Whereas English words are organised by an alphabet, Chinese words are often classified according to their radicals.
There are 214 Chinese radicals and the radicals are themselves organised according to stroke order.
Every Chinese character has a radical or is a radical. For example, 女 is the character for woman. It is also the radical for many female things: 姐姐 = little sister, 妈妈 = mother, etc.
In some cases, the radicals can imply the meaning or pronunciation of the character.
Radicals are very useful as they are generally used to look up characters in the dictionary. To find a character you look for the radical in a radical list. When you have found your radical you count the remaining number of strokes in the character. With this information it is now possible to find the character - but more on that later.
In this collection, we're going to look at learning the radicals..let's begin!