EXCELLENT CHARACTERS

Many people will express bafflement about Chinese ideographs, specifically how these may be arranged logically in a dictionary and thus easily looked-up. But it's easy. Characters are ALL broken up into a "radical", and other bits. The other bits are often phonetic elements, giving the speaker of Zhou or Shang dynasty Chinese clues as to pronunciation (yes, there has been skewage since then).
Most dictionaries arrange the characters under their radicals, from least to most strokes necessary, according to stroke order of components, starting at top left horizontal finishing bottom right vertical, and completing enclosing parts before moving on the next.

Fish, for instance. Eleven strokes. Radical no. 195.

魚

Underneath which can be found 鮑 ('baau') meaning "abalone". There are five extra strokes. Fresh, 鮮 ('sin'), six extra strokes. Whale 鯨 ('ging') with eight, bream 鯿 ('pin') with nine, codfish 鰵 ('man') with eleven, silver carp 鱮 ('jeui') with fourteen, and so on. There are very many fish I have not listed, and several characters which have a sound, but no actual fish.

Most Chinese characters will not have more than about twenty strokes maximum, ranging between seven or eight up to about fifteen or sixteen.

Dialect terms may have considerably more, usually being easily recognizable words combined with appropriate radicals to form new characters that will not be confused with anything similar by the average reader. Such as the word for coffee: 咖啡 ('kaa fei'), being 加 ("addition"), and 非 ("negation', "opposite"), with a mouth 口 ('hau') next to them to indicate that you should go by the sounds rather than the original significances of the characters.

There are 214 radicals. There are any number of phonetic elements, with a few hundred being common enough that one easily recognizes them.

Many words occur so often in so many contexts that the observant person will have learned them almost automatically before ever cracking a textbook. Rice, establishment, stone, gold, swine, wood, word, eat, and similar characters.
Some of which are also common radicals.

Respectively: 米 ('mai'), 官 ('gwun'), 石 ('sek'), 金 ('gam'), 豕 ('chi'), 木 ('muk'), 言 ('yin'), and 食 ('sik').



As a westerner, how you approach learning to write Chinese is really up to you. Haphazardly looking up words as you need them, or systematically by radical, even starting with simple stuff a child might study in first grade. After a while you'll notice that there are words that you know thoroughly, some which you kind of have an idea how to pronounce, characters which are clear contextually, and some things that you vaguely remember, but whose precise meaning and approximate pronunciation escape you entirely.

I've always found 豔 ('yim'; "plump", "voluptuous") to be problematic; some poet used it specifically for rhyme once, and it is also part of a famous person's name, but good grief! Twenty eight strokes total, filed under "beans" (豆 'dau').

The key thing, which cannot be over-emphasized, is getting a grip on the stroke order. It will make looking words up infinitely easier, writing them more readable, understanding scrawled notations possible, and impress the crap out of people.


All good things.




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