Chinese Radical Explorer

Every Chinese character is assembled from smaller pieces called radicals(部首, bùshǒu), and learning these radicals is one of the most powerful shortcuts in all of Chinese study. Radicals serve two jobs at once: they hint at a character's meaning, and they organize the dictionary. The character 好 (hǎo, "good"), for example, is built from 女 (nǚ, "woman") and 子 (zǐ, "child") — a mother and child together, the very picture of goodness. Once you know that 扌 means "hand," you can guess that 打, 拉, 推 and 抱 all involve an action of the hand, even before you learn their exact readings.

There are 214 Kangxi radicals, named after the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 that standardized them. They range from a single stroke (一, 丨, 丶) up to seventeen strokes (齒). You do not need to memorize all 214 at once — a core set of about 30 high-frequency radicals, like 口 (mouth), 木 (tree), 氵 (water), 亻 (person) and 心 (heart), appears in the vast majority of everyday characters. Mastering that core set lets you decompose almost any new character you meet, turning a meaningless jumble of strokes into a story you can remember. Our explorer lists the most common radicals with their pinyin, meaning and a sample character so you can start recognizing them immediately.

Decomposition also reveals the elegant logic of how characters are formed. Many characters pair a meaning-carrying radical with a sound-carrying component: 妈 (mā, "mother") uses 女 ("woman") for meaning and 马 (mǎ, "horse") for sound; 河 ("river") uses 氵 ("water") for meaning and 可 for sound. Studying these patterns makes new vocabulary easier to learn and to retain. Combine the Radical Explorer with our free Pinyin Converter for pronunciation, the Stroke Order tool for writing, and the HSK Flashcards for vocabulary, and you have a complete system for understanding Chinese characters from the inside out.