The basic elements of written words

In English, words are made from combinations of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Before teaching children to write whole words, teachers focus on the ABCs. Once these "building blocks" are mastered, learning words becomes simply a matter of recognising which pattern of letters to use. The problem for the learner of English is that each word has a unique spelling.

Chinese characters are also made of basic elements. They are called "radicals". The vast majority of the tens of thousands of characters that can be written in Chinese use only about 200 radicals. Learning these elements makes the recognition of characters a much easier task and frees the learner to think about the meaning derived by putting the elements together. Characters that look incredibly daunting to the beginner, once broken into their constituent parts, become more manageable, meaningful and fascinating.

Examples:

日 character for sun
月 character for moon
明 character for brightness (the sun + the moon = bright)

女 character for woman
子 character for baby
好 character for good (a woman with her baby is good)

Add to this the fact that many words in Chinese are actually compounds of 2 or 3 characters and learning Chinese reading and writing suddenly seems much less intimidating. In fact it is the "modular" nature of Chinese that makes it so flexible. Take for example the character 学 which means "to study". It can be combined to make new words very easily:

A character may be added after

学生 student

A character may be added before

大学 university

Before AND after gives

大学生 university student

How beautiful!