I am a big fan of the option of being able to the character breakdown showing the radicals.

I was wondering, however, whether it would be possible to break some of the radicals down even further. Why? I once studied roughly one third or half of the radical list but I hardly recognize any of them here in the radical breakdown. Many radicals still seem to be combined. In 侍 for instance 寺 is a radical listed meaning Bhuddist temple (亻of course being the other one). 寺 could probably still be broken down more into 土 and 寸. The very elementary breakdown I understand, the higher level one I don't.
Although I know that in the long term it might be useful to know 寺 and its meaning as Bhuddist temple, it at this stage would just mean another word to learn. This is of course also true with some of the very basic radicals, but there are a lot fewer of them.

Also, when my (Chinese) wife or my father-in-law describe a new character to me, they always use the most elementary radicals (both of them with university degree....so the "they should learn Chinese themselves" argument doesn't count).

Is it technically possible to break the radicals down to their very basics? Is there a reason not to?

David

I agree with what you are saying David. Seems that some of this is just sloppyness as a few of the really simple components I've noticed come up as "missing component"

A bit of an aside, but somewhere in the future i could see a hybrid-raw squigs mode whereby character components as a whole are identified and appear after all the strokes of that component are entered.
Like raw squigs but if you are wrong on the 2nd or 3rd part, you have already locked in your correct answer for the first component of the character. i don't know if this is making sense?!

Neil - Nick has said a while ago he was planning exactly that. Still, I wouldn't want it to replace raw squigs (gives too much info).

With regards to the main topic, the character breakdown details came from another source, so I guess they're dependent on that rather..

If you look in MDBG dictionary, you can see further breakdowns for some of the hanzi. (Not all). However, in a lot of cases the full breakdown makes LESS sense. Often, the combination you get is only there because it has the same (or similar) SOUND as the character you are learning. Sometimes too, the combination is there because its combined meaning is part of the meaning of the new character.

By the way; I could be wrong (I am not an expert by any means), but I think you don't call things "radicals" unless they are the basic 189 (or 214 for traditional) that dictionaries classify hanzi under.

I am having trouble with this kind of thing myself. In particular, I keep trying to learn words with sound-elements, and realising that I need to learn these more basic combinations first. (See my query on sound-elements last week.) Because of this, I intend to create a list of common combination-words (like your "buddhist temple"). If and when I do, I'll share it on Skritter, probably labelled "Sound-elements". Would you like me to email you when I've done so?

Rachael.

@百发没中 if you run into an incorrect decomposition, by all means send it to the Skritter Gods through the feedback form. I have been doing this for a while whenever I see something missing or blatantly wrong.

Rachael is exactly correct, "radical" here does not mean "subcomponent", it means "one of the dictionary headings". Unfortunately "radical" in English also has the meaning of "subcomponent". The radicals are not by any means a complete set of "common components" of the 汉字; I don't think there's an official set of those. At one point Bodum created a list of "all fairly simple characters" which can be used to study those common components if you're interested in that sort of thing.

One problem with using a breakdown which is not based on sub-characters or radicals, however, is that there's no strict way to tell when to stop. Should we break everything down into lines and dots? To develop useful mnemonics, I would much prefer to see breakdowns that use the most complex sub-characters possible. For example, 鄰 (neigboring, next to) can be broken down as 米* over 舛 next to 阝, but I find it much more memorable if I remember that 粦 means "phosphorus" and then make up a mnemonic like "the *town* is _next to_ a *phosphorus* mine". This has the added benefit of reinforcing the meaning of 粦.

* According to zhongwen.com it's actually not 米, but it looks exactly like it to me.

James

we need a full family tree haha

@Neil not a bad idea, but it would take up a lot of visual space, and I'm not sure it would actually help with learning that much.

