Classifying Radicals by their Meanings
In the “Preface” section, we mentioned there are a total of 201 radicals in modern Chinese. The best way to memorize all 201 radicals is to organize these radicals into groups according to common meanings. The table below presents one way to organize major radicals:
As the number of radicals you have learned increases, you will be able to reclassify radicals into new meaningful categories. The more you reorganize and inter-relate radicals, the better your recall of radical meanings will become. This, turn, will facilitate compound character memorization.
