Radicals 木 水 手

Are you having trouble learning Chinese characters? If you are, I highly suggest that you learn some radicals.

What are radicals? you might ask. Radicals are the building blocks that make up a Chinese character. Pretty much all of them also exist as basic characters on their own (like 水 and 手). No complex Chinese character is totally unique- what looks like a complex character is really just made up of lots of basic characters. You also need to know radicals to be able to look up a Chinese character in the dictionary.

In this post I'm going to introduce just a few of the more common radicals and some of the characters in which you can find them.

木 = tree

It even looks like a tree. Yay.

Here are some characters that use this radical:

林 - woods
森 - forest (by the way, 森林 also means "forest")
杏 - apricot
松 - 松树 means "squirrel." By the way, 松 is pronounced "sōng" while the radical on the right of the character is pronounced gōng, which is kind of similar. Often what you find in Chinese characters is that one radical contributes to meaning and the other contributes to sound (though it is a rather vague clue).
树 - tree
枯 - withered

水， 氺, 氵 = water

The one on the right is the one you'll see most often. It looks like a few drops of water (to me, anyway). According to Wikipedia, this radical appears in some 1 595 characters!

Some characters:

游泳 - swimming (I put both characters together because they both contain the radical)
冰 - ice (by the way, the left hand radical means "ice" on its own. If you were to look this character up in the dictionary, you would look it up using the "ice" radical, NOT the "water" radical.)
洲 - continent
洋 - 大洋洲 means "Oceania."
渴 - thirsty. Not to be confused with 喝 which means "to drink."
浅 - shallow
深 - deep
池 - pond, pool
江 - river
河 - river (I think the difference between 江 and 河 is that one goes to the ocean while the other doesn't. Something like that anyway.)
汤 - soup

手，扌,龵 = hand

To be honest, I'd never realised that the one on the right was a variant of the "hand" radical...

捉 - catch
打 - hit
搓 - rub
扔 - throw aside
找 - look for something
指 - point out
拍 - hit, take a photo (obviously depends on context. Also with the "hit" meaning, I don't think it's really hitting as such. I'm pretty sure that 拍拍手 refers to those hand-clapping games that kids play, for example.)

I can't be bothered adding any more radicals for now. I'll endeavour to add 3 a day. We'll see if I can stick to that.