Learning radicals

dustpuppy

榜眼
Hello,

I started learning mandarin 6 months ago and up until now i've been learning with pinyin, learning very few characters. I now realize I need to learn more characters, and I'm told the way to do it is to learn radicals first. Is there anything in Pleco that can help me learn those radicals ?

For instance, is that an add-on dictionary that breaks down characters by radical ? I haven't seen that option in the default dictionary.

Thanks for any input.
 

johnh113

榜眼
mikelove said:
Yes, though not as an official Pleco release; see this thread for ldolse's excellent radical dictionary add-on project.

Dear Reader,

I've looked at Idolse's radical dictionary and haven't installed it yet, but will.

I'm also interested in knowing how to "call" or "name" the radical. For instance the water radical with the 3 dots on the left is called "san dianr shui". I would like to not only know what the radical means, but also how to refer to it when talking to someone else. When I'm talking with a Chinese person and I don't understand something, they often draw the character on their hand (with their finger) and tell me the radical, like "san dian shui". But I don't know the names of the radicals, so their explanation is hard to understand. Knowing how people refer to these radicals would be useful.

John
 

Raesu

秀才
Get Reading and Writing Chinese, by William McNaughton. It was the foundation of my character learning endeavor and it was totally amazing at teaching radicals, meanings, and includes the 2000 most common characters. I got the traditional version (radicals make more sense with these characters) but there is a simplified as well if you choose.
 
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