Every character has a certain number of strokes, and learning how to count them is one of the essential skills involved in mastering the traditional dictionary. Characters are listed under the appropriate radical, subgrouped by the number of strokes in addition to the radical.
it’s definitely a worthwhile adventure.
I did it 10 years ago…I realized how arbitrary the selection of a radical was. Radicals were used so that characters could be sorted in a dictionary.
Obviously there are many ways you can search a characters now. Radicals biggest benefit was seeing the meaning correlation between characters which had a certain radical, but that meaning correlation is not 100%.
There is also sound correlation between some characters. what’s important is knowing which ones have sound correlation and which don’t.
I’ve actually indexed and databased all traditional and simplified characters into it’s radicals, parts, components, and allow you to search via any part/radical either via spatial, stroke, meaning, sound…
http://www.sunrisemethod.com or check out my wordpress.com.
Let me know if you have any questions about learning Chinese characters. I spent 10 years on this topic
Thanks very much for your comments. I’m glad to know about your site and look forward to reading your blog.
Learning characters by their components is certainly the only sensible method — at least for printed forms (cursive script is a whole other bowl of niúzá 牛雜, though).
I’m not sure I agree that “Radicals were used so that characters could be sorted in a dictionary.” It’s quite true that what we think of today as the standard radical in any given character has to do with dictionaries, but many of those elements serve a structural function: semantic disambiguation. They presumably served that function even before there were dictionaries.