Introduction

Overview #

Many Chinese Characters are composed of smaller components called radicals, assembled together in a number of different structures.

Some radicals have variations (also known as variants) depending on which character it’s used in. For instance, the water radical 水 will sometimes appear in that form, but can also appear as 氵or 氺. Some examples of each: 水 -> 泉, 氵-> 酒, 氺 -> 绿.

When it comes to handwriting, even the same radical variant can be written differently depending on where it shows up in the character structure. 从 is a good example, in that the leftmost 人 is a different size and alignment than the rightmost 人.

(For brush writing, you may notice the lower right stroke is a dot/点 in the leftmost, and a na/捺 on the rightmost. This may or may not translate to your handwriting style.)

The standard computer fonts don’t always make those differences obvious. Take the 玉/王 radical as an example. At the top of a character, it looks like 弄 and at the bottom it looks like 皇. On most devices, the radical looks the same. However, in Regular Script/KaiShu/楷书 the stroke lengths between the top, middle and bottom strokes are quite a bit different, as well as the overall size.

These differences are fairly consistent based on the radical variant and the part of the character structure it appears in. In order to learn these, I will be creating a series of posts demonstrating the differences on a per radical basis, starting with the most frequently occurring radicals.