For Westerners, the process of learning Chinese is made easier by 拼音 (pin1yin1) which is a Latinized, phonetic version of Chinese (the numbers after the pinyin indicate tone; we'll discuss tones in the next post). Pinyin helps you start speaking Chinese without having to learn any characters.
Now, if you want to really get around effectively within China (i.e. be able to read anything at all), you need to start recognizing some characters. Some characters can stand alone as words, for example 是 (shi4) meaning "to be" (i.e. "is/am/are"). Most however show up combined into words of two or more characters. Note that the Chinese don't use spaces between words. They aren't necessary for comprehension and they waste a lot of space on page and screen.
Now that we have an idea of how characters function, let's introduce the concept of the radical. A radical is a fundamental and simple shape that when stuck together with other radicals forms a whole character. Note that radicals do not work like letters; you cannot just stick radicals together to make new characters on the fly. Rather, radicals exist as the building blocks you use when physically drawing a character. In this way, knowing the radicals is helpful for remembering the characters.
Look at the title of this post: 你会中文啊 (ni3 hui4 zhong1wen2 a5), meaning "You can do Chinese!" If we look closely the characters look like this:
 |
| ni3 hui4 zhong1wen2 a5 |
I know from experience that at first this looks completely inaccessible. How do you possibly read this without memorizing every single character? The answer is... well, you don't. But the radical system acts as a helpful mnemonic for you to make guesses about a character's meaning or pronunciation. There are 214 radicals in the traditional systemization; below I've highlighted 2 from the above sentence:
The one in red I think is easiest to see. This is 口 (kou3), meaning "mouth" or "opening." You see it standing on its own in words like 出口 (chu1kou3) "exit," and 门口 (men2kou3) "doorway." Here it is as a building block in two different characters, 中 (zhong1) "middle," and 啊 (a5) which actually doesn't have a meaning other than to convey emphasis, sort of like an exclamation point "!".
The radical in green may look strange because it has two different shapes. This is 人 or 亻(ren2) and it means "person." Many radicals can be squashed to the top, bottom, or side of a character in this way; the way you know they are still the same radical is by how they are physically drawn.
Now, by some force of imagination you might picture how 你 (ni3) "you" contains the meaning of 亻"person." However in 会 (hui4) "to be able to," the connection to "person" is less obvious (in this case it's a "person" 人 on top of a "cloud" 云 (yun2)—what do you make of that?).
When learning the radicals you can't get too attached to the idea that they provide an easy path to understanding characters. They are a useful mnemonic, but their prime importance is in the physical drawing of characters. Sometimes they can be ridiculously clear, other times completely mysterious. Ultimately, they help a lot so it's important to learn them.
