I've never taken a formal Chinese class, and so I've never studied radicals.

Lately I started doing so with Anki, but I got frustrated because I couldn't remember the correct pinyin, or tones.

I'm starting to think that the most important parts of radicals are the meaning they represent (i.e. "bamboo"), and how they are written. Would you all agree? When you study them, do you bother with pinyin & tones?

Alex

I have never formally studied radicals. I feel their name and pinyin aren't particularly useful. What they mean and the ability to write them are very important, though.

I've been using the deck provided here, though I also picked up a chart to learn them as well. Originally I had thought they would be good for just learning to use a paper dictionary, or even some online ones, as well as learning how to construct them. That is, I mostly learned to recognize them and not to necessarily know how to read them.

In practical use, however, I have found them more useful to know how to actually SAY them. For example, it is very easy to confuse two characters, especially names, in Chinese due to similar sounds. So, I've noticed in Taiwan anyway, people will say [radical name] 部的 [character], or other similar wording, to clarify. I've noticed this in class too.

Most formal Chinese courses I've taken kind of gloss over it--they feed you the words anyway, and they're already pre-established within the book and within the chapter.

At any rate, I feel that you should learn how to read them. That's my take!

I've never isolated and studied them. I do know many of them just based on my study of characters. I think someday I'll go back and fill in the gaps, but not today.

@Zhongruige Today I was talking with a PRC Chinese teacher and I asked about that. I rarely encountered it during my time there, but I thought I would double check. That appears to be a Taiwanese thing. People in mainland China very rarely use that style of explanation. She also thinks learning the radical terms isn't worth the time. Learning what they mean and how to write them is enough for life in the PRC. I don't know about Taiwan.

Yeah, I'm in the mainland and I've never heard of anyone clarifying a character by it's radical. Mostly they clarify the character by repeating it in another common word.

In fact, I have a friend who helps me with my Chinese, and when I was learning the names for the radicals, she didn't even know what they were called. I think I'm just going to stick to what the radicals represent for now, and if I ever go to Taiwan, then actually learn how to say them.

I've never formally studied radicals, and only know the names of a few of the basic and most common ones. Doesn't seem like it would hurt to know them all though, especially if plan on being a linguist or doing a lot of dictionary work, etc.

I did the list here on skritter, but was not very strict on them. It helped me for some characters to help remember them. For example if you know that the right part of 隔 and 膈 is ge, it is way easier to remember the character, since the left part adds an obvious meaning clue.

However if you practice long enough you might figure that out anyway. But when I started skrittering, they hadn´t implemented character breakdown yet.

I did the radicals before, you know almost all of them already anyways. I think it took me a few extra hours as there were some advanced ones. Useful for ordering noodles? No. Wouldn't it be cool if you new all the latin roots by putting minimal effort though? I had one friend on here who could read lots of characters and I suggested he start out on Skitter only using radicals, he was blown away at how logical characters become and it all clicked he said. He's been able to read characters for over 40 years too...

FWIW I feel that knowing the radicals for Japanese helps. In Japanese often the pronunciation of one radical is the same as the compound. So knowing both the pronunciation and meaning of radicals is worth it in my opinion. I can't speak for Chinese though...

I use the Radical list here on Skritter occasionally, just for review. They help with predicting punctuation moreso than with predicting meaning, IMHO.