I’m looking for websites (or one good one) with a list of all the radicals with pronounciation and any kind of history or meaning that would go along with each one. I haven’t done an intensive search yet, but some quick googling found this pag:
Any other pages would be greatly appreciated.
casey, they are all in the simplified form. Anyway, you can find all this in your wenlin. Furthermore, the Chinese Squabble that we made include most of them (frequently used ones) with sample characters that employ the radicals.
anyway, it might be useful to some…
ax
My favorite site is a classic http://zhongwen.com.
On the left of the home page, in the Search Dictionary area, there’s a “radical” section.
All characters are clickable, it gives a breakdown of the symbol, its pinyin, its older meaning(s) and quite often a quick explanation (eg bu2, pictograph of a bird rising to heaven) that can help beginners like me to remember the symbol.
There are links to other sites, if you want to know how to write it for instance.
I love it so much that I downloaded the whole site and burnt it on a CD.
Taurus[/url]
I started with the radical list in a children’s Chinese dictionary: Wang4 Wen2 Xin1 Xue2 Sheng1 Z4i Dian3 (旺文新學生字典, 旺文出版公司). Since there’s some dispcrepancy among radical lists, especially in ponunciation, I decided to use this list as a starting point. Also, it’s a really cool all-Chinese dictionary with 5000 of the most commonly occuring characters, stroke orders, and example sentences (sort of a more intense version of the Far East 3000). My version is pink with an elephant on the cover.
Then I went to Chinaknowledge to get the English meanings. Some of the definitions there seem a llittle off, so now I’m checking it against Zhongwen.com. Some of the radicals there don’t have entries, but you can sort of get an idea by clicking on the example characters that are listed under a radical.
I’ve checked out some books, but they’re all crap. I’m still looking for any other resources. And I think it probably makes more sense just to learn the 200 or so characters that form the basis of the classification system used at Zhongwen.com, instead of the radicals. I’m just learning the radicals so I’ll always be able to look up any character in a traditional dictionary, when I don’t happen to have my Palm with handwriting recognition nearby.
Dear Taurus,
[quote=“Taurus”]My favorite site is a classic http://zhongwen.com.
I love it so much that I downloaded the whole site and burnt it on a CD.
Taurus[/url][/quote]
How did you download the whole site?
Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.
There are software to do that. I used HTTrack.
Taurus
I take back what I said before. Zhongwen.com kicks butt and you shouldn’t need any other resources to learn the meanings of the radicals. Problem before was that when I clicked on some of the characters in the radical list, I couldn’t get to the actual entry for the radical. For example, clicking on the sixth radical jue2 just gives a list of three characters that use that radical, but not an entry for the radical itself. For those few instances, you can just look them up by pronunciation instead. Although I guess that means you have to already know how to pronounce it. But you can get that info from any of the other radical lists.
I just finished entering the whole list into Supermemo. I’d be willing to share, if anyone’s interested.
Dear Taurus,
Thanks for the Info.
I’m going to download the program and try it out tonight.
How much megabytes does the zhongwen site take up? 
Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.
Here’s my radicals database for Supermemo. I tried to reinstall it on my Palm to test it out, but it didn’t work. If anyone can get it to work, or knows what I might have done wrong, please let me know.
Kobo,
that should be around 160MB.
Taurus
I tried it and it didn’t work for me either. If you used the converter, did you save the file in the proper format? And was the file formated properly before you did the conversion (ie space, numbered, etc., correctly)? I’ve used it many times now with lots of success. I used MS Excel and saved the file as a “tab deliminated (or something like that)”. They have intrucstions on the maple top website.
I think I’ve got it now. I copied the database from the palm backup file on my computer. I’ve also been using Excel, but it seems a little quirky. When I save a file and then open it later, sometimes the chinese gets all jumbled. I don’t have this problem with Word. And when I convert it and then open it in supermemo, it often inserts quote marks that I never entered. Anyone else having any problems with Excel? Anyway, I think the problem was in the way I was uploading it to my website. Let me know if you get it to work.
Also, as I’ve been going back through it, I realized that some of my definitions might be a little hard for others to figure out. Such as when zhongwen.com goes into detail with components of characters that the palm doesn’t have a font for, so I just did my best to describe it. Anyway, if something doesn’t make sense, just check it out at zhongwen.com or ask me. I also wasn’t consistent with providing pinyin for components mentioned in the definitions.