Hot answers tagged radicals
17
The short answer is: not all the elements of all the characters are ‘radicals’. For example 凹 (concave, hollow) consists according to the dictionaries of 部首 bushu (or radical if you will, more on that below) 凵 and three more strokes that cannot be further analyzed or categorized.
A more complete answer would depend (as Tsuyoshi Ito already indicated in his ...
10
I'll have a start at an answer, but not sure I'm able to completely answer it.
In many cases, radicals on the left side of the kanji indicate the "class" or meaning that the kanji belongs to. This seems to be moreso the case with physical objects rather than abstract concepts.
For example, 人 - person - (called "nin-ben" as the left radical): 休、体、代、伝 ...
6
The choice of radicals (部首{ぶしゅ}) as in the dictionary radicals (as opposed to any other selection of components), comes from Chinese and presumably was adopted alongside the kanji themselves.
The first source to use radicals was a second-century Chinese dictionary called Shuōwén Jiězì (說文解字 - in Japanese 説文解字{せつもんかいじ}). This included 540 radicals. The set ...
5
This is just the opinion of your dictionary. According to the KRADFILE, 出 has these radicals:
#
# K R A D F I L E
#
# Copyright 2001/2005 Michael Raine, James Breen and the Electronic
# Dictionary Research & Development Group at Monash University.
# See: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/groups/edrdg/licence.html
...
4
In addition to makdad's wonderful answer, I'll add this on the issue of whether you need to pay attention to radicals when learning kanji.
This is only one data point and no more than one person's opinion, but I don't think learning radicals is all that important if you want to read Japanese. It does help to know that certain kanji (such as "heart" and ...
3
What is meant by a "reliable translation"? Let's look at 彳:
In Japanese, it is given the nickname ぎょうにんべん. This is customarily translated to "going man". If you want a translation of these customary nicknames, you can find them in the New Nelson dictionary.
But whoops--that's just a nickname! How about a definition? Well, that depends on what you ...
3
I think studying radicals is a good thing. However there are lists that are more specifically geared towards Japanese then Chinese. If you use a number of sources, you can see commonalities between scholarly interpretations, and these will help you get a firmer grasp of the concepts at hand. For instance, I think that unfortunately the names of radicals ...
2
Someone collected those with unicode points.
http://shimapucchi.blog93.fc2.com/blog-entry-321.html
http://tokyo.cool.ne.jp/kondo_hiro/proverb/busyu/busyu.htm
http://www.efontshop.com/feaddfont/help/busyu_list.htm
http://www.kanjijiten.net/radical/index.html (page is in shift-jis encoding)
http://www.kanjikentei.jp/list/bushubetsu/
or some at ...
1
My $0.02:
I would not worry too much about trying to find a definitive list so much as text/list that works for you. It might even be worth taking several lists and cherry picking the definition that you can remember most easily.
I once tried to learn kanji via the radicals. After a while, for time it was taking and the return obtained I decided I was ...
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