Transcript for:
Mastering Chinese Character Dictionaries

this week we're dealing with one of the most iconic skills in east asian studies using a chinese character dictionary this remains an essential task for learning chinese and japanese today but even for those of you learning korean knowing how to use a character dictionary will enrich your understanding of the korean language and open access to the study of earlier periods of korean culture to introduce chinese character dictionaries i'm going to do this by discussing several topics first the logic of the traditional character dictionary thinking about why it's organized the way it is and and the different component parts of it certainly will make learning to use it easier i also want to introduce the kinds of dictionaries that are out there just so you have a sense of the range that character dictionaries can take and that again will help us to sort of think about how usage determines which dictionary you choose in other words you choose the dictionary based on what you need to do as a linguistic task to do that the central concept that i'm going to spend most of the this lecture dealing with is the concept of the radical the busho in chinese or the bushu in japanese or the busu in korean this concept is central to understanding the organization of every chinese character dictionary but it's a little bit counterintuitive so one has to practice to get used to it let's begin with the actual concept of a chinese character so we call it chinese but we need to distinguish between the origin where these uh developed uh and for one of a better word ownership in other words who gets to use them certainly there's no contesting that what we now see as chinese characters have their origin in china but early on they were adopted throughout east asia so they were adopted in korea japan vietnam and even areas beyond those three and in a sense they became a common property of all of the east asian cultures and as a result they've had an enormous amount of of influence in east asia and they've also served some role in creating a shared civilizational space in east asia now that's the chinese part of the notion of a chinese character character is another issue and what i mean by a character and what we generally mean by a character is a written form right um in the case of chinese characters it represents a unit of meaning a concept basically and although it is connected to pronunciation to the phonetics of the language it is ultimately independent of pronunciation um and in fact it can be associated with one or more pronunciations depending on where you are and i'll have something to say about that in a second there are different ways of talking about chinese characters certainly you will see a variety of different phrases used in english so in addition to the word characters you might see the word graph again referring to a written form so a chinese graph for example sometimes you'll see the word ideograph emphasizing the notion that this is a written form that conveys an idea or a concept so you'll see chinese ideographs sometimes we shift out the word chinese to make it a little bit less national in its tone and so we'll use a word that refers to a kind of chinese cultural sphere the word senetic which is the same root shares the same root from which we get the study of china being synology right so so you may see synthetic graphs or synthetic characters uh for example in east asia the terminology is a little bit more consistent so generally speaking we take two chinese characters one for the word china and one for the the idea of a written form character and put them together and that's what we use and this same term is used throughout east asia china japan and korea although it is pronounced differently not surprisingly given that chinese japanese and korean are three distinct languages so chinese pronounces it japanese kanji and korean hanja but it's the same underlying term it's those those two characters that you can see in that first line under the phrase east asian terminology now to give ourselves a sense of the shared usage mutual influence but pronunciation independence of characters i've put up three examples here and in the left hand most column you can see three different very basic characters they are when you're learning characters among the very first that that you learn and you can see here what i've done is put the various pronunciations down so you can see that in a sense they can influence each other's pronunciation or pronunciation can be derived from it but is not necessarily connected right so the first one da in mandarin it means big or large right and you can see that there are two japanese pronunciations uh japanese very often just uses characters uh with different readings they essentially use the character but i give it different readings the chinese inspired reading the onnyomi right is dai here but the kunyomi the indigenous japanese pronunciation is o korean is dai right so you've now you can see where that da the dye and the dye are coming all together right they're related to each other the same with the second character the chinese jung meaning middle uh jung becomes true in in the japanese onyomi and jung in the korean reading the last one 10 meaning heaven could be 10 in japanese sort of chinese reading the onyomi but in the indigenous reading the queen yomi it could be amatsu and korean is chon right so you can see that there's uh a related pronunciation usage not surprisingly given the characters were borrowed with pronunciations but they are essentially independent you can use the form without using the same pronunciation one example i'd like to give is to think about how mathematics is written mathematical notation in in the modern world we can write an equation using mathematical symbols and someone who's speaking english can read that equation and then someone who's speaking german can read that equation and we wouldn't understand uh what they were necessarily saying if we didn't speak the language they were they were reading in but if they wrote it down we would be able to figure it out right we would know what they were doing what they were saying simply by looking at the pronunciation independent symbols and in some ways that's how chinese characters work in in basic function now before we dive into a further reflection on dictionaries and uh characters in the the way they appear in dictionaries uh it might be helpful to have a sense of of what kind of dictionaries actually uh are compiled for chinese characters they run a pretty wide spectrum from basic dictionaries all the way up to [Music] comprehensive ones