部首 [Radicals]

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An assignment that I’ve been doing for a few weeks now for my Japanese 401 class has been translating a manga from Japanese into English. It’s been challenging, but not necessarily too trying. However, occasionally I do run into kanji that I don’t know. Fortunately, the manga has provided me with furigana so that I can read it. But sometimes, the furigana given is not actually the typical reading, and so in order to understand the kanji, I have to look it up.

That then begins my process of having to look it up by radical, and I usually use jisho.org’s search by radical function and sort of finagle my way through the process to find the right character. Sometimes I’m unsuccessful and have to try my hand at drawing the character to find it. But that can be troublesome, since I do believe that the program factors in the proper stroke order, and while generally the stroke order for kanji is top-down, left-right, I’m not an expert and sometimes do make my lines in the wrong order. So the process can be vexing.

I was browsing through the blog Tofugu earlier, and I came across an article on the radicals of kanji. It was an overview of radicals - what they are, why they are important, where they are located in a kanji, and how to locate the main radical of the kanji. While Jisho.org does let me search using multiple radicals, kanji are typically listed under one radical in particular - the main one. And so learning how to locate the radical would be useful for my translation as well as learning in general. After all, sometimes the radicals do have particular meanings - 亻means or stands for “person”, and so combined with 動 which means "movement" or "move", the combination of the two 働 means “work.” And so learning radicals is incredibly helpful as a learning student - I can learn how to possibly read the kanji and failing that - I have an easier time looking up the kanji in question.

I still struggle with looking up radicals; I usually forget that radicals can be considered part of the whole character, such as 夾’s radical being 大. Not to mention...with there being 214 radicals, there’s a lot of possibilities as to which one is the right one.

But in any case, hopefully the 12-step process will get me even closer to knowing and learning kanji.

頑張りましょう！