David,
quoting L.Weiger in his excellent treatise - Chinese Characters / thier origin, etymology, history, classification and signification, "From the logical, etymological point of view, the compounds are made, not with strokes, but with characters more simple, having their own use and meaning. These simple characters are what we call 'elements', when we speak of compositions and decompositions. The more intricate character was formed by their association, and the analysis must end when it has separated and isolated these 'formal elements'. To go further, to decompose into strokes, would add nothing to knowledge. Just as, in systemic botany, the study of a plant is ended when one has determined its specific organs. The ulterior decomposition of these formal elements into cells and fibres, belongs to histology, and is of no interest for classification purposes. (...)"
and then he goes on to give examples, much like the one you yourself gave.
In other words, there is a point of diminishing returns for the student who tries to decompose too much.
Still, this is just a scholar's opinion. He might not approve of mnemonics of ours such as "the Mouth nails it", or "my older brother's spirit comes running over the shells to congratulate me with his mouth"!!! And yet, these mnemonics have helped us all remember quite a lot of extra characters. So, if you already know the radicals, and it's useful to you to break everything down into atoms, I'd say go for it :)
Miles

anyone ever tried typing an SMS using stroke input mode??? wayy diffficult

The full breakdowns are in the system, but hidden. The plan now is to include them on this popup that comes up when you click on the character for more information. I'm not sure whether it will be useful to display the composition type and the nesting levels or to just list all the maximally-decomposed components like is currently being done for the top components--thoughts?

So the practice page shows the most meaningful breakdown and the more-info popup shows the full breakdown (or both, maybe). Maksym is almost done spawning the popup.

Rachael, I would love to study a Sound Elements list. Definitely make a forum post when you've published it.

in the case of the buddhist temple I also value the whole thing more than the breakdown, but that's because of the way I learn. I learned that there is a couple of character that have that, just with a different left side component and somehow I never forget these characters.

Or in other cases it is because it is a sound-component, however since the website doesn't show that information, I think people should have a choice. Especially beginners would value that I think, I remember I did when I was just starting. Right now I only use it for the very complex characters with components that are rare or that I never encountered before.

about the sound component thing: you could say you can see it in the pinyin however lots of sound components are MEANT to be a phonetic hint but aren't very obvious. However knowing that it is meant to be one, helps to remember, in my case.

Nick, I have finally published my first set of sound elements (more to come in a month or so).

When I looked through my favourite dictionary I realised that there are more sound elements than I had realised (hundreds). Also, more characters than I expected seem to use them (maybe half). Thus, it is a bigger job than I thought. Not that that means I'm quitting. Since I plan to learn all of these hanzi eventually, I still think it will be more efficient in the long run to learn the sound elements first before I meet them in combination.

The skritter breakdown does now give sound-element information, in that it gives the pinyin for each component and users can spot that it is the same pinyin as the character. Occasionally that may be a red herring, in that the element might be valid for its meaning too, but I don't see that as a problem. There are quite a lot of those, actually, ie components chosen where both the sound and the meaning seem to make sense. I guess you would, if you were inventing a character and had several possible options for a sound-element.

One final thing I noticed during my dictionary trawl: the meaning-elements commonly used to combine with sound-elements are usually radicals and very often from a smallish sub-set of radicals (about 54). A dozen or so crop up particularly often (hand, water, ice, fire, tree, metal, food, person, grain, walk, sun, bug, mouth, silk, heart, stone, grass, woman, soil ...). I've listed the 54 as Sound Elements 0, as I consider it a useful prerequisite to making sense of the sound + meaning combinations.

Hope this lot is all of use to someone. It has certainly been interesting for me.

Rachael.

These are great! I'm totally studying these next.

Rachael, if you haven't already, you should start a new thread with this. 顶一下！

Neil,
I have (called Sound Elements...), but nobody (except Nick) is reading it, so I thought I'd mention it here for any of the folks who expressed interest last June.

It might be good to link the threads somehow, but I don't know if that is possible.

Rachael.

@Rachael you can link to other threads by copying the URL of the thread page you want and pasting it into your comment. For example you can copy the URL from the address bar, which is usually at the top of your browser window. Or you could right-click (maybe Option-Click on Mac? not sure) the forum title link on the main forum page.

James

Ctrl-click, but no-one ever uses it. On a mac trackpad you double tap to right click. On an apple mouse you also double tap to right click. I'm not even sure it has a mechanical button at all...

Thanks James and Byzanti.
Now linking to my new topic on Sound ELements:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=48580068&comments=1

Rachael.