on massive scales so uh small-scale character dictionaries uh can have uh a number of different forms so there are dictionaries that are most are essentially uh focused on individual characters right so they will give you a character they'll tell you information about that character um and and that's the focus then there are phrase dictionaries and these are probably the more familiar dictionaries that you've run across these are dictionaries that give you a character and then under that character it gives you all of the compound words or phrases that begin with the with the head word character right so you might have a single character but it might be the first character in a two or three or four character phrase and and some characters can have tens or even a hundred phrases depending on uh how big the dictionary is and how much it can accommodate now these kinds of dictionaries and all kinds of dictionaries could in theory but these kind of dictionaries definitely are character to the native language so for example if it's a chinese produced character dictionary either character focused dictionary or phrase dictionary it could be chinese characters to chinese language chinese characters to provide the definitions etc uh if it's produced in japan it would be chinese characters to japanese and in korean it would be chinese characters to korean and of course in the case of japanese and korean they would be using the japanese or korean pronunciations readings of the characters for americans studying chinese characters in one of the east asian languages the dictionaries would be from the characters to english obviously in addition to those sort of basic types of dictionaries there are specialty dictionaries um probably the most um visible ones are rhyming dictionaries um that trying to figure out what uh characters rhyme with other characters and wanting to for example make use of them in poetry or something like that but there are other kinds of specialty dictionaries as well that might focus on characters with a certain that are used in a certain area of of expertise for example archaeology being a good example and then the most uh expansive of the dictionary types are what uh we often uh in east asian studies refer to as encyclopedic dictionaries these are massive dictionaries um and there there aren't really any encyclopedic dictionaries that go from characters to english so they tend to be produced by scholars working in the languages that actually employ chinese characters probably the most famous one of these encyclopedic dictionaries was produced in the 1950s well 40s and 50s in japan by a scholar known as murahashi tetsuji and that's his daikon wagitan right the great chinese japanese phrase dictionary which comes that came out in 12 massive volumes it's a really stunning piece of work highly inspired by murahashi's efforts was a dictionary that came out in the 1960s in taiwan the so-called jung datsuria in 10 volumes and more recently in the people's republic uh a massive 12-volume dictionary the kanye datsudian these encyclopedic dictionaries illustrate the scope of uh chinese characters um they all contain uh approaching or exceeding uh 50 000 characters so one of the things that when you're studying chinese characters one realizes pretty quickly is that there are a lot of chinese characters and while modern language usage even in chinese which only uses chinese characters to write as opposed to japanese which mixes kanji and and kana the syllabary the two syllabaries even in chinese only a small percentage of all the possible characters that have been created are really regularly used but still it's a it's a fairly formidable task to learn all those characters now for those of you who are less familiar with characters and this is particularly true of students of korean because korea has stopped using hanja as a regular part of the writing the korean writing system i thought it might be helpful just to kind of review what exactly a character consists of right what what how do we compose characters when we talk about characters what they all have is a series of repetitive visual elements so they're made up of strokes that you see in patterns over and over again but they those patterns are mixed and matched uh in to make as i said tens of thousands of of possible visual combinations right and characters follow several principles right so there is a certain calligraphic consistency in other words common elements are written the same way so brush strokes when characters were originally written with writing brushes now they're written with pens but when they were brush strokes there developed a certain consistency on how the various elements were written and the order in which they were written so stroke order is an important part of learning to write chinese characters and it's often one of the sort of giveaways that a character has been written by a non-native user because they don't quite have the instincts for proper stroke order so those of you studying japanese and chinese as non-native speakers really ought to devote some attention to getting your stroke orders correct in addition to calligraphic consistency their characters generally have elements that convey some meaning what i'm calling here semantic significance the elements that have semantic significance and those can be obvious they can also be implied from earlier forms that are no longer used but the more familiar you are with chinese characters the more likely you are to spot the significance when we get to discussing radicals in a couple minutes um uh you will get a sense of some of that semantic significance uh in addition characters uh often have substructures par of the overall character that are associated with pronunciations now i just said that characters are independent of pronunciation and in uh in essence they are you don't have to pay attention to the pronunciation to understand what the character uh is uh trying to convey nevertheless um there's long historical association of a character with a pronunciation and and that makes sense if you think about it because before there was writing people were speaking right and so the writing system was an attempt to capture the concepts that were being spoken uh and so the as characters were developed they were sort of arbitrarily associated with with certain pronunciations and then from that initial association with pronunciation you could have you could reuse those those characters as elements in other characters to capture words that were pronounced the same for example so when you take those together you have a kind of consistent writing system in other words how you write