Step 4: Appreciate - Starting to recognise and appreciate basic radicals

In this series, I’m sharing seven areas I pre-teach to new learners before starting any course or programme. They are:

1. Characters 🀄️

2. Digital Dictionaries 📓

3. Stroke Order 🖌

4. Radicals 口

5. Pinyin 🗣

6. Tones & Numbers 1️⃣

7. 听写 📝

For teaching purposes, I reframe the steps like this:

1. ✅ Inspire: Have a sparkly eyed “aha” learning moment with characters (read here)

2. ✅ Equip: As soon as possible, equip learners with a digital/web based Mandarin dictionary & set up input of Mandarin in phones & computers (read here)

3. ✅ Write: Begin to learn, practice and appreciate stroke order (this post!)

4. ➡️ Appreciate: Start to recognise and appreciate basic radicals

5. Type: Know the basic rules of pinyin

6. Count: Memorise the numbers 1-10 by heart in correct tones

7. Tingxie: Have a positive experience of doing an (often dreaded) dictation

Rationale

I can still remember the day my professor at SOAS informed us he was not satisfied with our character memorisation and that he would be testing us on all 214 radicals.

This seemed out of this world crazy to me at the time, but looking back, I really appreciate why he made us do that.

Ever since, I’ve paid special attention to radicals and noticed how they helped me memorise characters more swiftly.

Session 4 objective:

In this lesson, the main learning objectives are:

1. Recognise a few basic radicals and their variations, like: 口，亻, 女 , 火，水

2. Understand how radicals fit into characters

3. Understand that sometimes radicals can have different forms, but still carry the same meaning

4. Understand radicals can help us guess the pronunciation or meaning of unknown characters

Session 4 outline

1. Spiral progression - review & refresh:

   1. Start by reviewing again the characters shared in the first lesson. Since the homework last lesson was to memorise how to write the characters, you might want to start by getting the learners to write the whole dialogue quietly while you wait for class to begin.

      1. 你， 好，我，叫，呢 ，再，见，老，师

      2. You can use a similar activity to the one before, or try a new one with flashcards. By this point the dialogue should be memorised, so you may even jump straight to a role play with the learners.

2. Classroom vocab: Cover the same vocabulary as last time: 好不好, 好 or 好的。 This time add ‘上课’, and explain:

   1. 上课，好不好? And asking them to reply with 好！or 好的!

3. Share learning objective: I share the learning objective: that we’re going to learn stroke order.

4. Share the measure of success: e.g. that they recognise 3 radicals and one alternative format for each.

   1. Note: I do not mind so much if learners don’t understand WHAT a radical actually is, as much as I mind that they know a few of the basic ones. The former comes in time. It’s a bit difficult for a new learner to wrap their head around it until they get more cosy with characters.

5. Plenary: Ask learners whether they can tell you something similar between the characters 冰 冷 and 听 吃 喝 and 你 他 仁 谁

   1. They should eventually find the 冫，亻and 口 radical.

   2. Explain what radicals are and how they are used.

6. Activity: Ask learners to write out 口, and the other radicals a few times in correct stroke order.

7. Plenary: Now ask learners how they might find a radical - how do they know which part is the radical?

   1. Explain they can use MDBG.net and look up the character stroke order, which has a different colour for radical.

8. Practice activity:

   1. Ask students to find the radical in a few unknown characters:

   2. This activity is great if you use both old and new characters! Like 谁，住，主，说，谁，热，火.

   3. This is because it means learners are reviewing and practicing new and already learned skills.

9. Plenary: Finally, discuss with learners whether it’s possible for a radical to be a character by itself?

   1. Show some examples of characters like 火，水，口，and explain that it is possible.

   2. Discuss and show variations of these characters and how they show up in other characters.

   3. Ask learners to go and research what the most common radicals are, and how many of them there are in total.

10. Wrap up: summarise the key points. Check that learners know 口，亻，氵，灬，冫。

11. No homework for this lesson: let students enjoy their new knowledge.

Summary

This lesson is usually a nice, short and sweet session that touches lightly on an important part of preparing to learn Chinese characters.

How (and when) do you teach radicals?