my interest with radicals started.
I also noticed that it is NOT ALWAYS accurate for some words. Sometimes, it doesn't even make sense why that radical is used for the Chinese word, that is why I won't recommend it to be a reliable way to ACCURATELY recognize and understand the meaning of each word, but it can be a guide in someway. Let me try to explain it further with my learning video below.
How do you find these radicals? Are they helping or not? I hope you learned something from my learning videos. Until my next lesson, take care! :)
Comments