and produce the characters and you do that by combining uh repetitive elements some of which have meaning significance and some of which have pronunciation clues in some ways we can see all of those principles being activated in how characters were formed and generally speaking the the there are four main ways that characters seem to have come about the the most obvious ones and this is often a cliche about chinese characters is that some characters were formed as pictographs right in other words they they were a picture of what they were supposed to be so you have this four-stroke character here which in chinese is pronounced that means sun and if you kind of look at it you can see that it's kind of represents a kind of encircling object with a kind of middle uh element right which kind of captures the what the sun looks like if you look up into the sky then you there are conceptual diagrams in other words it's not a picture of anything specific but it is a written representation of some idea and the two characters that i've put here one for above and one for below i think are pretty obvious right so one has a couple of strokes above a level line that's the first one and the other one has a couple of strokes below a level line and that would be the second one right so they don't they're not picturing anything specifically but they are depicting the idea of aboveness and belowness then there are uh compound idea graphs right idiographs where you take a couple of representative characters uh representational characters and combine them and thereby denote another concept right so here we take the character for a tree and we combine it with the character for the sun which was up above and if you put those two together you get a concept you get a character that was used to denote east and the standard explanation of that is it's the sun rising uh behind trees right so as as the sun rises behind the trees that denotes the east right now those are relatively small categories of characters uh the the largest by far uh category of character's character formation uh is these uh so-called phonetic compounds and this gets to that notion of an uh a meaning element and a pronunciation element right so you combine some kind of of meaning signifier with a pre-existing sound character and you get a new character that covers both right so the the chinese word for lake right takes uh as its pronunciation element uh another character pronounced who right and then it adds a signifying element those three strokes on the left hand side of the character and when you that those three strokes signify water so if you have water that is pronounced who then that becomes who combined as lake right which makes sense so the earlier writers would have known that the word for lake is pronounced who and so when they see the character uh it's unambiguous for them because it's a character pronounced who to do with water so having thought about the composition of characters uh that brings us naturally to the topic of a radical uh abusho or a bushu or abusu when we talk about a radical what we mean is uh that it's a visual element in a character that is used to classify it as related to other characters right so all the characters that have a shared visual component that we can use as a as an organizational principle right now this responds to a pretty obvious need right as i said while there is some pronunciation association with characters there's nothing that requires it to be connected to pronunciation and in fact they are in some ways as soon as they're created unmoored from their pronunciation the pronunciation of chinese characters within china has changed dramatically over the centuries and millennia and of course as they were borrowed into other languages they continued to evolve in terms of how they were pronounced so in a sense you can't rely on the pronunciation to organize the the dictionary very easily right so radicals be were an a good solution to that problem of how do you characterize characters and then how do you organize them uh in a dictionary when you have tens of thousands of characters you know the situation's a little easier with say the english alphabet which has 26 letters and therefore you can organize everything in terms of the sequence of those 26 symbols but if you've got 50 000 symbols you need something that is going to uh sort of provide a a logical sort of structure right and and radicals are a fairly logical uh system that is not dependent on pronunciation right so what this means in terms of implementation uh is that uh every chinese character uh has at least one radical uh within it uh sometimes they have more but every character by convention has at least one uh and uh that radical is shared with other characters uh often related concepts so for example that three stroke element that we looked in the in the word uh lake in the previous slide is associated with water right it means water uh and therefore characters that have that element as a radical often have something to do with moisture or water or some related uh concept now the traditional radical system which i'm going to introduce here is the sort of result of centuries of gradual evolution but it was formalized in the 18th century so the the 1700s the early 1700s is when it was kind of reached maturity and this is a system known as the kangxi radical system which gets its name because the emperor at the time when a imperially commissioned dictionary using the system was published was named the kangasi emperor as you can see he was in the late 17th and early 18th centuries the kangsi radical system basically identifies 214 radicals right so that's a lot of radicals uh if you are coming out of a alphabetic tradition like english where you've got 26 letters to organize your dictionary 214 is a much larger number than 26 obviously but 214 is a tiny number compared to tens of thousands of characters right so if you can take 50 000 characters and organize them into 214 bundles it's a much more efficient system obviously so this kongxi radical system really become became the basis for all character dictionaries uh after its development uh and it's still used this the traditional system is still used in japan uh in taiwan the traditional system was modified in the people's republic of china beginning in the 1950s to accommodate its decision to [Music] simplify uh chinese characters and basically uh to reduce the number of strokes needed to write some of the more common chinese characters when they simplified those characters they found that the traditional radicals were not as conducive to dictionary organization for those of you who are studying