Tomorrow's Chinese/Japanese Radical(s)

#chinese #mandarin #hanzi #japanese #kanji .
After setting your neurons into crazy loops with all the complex characters here, I am happy to announce that tomorrow - February 3, 2009 - is the day when all will be peace and ease here. Then I will start to post everything from step one, hopefully with a couple of updates every day. No promise, though.

The entire idea with this site is to demonstrate that it is NOT very difficult to learn and remember even the most complex character. This is not to say that it will not require time and effort, but the process per se is not something to fear or loathe.

Instead of seeing 2000+ Kanji or 3000+ Hanzi as your dreadful future, you can instead see a limited amount of friendly components, radicals, primitives, or graphems (a term used in the book Kanji ABC) where each of them is fairly easy to learn and memorize.

Despite the fact that I have never used these items as part of the list of RADICALS, I have chosen to start there since they are easily available on the net: List of Kangxi radicals - Wikipedia. Suddenly we have a limited list of 204 radicals, which will be boiled down to even a smaller number here for learning reasons. (If you look at the list you will notice that the final radicals are complex characters, which can be broken down to smaller components. Not what we need here.)

Until tomorrow I leave a character animation from nciku.com as something to look at and perhaps even meditate over. "One" is the very beginning. This is a brush stroke, but we should try to get as close as possible even when using a pen, preferably a fountain pen.