Chinese Radicals
Learning Chinese is hard, they say, but it is made easy with the Douwe Osinga's learn to read Chinese method, to be downloaded for free from here. Chinese Radicals is a simple program that teaches the user in an interactive way the 215 radicals used in Simplified Chinese.
I think learning Chinese is hard, but only learning to read it, should be a lot simpler. Pronounciation and learning words is just hard for people from completely different languages. However, learning the meaning of the Chinese characters should be relatively simple, especially if you forego how to write them.
If you download the zip file below and unzip the contents to a directory, you can start the executable and it will start training you on the radicals immediately. Under the hood in will keep a set of 30 or so characters it is working on for you. If you know a radical directly, i.e. by typing it, you get one point. If you don't know the radical at first, you can press the go button without entering anything and you get a multiple choice. If you get the right one here, you get zero points. If you don't get it right you get -1 points. The points are added to your score for this radical. As soon as you have three points, the radical is thrown out of the current active set and replaced with a random new one.
Have fun and let me know if this makes any sense to you.
downloadable files
Kinda fun
by Richard
I think it is kinda fun, but it would be cool that once you have a few 'words' in your vocabulary, you get a few sentences, to show that with these radicals you can actually read stuff (I think at least that that should be possible). I know now cauldron and fire and maybe five or six others, but what can I do with them?
Furthermore
by Richard
It would be handy if you could see your 'score'
I like your program!
by Cai Laoshi
I honestly like your program, and think that it is better than other similar programs that I've seen (i.e. programs to practice Chinese characters), ant it may be very useful.
Some suggestions to future updates:
1) When I click on one of the suggested meaning, I would appreciate if the focus is automatically re-set to the input box.
2) It would be nice to have an option to show characters containing each radical.
3) In some cases you may want to add alternative meanings of the radicals. E.g. I usually refer to the radical "dry" with the name "stem".
Jammer!
by Martine
not executable by the mac :-(
Interesting take
by Ricemutt
A friend forwarded me your website and project link. I think it's an interesting idea and always applaud different ways people come up with to learn a new language. I grew up as a Mandarin speaker, so I can't say if this approach will work or not for someone who's new to Chinese, but I myself find your radicals program fun to review. I think the tough thing about learning to read Chinese, even if you know 1000 common characters, will be parsing a sentence to get its meaning. You can know 1000 characters, but combinations of them can mean something totally different and unrelated to the original terms. For example, dong1 is "east" and xi1 is "west" (all using pinyin format), but dong1xi1 together in a sentence means "thing". Good luck on this though. Earlier this year I decided to start a multilingual blog (experiglot.com) in an attempt to maintain my language skills, and it's definitely been a challenge to maintain!
Little pretty tool
by Fei
It's a lovely tool. I think it could be a template to create tools to help study basic characters or words of any language.
But as a Chinese, I have to point out 青 means green rather than blue. As a matter of fact, 蓝 means blue.
No Pinyin?
by Shanghai Matt
God program, but would be much more useful if it included the pinyin name of the radical in addition to the english meaning.
Runs with WINE
by Mattias Thorslund
I think the idea here is excellent. Recognizing the radicals should help in memorizing the other characters later.
Another thing that helps (to me) is learning the principles of stroke order. Even though you say you aren't trying to learn writing, it will give you a clue to the anatomy of the character. That is, it helps in clueing you in on which differently written characters are actually the same.
I don't see any mention of what OS the executeble is for - Windows, obviously. I thought you'd be happy to know it runs fine under WINE (on Linux/Mandriva).
Is that a Delphi executable, by any chance? I love how it produces a single, self-contained executable. For a little more cross-platform support, there are other tools as I'm sure you know.
Wow
by Jonn
this is cool! I am making a kind of project on Chinese Calligraphy and this really helps!
Radicals Need Pinyin
by Steve
This is a second comment on the subject. But, can you give us the pinyin? Or at least a document with the pinyin?
Thanks
comment_11
by Phuong Anh Pham
Thanks a lot. It's really useful for me.
VERY FUN
by tony
I usually procrastinate or feel overwhelmed trying to learn to learn these.
This little program was not only fun, it was very addictive... it was like a game, and I just couldn't stop playing!
One comment I'd like to share is that this game is MUCH easier and faster to play if you ONLY use the keyboard, and don't use the mouse. If you don't know the radical, simply hit the ENTER-key, and your list of choices will pop up. Then type in one of your choices and hit ENTER. This speeds things up and feels just as fun as any game like Tetris... :)
MANY THANKS for this fun learning tool!
Simple yet practical
by Mikal K
Thanks. It will be useful.
comment_14
by
Saved me uncounted hours!
by Teresa
I thought I'd NEVER learn those dang things.
Study was long. Life was short.
Now life is thrilling and study is over. :-))
Edited the content files
by J242
Thank you OP for the program. I hope you don't mind that I did a minor edit to the picture files. I am not a big fan of pin-yin, and I wanted to quiz myself on the ㄅㄆㄇㄈ of the radicals, so I edited the picture files to quiz me on the radicals. If anyone wants the picture file mod, let me know: zillofest @ yahoo . com. I hope this is okay with the OP. If not, feel free to delete my comment.
Thanks again OP
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