chinese in the dedicated lecture on chinese dictionaries which you will find in the chinese studies material subfolder has some discussion of of the simplified system so within the a dictionary using the traditional radical system each character is classified with one of the radicals as i said even if it has more than one so the traditional system essentially identifies which possible radical it is and then puts the character with that radical in the dictionary and traditional dictionaries generally put the characters in the body of the dictionary according to radical right and then to put them in a more predictable order then uh one counts the number of strokes and and puts them in in increasing in order of increasing numbers of strokes and so if you take the radical identification and the stroke counting method you get a pretty accessible organization for a dictionary for handling tens of thousands of of characters as a result of that the logic of it uh suggests that the dictionary character dictionaries have several parts right most character dictionaries well i shouldn't say most all character dictionaries have a body of the dictionary and that's organized by the character head word and there's usually information about the character head word given pronunciation meaning other kinds of information might be given then if it's phrase dictionary there will be compounds uh with uh definitions in other words all of the charac all of the words or concepts compounds right one or more character two or more characters together uh that appear with the head word as the first word and the compound appear and then their definitions will be given the body of the dictionary is organized as i said traditionally by radicals although uh in the modern period the last [Music] half century or a little bit more more and more dictionaries are being organized in places that use characters by pronunciation so you have to check your dictionary to figure out whether it's organized by radical or by or by pronunciation in addition to the body of the dictionary which is obviously the useful part of the dictionary there are a series of indices that will bring you from the word on the page that you're looking for and you don't understand and you need to look up to the actual place in the dictionary where the character appears the most obvious uh indus index that you would need is a radical index right so in other words how do you find the characters if you don't know how they're pronounced uh or if you've never seen it before well you look you figure out what the radical is and then you go to the index with that radical and it'll tell you um where the um where the character appears in the body now if the body of the dictionary is organized by pronunciation then the dictionary may provide a pronunciation index so if you happen to know how it's pronounced then you can you can look in the pronunciation index even if the dictionary is organized by radical right if of course if the dictionary itself is organized by pronunciation you don't need a pronunciation index the dictionary body itself is a pronunciation index obviously the organizing the body of the dictionary by pronunciation or providing a pronunciation index is only useful to you as a user if you already know the character and how it's pronounced if you don't know how it's pronounced then you've got to use the radical index to to to locate it some dictionaries uh will provide uh what's called a total stroke number index in other words you instead of worrying about the radical uh or it's pronounced or the character's pronunciation you just count the total number of strokes uh in the character and uh this total stroke number index will just list all the characters in order of the number of total strokes they have in them that is most useful in small dictionaries uh it's a very important tool for some characters that for which the radicals are not obvious it also is most helpful for characters with few strokes or characters with lots of strokes it turns out there's a lot of characters that have the same number of middle level middle number of strokes so for example there are thousands and thousands of characters where with eight nine or ten strokes that's just a sort of common number far fewer characters with 20 strokes far fewer characters with three strokes um so uh in a sense once you get into the middle numbers uh that sort of 8 to 12 stroke number then the bigger the dictionary the less useful the total stroke number index will be it can still be useful but it's time consuming relative to just learning how to use radicals many modern dictionaries now also include useful appendices where they reproduce important information altogether so you know some dictionaries have an index of place names like province names or prefecture uh names uh some will have seasonal terms terms for uh uh times of the year calendar terms things like that right so when you're looking at a dictionary you're trying to decide you know if you want to buy the dictionary or something uh it's always useful to see okay well what's in the body what kind of information they got what kind of indices does it have is it going to be useful for me going forward and then perhaps are there useful appendices that that i might imagine using so now uh let's uh think about character dictionary organization in in more granular terms in more detailed terms right so as i said in a traditional dictionary all characters appear together by radical modern dictionaries may do it by pronunciation but we're going to stick for now to get our heads around the radical or notion we're going to stick with radical organization so we start from the premise that all characters appear together by radical right and then within the dictionary uh radicals appear in uh in are ordered by the number of strokes in the radical right so uh radicals with one stroke come first then come radicals with two strokes then three then four and so on right so uh to give you an example here uh returning to that uh character that that means sun that i introduced earlier it turns out that's also a radical and if you count it up it has four strokes so it comes after the radical without the middle stroke right which has is counted as having three strokes right so the open box radical or the mouth radical is what we often call that uh the mouth radical comes first and then later on comes the the sun radical uh with four strokes as i say the indices help to locate characters within the dictionary right and characters with the same radical are put in order according to the number of strokes left behind after you eliminate the radical right and we often call those