Radicals questions....

[flameproof]

2 questions I have about Pleco radicals:

1. The Radical table seems to have both, trad. and simpl. characters. Even I chose simpl. only, I can still see the trad. characters. When I i.e. look up the radical 门, both forms will be displayed. Beside 门, the table shows also 門. Is it possible to have a clean simplified radicals list?

2. It seems that some radicals can not be used in flashcards, specially with the single strokes and all the short forms (those that change shape as compound parts). Any comment here?

 

[mikelove]

1) Not at the moment, no. I believe you're the first person who's ever complained about this, actually... we do allow you to exclude characters from the radical table that aren't in any installed dictionaries, but not from the wrong character set. Wouldn't be that difficult, though.

2) What do you mean by "used in flashcards?" Are you trying to create custom flashcards containing those radical characters? If so, where in PlecoDict are you getting the characters from?

 

[flameproof]

2) What do you mean by "used in flashcards?" Are you trying to create custom flashcards containing those radical characters? If so, where in PlecoDict are you getting the characters from?

To give an examples, I can't get radicals that can not stand alone into the flashcards, such as 辶（I'm surprise, it works in Xp!).

Seems that characters are not included in the fonts.

That was just an examples, quite a lot can't be found.

 

[mikelove]

Oh, right, yes, some of those aren't included in our fonts for space-saving reasons. But ? should actually be in there, I think - make sure that you enter the version from the main Unicode block (4E00-9FAF), rather than the one from the special radical block; I think it may show up in two different places in the standard.

 

[flameproof]

I think it would be a good idea to add all the radicals, plus the short forms in the fonts. I don't think that those 30+ or so will make a big impact. Most are in the font pack already anyway.

 

[daniu]

hmmm ... well - it might be right that it does not make a big difference and I myself have tried to write these radicals on a pc already (BTW: how can you do that?) - not on a PDA though and that's why I really wonder: why do you need that? What is the use of it? Why should we bother the programers with that "problem"? (especially in that time where everybody else wants to see other things get done ...)

 

[flameproof]

Why should we bother the programers with that "problem"? (especially in that time where everybody else wants to see other things get done ...)

Sure, world peace and and fighting hunger are more important. Still, it makes sense for those who look at radicals.

 

[chao-ren]

I am just thinking "aloud" what would happen if the complex radicals were separated "cleanly" from the simplified radicals into two tables and how would this affect the "radical look-up" process.

What is the purpose of having a radical table in the first place? Well in most paper dictionaries "all the radicals" are lumped together in a section and the "simplified" or "complex" radicals are usually place together, one "half" is placed inside brackets next to each other for easy identification.

There are officially 214 complex radicals according to the KangXi definition and 28 have been "simplified' or have simplified forms if you use this definition. But this cannot be "all the radicals" as appearing in the radical section of most dictionaries because each radical even if we are dealing with complex characters only can appear in several "non-independent forms" eg heart 心 恭, 怡 etc... And they do need to list every possible form of each radical independent and non-independent so people can look up their character extremely fast.

Speaking on the complex character side first since this side is more straightforward. Assuming there is no such thing as simplified Chinese characters, the radical to character lookup process as I call it would be quite straightforward because each Chinese character has it own unique or stipulated complex radical. One character, one radical. And therefore if you know the radical of a character you want to find, then you should be able to eventually if not immediately, find the character through the "radical look-up process".

This unfortunately is not true on the simplified character side. Here only 30% of simplified characters have their radicals simplified or only 30% of such simplified characters are using one of the 28 "simplified" radical forms. Another 50% of simplified characters continue to use their "complex" radicals but have thier non-radical part "simplified" to form the final simplified character.

Finally the remaining 20% of simplified characters either have :
a) a new or different radical from their complex version or counterpart,
b) a missing radical or the original radical ignored eg 云 ; or
c) the original character is completely changed in such a way that the radical and non-radical portion are no longer recognisable in the new "simplified" character
eg. the character for 10,000 (萬) and (万). What radical would this last character under a simplified (ONLY) "clean" radical table be listed under?

I am actually just a "beginner" at simplified chinese characters after learning the complex version some years before. My method for looking up certain simplified chinese characters is to look up the radical belonging to the complex character version or form and then hopefully find that the complex character has the simplified form shown or listed together.

But doing a simplified ONLY radical lookup (would be kind of tricky)would be successful 80% of the time because learning 28 more "simplified" radicals forms after learning 214 is not that much more to learn. The main problem comes when you need to look up the remaining 20% of such simplified characters whose "radical" is uncertain because of the above a) b) or c) reasons.... For this reason I still prefer "all the radicals" listed together like in paper dictionaries, simplified and complex radicals shown together.. easy to perform radical look-up!

I have no objection to Mike freeing the simplified and complex radicals such that they can be extracted separately onto flash cards. I guess this is just a fonts and technical problem. I rarely use flash cards myself. The radical themselves I think are quite easy to remember.

Fortunately, the total population of simplified characters amongst the most commonly or frequently used Chinese characters is not that much.

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, I should have clarified what I meant by "space-saving reasons." In the Unicode text encoding standard, most radicals actually appear in two different character "slots" - one alongside other common Chinese characters, and another in an entirely separate block of characters which specifically contains Chinese radicals and nothing else. Since it seemed silly to include the exact same character twice in a single font file, we didn't bother including the radicals in the radical-only slots, but instead kept only the copies of them in the block of other Chinese characters; the vast majority of Chinese texts we've seen use radical codes from those, the radical-only group seems to have been added mainly for "neatness" purposes and to cover a few radicals that didn't make it into the basic set.

The weird thing, though, is that the 辶 that you entered actually is in PlecoDict's font files; it comes from that block of regular Chinese characters. What text encoding are you using for the flashcard import files? If it's anything other than UTF-8, switch to UTF-8 and see if that improves matters. What software are you using to generate these radical characters?

Re the simplified versus traditional debate, to be honest we haven't really done anything much to revamp the radical table for 2.0 yet, nor are we planning to, because it's very likely that in 2.1 we'll be adding a new, multi-radical lookup feature (where you can look up a character based on a component other than its primary radical, or a combination of such components) - we'd love to get this into 2.0, actually, since it's one of the few features that Wenlin offers that our software still doesn't, but we're not sure if we'll have the data set ready in time.

 

[chao-ren]

Mike: multi-radical lookup feature (where you can look up a character based on a component other than its primary radical, or a combination of such components) - we'd love to get this into 2.0, actually, since it's one of the few features that Wenlin offers that our software still doesn't, but we're not sure if we'll have the data set ready in time.

Oh excellent Mike! That plus the being able to directly input chinese characters or pinyin should make it enormously fast to find words in your dictionary. My main interest in Pleco-Dict 2.0 is just dictionary. I am interested in the 3 largest dictionary you've got i.e chi-chi, Eng-Chi and Chi-Eng! :lol: