A _radical_ is the portion of a kanji that is used to list that kanji in a
kanji dictionary. It could represent the "general" meaning (whatever that is),
it could represent the sound, or it could represent other things that I don't
know.

I don't think we can know what the radical is for a new kanji just by looking
at it. Although I learned many kanji, I didn't find any pattern whatsoever in
what the radical for a kanji has to be.

All this confusion is making me ask this: where does the concept of _kanji
radical_ come from to begin with? And more importantly, why isn't there a
single definition for it? The reason I am asking this is because while I can
see that radicals are NOT the simplest building blocks of all kanji (which is
what I thought before), they are still somehow supposed to help us break down
the kanji for study and looking up in dictionary. How exactly are they helpful
at all with all the chaos in Japanese?
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2013-05-04T23:58:50.080
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2013-07-03T13:49:21.960
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kanji radicals
Why don't radicals have the same definition for all kanji?
The choice of radicals (部首{ぶしゅ}) as in the dictionary radicals (as opposed to
any other selection of components), comes from Chinese and presumably was
adopted alongside the kanji themselves.

The first source to use radicals was a second-century Chinese dictionary
called Shuōwén Jiězì (說文解字 - in Japanese 説文解字{せつもんかいじ}). This included 540
radicals. The set of 214 radicals popularly used today are often called Kangxi
radicals from the name of a standard Chinese dictionary of the 18th century
which used them (but they were used in earlier works). There is more
discussion on the Kangxi radicals in an earlier question
[here](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/8216/). The Kangxi
radicals are generally used to be consistent, but there could be lots of ways
of splitting up the characters. Simplified Chinese uses a set of 187 radicals
(Xinhua Zidian radicals), for example.

The point of the radicals was never to tell you what the meaning of a
character was, but to simply provide a way of indexing. Using a paper
dictionary, if the characters are indexed by radical rather than sound it is
possible to look up characters you don't know the reading of (even if you have
to check a couple of possibilities). When using a physical dictionary, that's
quite useful and saves time.

With computers there are other methods to find kanji, even when you can't
copy-paste or don't know the reading (multi-radical/component search,
handwriting input), so knowing what the dictionary radical is becomes less
important.

There are still many cases where there are obvious patterns, and these can
help particularly when remembering how to write a kanji. e.g. 金 on left hand
side is normally related to metal in some way - names of metals or things made
out of metals - 金、銀、鉛、鈴、銅、鍵、etc.

Many body parts have 月 in (in these kanji this radical was 肉 originally and is
sometimes called 肉月), as can be seen in 肺、臓、胆、肝、脚、胴, etc, and I believe in
this case it's pretty much always on the left hand side.

Or how about 犭? Actual beasts (猪・狼・猿・猫), kanji with a connection to hunting
(狩, 猟、 狙, 獲 ), and kanji that you can connect metaphorically to beasts (犯 and
猛, for example), all feature.

You don't have to know the names of all the radicals or what they originally
"meant" (in many cases the exact origin of a kanji is not 100% clear anyway),
but being aware of common components can provide a sort of memory hook for
those cases where there's some sort of connection between the components and
either the meaning or reading of the kanji.
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