residual strokes so a character will be made up of its radical plus all the other strokes in it right and so you can calculate the residual strokes by eliminating uh the radical strokes right so here the first category cat character example here means clear like as in a clear sky and you can see that meaning a clear sky it's significant that it has the sun radical right so there's a four stroke radical that we see on the left-hand side and then if we were to count up the remaining strokes you'd have one two three four five six seven eight right so it's the sun radical plus eight residual strokes and that's going to come before uh another character with um with the sun radical that has 12 residual strokes right so if you counted up all the strokes in that second character you'd have 16 you take out the 4 for the radical and that leaves 12 left over and then you put them in order of whichever one has fewer comes first and whichever one has more comes later right now compound words are made up of more than one character as i said and they appear in the body of the dictionary under the first character as the head word and then in the order of total number of strokes in the second character and if the second character if they have three characters then uh and there's ones with the same second character then under the third character etcetera etcetera right so basically what what you need to do is learn to identify radicals and count strokes so here's an example we've got two terms right one means the first means culture the second means literature right these are used uh in in all three east asian languages um they in a dictionary they would all appear under that first character which is in chinese when uh in japanese and in korean as bun as well right and then within the list of compounds under uh that character that that bun or one character uh you would first run across uh the first one meaning culture because it only has four strokes uh and then later on in the list you run across the second one because that second character has 16 strokes right so you need to get used to counting total numbers of strokes and the strokes of the different parts the radical versus the residual parts now this is the the traditional radical chart which lists out all 214 radicals this this actually comes from the murahashi encyclopedic dictionary that i introduced earlier um and i put it up here because it's particularly uh clear and well laid out and it has a couple of uh important uh things here all right so this is the here you can see up here this term means uh radical index right and it basically uh starts with radicals that have one stroke so this means one stroke this means two strokes this means three strokes right and then you go four five six seven eight nine 10 11 etc right so you can see the most strokes in a radical is 17 for this very complicated radical over here for those of you who are studying korean the numbers well the first three numbers are pretty obvious one line means one two lines mean two three lines means three from there on uh the characters are characters and so they're not obviously pictographs and you just have to learn them luckily this chart is still useful because you can you can literally go across the line so from 1 to 2 2 to 3 3 to 4 4 four to five five to six right remember that's reading from uh right to left on this chart right and it's fairly straightforward but the the point being is uh how we have the character the radicals arranged here is by the number of strokes in the in the ca in the radical there are some [Music] anomalies here that that we'll point out coming forward but the basic principle is is fairly straightforward i think right now there are a couple of things uh that curveballs that get thrown when you first start using a radical character dictionary some radicals uh are also characters on their own so as i said you're trying to identify the radical and the residual strokes but in some cases the radical the character is the radical and so there are no residual strokes so we have here uh three examples um meaning uh one meaning would one meaning bamboo one meaning sun that's our repetitive example that i keep using and you see here i've circled where they appear on the radical chart so the first two or i shouldn't say the first two the first one is a four stroke radical the second one being bamboo is a six-row stroke radical and the third one meaning sun is a four-stroke radical and so that's where they appear on the uh on the table um there are characters uh there are radicals that uh only appear as parts of uh characters they they never stand on their own as characters so for example we have this one up here that is never never appears by itself but it is an important part of other characters and for example in this character that means to build or erect right so with that as a kind of preamble we might think about how to begin identifying radicals now let me emphasize and i'm going to repeat this several times this is not an automatic skill this is a skill that requires practice and in some at some element at some level it's almost an art because there is a kind of some some radicals are not obvious many radicals are very obvious as soon as you see the character you'll know exactly what the radical is but not every character is like that and it takes practice to recognize radicals uh and to decide what's the most likely radical and it's certainly the case that you may run into situations where you need to look up look the look for the character under multiple radicals because it there it could be any number of ones so you you need to practice this it's obviously relatively easy to practice for those of you studying chinese in japanese because everything you're reading from your textbook to your to any supplemental materials you're reading will have characters in them so even if you know the character you can practice looking it up to make sure you can figure out how to find it in a dictionary for those of you studying korean it's a little more difficult because as i said korean is no longer using hanja as a regular part of the writing system but still there are plenty of korean language materials from earlier periods that use characters and you can you can look those up in in various dictionaries as well now if you're going to start thinking about how to identify radicals uh you want to really keep three uh questions in mind right uh the first is uh what is the radical you know so that's the that's what you're trying to do you're trying to identify what's the radical so you're going to visually scan the character looking for those repetitive elements to to get used to doing that and to kind of get a um a handle on it it's not a bad idea to spend a little bit of time just scanning the radical index for example the motohashi radical index even if you're not studying japanese that is such a well laid out visual radical table that just looking through it is is pretty helpful make you familiar with various kinds of radicals and their variations and i've put that murahashi table in all of the subfolders all of the studies materials subfolders so the chinese studies material folder japanese studies material folder and the korean studies material folder all have that murahashi radical index in them so you can just kind of pop it open and keep you know keep your eyes on it as you're looking at characters the second question you're going to ask is where is the radical character uh the radical in the character uh and in fact this is one of the ways um to sort of figure out what the radical is is to sort of look in the spaces that radicals tend to appear right and then once you've got a suspect then you want to figure out okay where in the index table is that radical because you've got to find the radical in the table and then look for the character under that radical in the index table in terms of of identifying the where question answering the where question in many ways that's a process of elimination that i'm going to walk you through and show you a couple of examples to give you a sense of that basically you're eliminating the various possibilities right you ask yourself is it all of the character is it on the left side of the character is it on the right side of the character is it on the top it's the bottom is it around uh the character etc right and as you eliminate each possibility then you get closer to identifying it as i said the what is a function of becoming familiar with the radical table but there are some tricky ones that change form or otherwise present uh sort of unexpected twists in terms of the the third where question where in the index table it is that's really a function of counting strokes right so that second strategy that that second skill that i talked about uh besides identifying radicals is also about learning how to count strokes so you need to to get both of those again there are uh only a couple of of uh tricky elements to it uh so for example that um very often a a right angle that goes across and down is counted as one stroke instead of what looks like two strokes but you can get a sense of that again by just looking at the radical table and figuring out how are they getting to three strokes or four strokes or five strokes in that radical i think some folks find it useful i certainly did in thinking about the radicals in terms of what they mean most of the radicals have an underlying meaning that can hap that can be help you help explain why characters are classified the way they are and and what they mean uh in fact looking at a radical cons of a character that you don't know can often give you a hint uh from context of what what it might mean or kind of the range of things it might mean so i've given you just some examples uh obviously with 214 radicals that take way too long to go through a whole the whole list but that very first one that we looked at is one so not surprisingly that's the first radical in the list then there's the person radical the knife radical the mouth radical we talked about already big we've already looked at that's a radical that's also a character woman that's also a character heart that's also a character hand water we've talked about and i'm going to say something a little bit more about that variation in a little bit fire jade stone bamboo meat that meat one and then grass you can see are similar to water that we'll talk about in a second clothing you'll see is a very has a variation that is reminiscent but you might miss it you might spend a lot of time looking for the the form in the parentheses not realizing it's actually just a variation on the regular form to the left of it the radical for word appears in pretty much anything to do with languages or speech or any characters i mean that have to do with language or speech or um anything making making noise with your mouth basically um gold or metal radical of course for those of you studying korean that character may be already familiar as a uh the most popular surname in korea kim rain radicals and there's plenty more that we could talk about now i said identifying radicals was a matter of process of elimination and if you'll pardon the uh goofy uh professor uh humor uh i've i've named the that process of uh elimination the eight radical steps um so uh again we're starting with uh is the character a radical by itself right because if it's a radical by itself you don't have to go any further that's that's just it um and so recognizing the ones that are radicals themselves is important um and we all all of us who have learned chinese characters and how to use dictionaries have suffered the experience where you spend way too much time looking the character up in various places in the index because you're identifying different strokes as the possible radical and it turns out you forgot it's a radical itself so that's the first thing to do is just think could this be a radical by itself if it isn't then you go to the next step which is the left side because the vast majority of uh radicals appear on the left side after that it's more most likely to be on the right side of the character i'd say although i've never done a statistical study of it but my gut tells me that after the left side right side then top radicals are more common than bottom and then the various kinds of encircling type of radicals what we often around the department call enclosure radicals and northwest refers to the quadrant which uh we'll get to um in a sense one one uh way to kind of think this through is to imagine that the character's sitting on a kind of grid and that north is at the top and south is at the bottom and uh east is is on the right and west is on the left and then kind of think through those uh elimination uh questions that that i just put up there right so uh there you see that that word radical is uh on the left here uh and then the next one over has a kind of looks like a stylized letter b on the right hand side then the further over you can see a top radical which is a grass radical and then the bottom left you can see the radicals on the bottom that is the heart radical then there's one of these enclosure radicals which we might describe as the northwest kind of enclosure if you imagine the top of the character's north and the left hand side is west that's kind of a northwest enclosure that's a an illness radical that that radical appears in many characters that denote some kind of physical ailment or meant even a mental ailment as well and then what we might call the southwest enclosure or here it's labeled as left down but on our list before on the previous slide we would have called it southwest right so imagining that grid and thinking about the character not as a kind of random collection of strokes but as discrete units that can map onto a grid is a useful way to think about uh think about identifying radicals and to think about characters in general it's one reason why those of you who are studying chinese and japanese your teachers will often give you sheets of paper with little blocks on it make you practice writing your characters your kanji uh in uh in the box to make sure that they're all kind of about the same size and and kind of fill the box right because that essentially lays them onto a conceptual grid and makes them all the same size regardless of how many strokes they have now i mentioned that there were a variety of irregularities in in the radical index some radicals have pretty dramatic okay i can't resist upon have pretty radical variations so you can see for example that first one on this list of examples right up here right that's the fire radical but that can appear in in one of two forms um if it's on the left-hand side of a character it will appear as this form but if it's on the bottom of a character it'll appear over here right so but they're listed in the same place in the radical index they're all under this radical but they they vary uh by appearance same with this one this is just a variation that appears always on the right hand side of a character probably the most the trickiest part of radical irregularities is when the variant form also has a different number of strokes to it again this comes out of convention but there's nothing you can do about it so the heart radical when it's written as a full radical like we saw on the bottom of a character has four strokes but when it appears as a radical on the left-hand side of a character it has only three strokes so we go from four strokes to three strokes so that means all the characters with this heart radical don't appear in the radical index where the three-stroke radicals are they appear over in the four-stroke radical and if you're counting residual strokes you're not going to subtract four from the total stroke you're only going to subtract three because this one only has three strokes and it's radical so you have to be aware of that this is the hand radical again from four strokes to three strokes here's our friend the water radical from four strokes one two three four four strokes to three strokes one two three here's the grass radical that we looked at six strokes but four and if you do handwriting you may be tempted to think it's only three uh because that that cross line often uh is is run through as a single stroke so if it's printed you'll see it as four strokes but if you see it hand written you might think it's three strokes but it's actually a six stroke radical that southwestern enclosure below it which has three strokes to it is actually a seven stroke character right and then these are particularly insidious this is a three-stroke rat it looks like a three-stroke radical but it's a three-stroke variation and it's a different radical depending on what side of the character it is so if it's on the right side of the character like this one right it's under this radical in the traditional system and if it's on this side it's under this radical right now there's a little bit of a mnemonic here so you can think about this little stroke down here kind of pointing towards the right and it turns out that's when it appears on the right so this little line here points to the right and the variation appears on the right if it doesn't point to the right then it appears on the left you're welcome many dictionaries will actually show the variance in their radical indices and in fact um uh motahashi's radical table does that so if we just look at it here you will see some of the examples that i just gave right so here's the hand radical and it's variation right under it it's in the four-stroke zone by the way these numbers under here refer to the volume of the dictionary remember this is a 12-volume dictionary so these these numbers down here refer to the volume of the dictionary that the radicals or characters with that radical appear in so don't don't get forward fool this is the number of strokes in the radical that means four so here's our hand radical here's our water radical right goes across two volumes from six to seven so that's why that's there here's our fire radical with the variation um here's our southwest enclosure running radical sort of referred to as a running radical uh etc and if if we go down to here's our little b or ear some people think this looks like an ear on the right under that radical and the version on the left over here right so you just need to be aware of that again uh sort of becoming familiar with the the table will certainly help with that so if we just sort of take a look through some examples just to get you familiar with identifying the radical here we have some examples these are all characters and i've circled them on the table to help you see them these are all examples that they look like they could be have other radicals but in fact are radicals themselves right so pieces of it pieces of these uh characters do appear as radicals in in other places so for example this bottom mouth uh type of uh element uh certainly appears as a mouth radical elsewhere in other characters and you might think oh that must be the the radical and so you kind of go to the radical index under the mouth radical uh and then it turns out that not really it's uh it's its own um radical which is right here which i forgot to circle um cara the more characters the more strokes a character has the more you will be tempted into looking elsewhere because as i said at the beginning um there are there are uh uh calligraphic consists consistently consistently appearing calligraphic elements that appear and so they look like um radicals and you will be tempted away from them but these four exam these three examples that i've just put up for dragon turtle and nose even though they all have multiple units that could be radicals are in fact radicals themselves right so uh the more characters the more strokes a character has the the more you will be tempted away from thinking it's uh a character a radical itself as i said left side radicals are usually relatively easy to identify the biggest trick here is to watch for the the variations in the number of strokes in those uh radicals right um but here you have some examples uh to uh to look at right um again the the variations are where where the tricks come in for this this category we have some examples of right hand elements which i think you can find them all but here again is our right left ear trick that we've already talked about so we don't need to spend too much time on that and here are some examples of characters that have top radicals right notice the bamboo looks a little bit truncated it's not doesn't lose strokes or anything and and you can obviously tell it's the same but when it's written as a radical it has those long down strokes but those are shortened considerably when it appears as a radical and here are some bottom radicals again we have that heart radical here and the fire radical underneath this is a shell radical etc so northwest enclosure radicals that you can see they all have the shape of a kind of enclosing form to the upper left and then similarly we have the southwestern enclosures and if we look at the table you can again see those remember this running radical here is actually a seven stroke radical over here right so you need to keep an eye on that one here we have the total enclosure uh to be honest with you this one is a little bit more arbitrary i think uh in how we think about it uh some are obviously enclosures so this one here which is this radical up here that's clearly enclosing the rest of the of the character uh notice however that what's enclosed in this particular character is itself also a radical right so you need to choose the outside enclosure not the inside uh it's rare that the inside of a character is the radical almost always the radical is on the periphery of the character or if there is a choice uh it it's more likely to be the peripheral element rather than the internal element there are less total enclosures this one meaning gate often has things underneath here which is sort of enclosed but not totally closed off these are obviously incompletely closed but they all have some kind of more general in closing than the northwest and and southwest enclosures at least to my eye anyway um and here they appear the various ones that are on this these characters here appear on the table all right let me wrap this up with some final thoughts i do think that character dictionary usage is an important part of east asian studies um certainly as i mentioned japanese and chinese uh continue to use characters as central as elements in their writing systems for the chinese that's all they use for chinese characters and the japanese continue to use significant numbers of characters in its in their writing system korean is certainly less essential since the orthography has [Music] basically become all hunger orthography at this point but characters are still implied in sino-korean vocabulary which is a big chunk of of the korean vocabulary and anything involving historical materials say before before the 1970s uh will require that you use or have the ability to recognize hanja so i think it's it's practically still important it is also abstractly important because after all for most of two millennia all three of the languages chinese japanese and korean made use of chinese characters the same could be said for vietnamese as i've already pointed out so just thinking about the long sweep of east asian civilization knowing about characters and how they function is an important part of the field that you are entering now as i said over and over the key skills here are recognizing radicals and counting strokes that's what you need to do you need to learn to do that and it the the more instinctive that is the faster you can use a dictionary and i can i can promise you that if you practice regularly you will become uh fast dictionary users there's no there's no magic here uh there's no hidden talent it's just a matter of practicing and the more you practice the more uh you'll you'll get the hang of it um the the common pitfalls as you're doing this especially when you're early on although i will admit i've been doing this for a very very long time and i still make mistakes so um you just have to get used to that but the big the common pitfalls are the characters uh with uh one-stroke radicals because obviously the one-stroke radicals appear in every single character so the temptation to look there or to miss them is is pretty common uh and then the characters with their own radicals are also a problem i could add to this uh the um the variations uh invaria of radicals but i think those become so uh instinctive so quickly that you don't really i wouldn't describe them as a pitfall i would say now having done this for decades where i still make most of my errors and looking up characters in dictionaries is one-stroke radicals and characters at their own radicals that i just keep forgetting uh that they are um so those i think are the big the big pitfalls um when we talk about the modern period uh things change so what i've just laid out for you is a kind of rigid traditional system and certainly up until um the mid the mid 20th century the first world war that's exactly how dictionaries across east asia would have been organized modern dictionaries have tinkered with the system a little bit even if they are using the 214 radicals they might recategorize things those of you using the new nelson japanese english character dictionary because you're in japanese studies will notice that there's some surprising examples there but the key thing is just to be patient and think through what the possibilities are there's nothing it may not be traditional but it's nothing that violates the principles that i've laid out already there is one very nice trend uh among dictionaries which is that um more and more modern dictionaries are listing characters under all of the radicals that all of the potential radicals that the character has right so you don't run across that situation where it has three or four possible radicals and you pick the wrong one so you're not going to find it more and more dictionaries are putting it in under all the radicals and pointing you to the to the place in the dictionary where you would find it so i think um that that is a really positive uh development that will save you time uh going forward all right i'm going to stop this lecture here remember that each of the language groups has a dedicated supplementary lecture in the subfolders to walk you through how to look up characters in dictionaries for your particular language so chinese japanese and korean okay i will stop there