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française. This site provides the English-speaking student of Chinese a quick, easy-to-learn, almost fool-proof method of finding the pronunciation and meaning of the most frequent 4,000 characters. Radicode – a combination of “radical” and “code” – is the name of the system. If you have already learned two or three hundred characters, you can learn to use the system employed here in twenty or thirty minutes -- the time it would take you to find three or four characters by other methods. Once you have learned the system, you can find any character in about the same time it takes you to find an English word in a dictionary.
The Radicode system has been invented by Clopper Almon, professor at the University of Maryland. The description of the Radicode System is given here or can be downloaded as a pdf file HANZI.pdf from his web site. Please read this file carefully before using the dictionary.
The dictionary can be accessed by the 102 radical tables either classified by English names or classified by codes. An index on the top of the table (first letter or first digit) allows a fast access. To select a radical, click on its English name. Once the radical is selected, a list of characters classified by codes is displayed. There is always an index based on the first digit of the code at the top of the list. For the long lists, there are even two-digits based indexes inside. Those indexes allow to find a character with only a few clicks of mouse.
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The 102 radicals classified
by English names |
If the pronunciation is known it is also possible to access the dictionary by the pinyin table.
The description of the different fields of the dictionary is given below:
| Column 1 | Code | The "code" part of the radicode. |
| Column 2 | T | A "T" in that column means that the Radicode is
given for the traditional version of the character (Column 4). A "P" or a "M" indicates a multiple listing. "P" corresponds to the "official" code and "M" means that the listed code can be also acceptable. |
| Column 3 | Smp |
The simplified character. Click on it to access a the word dictionary of www.chinese-tools.com. |
| Column 4 | Trd | The traditional version of the character. |
| Column 5 | UniC | The Unicode value of the character (hexadecimal) and a link to the character description on the site www.unicode.org. |
| Column 6 | Pinyin | The pinyin transliteration and a link to the pronunciation if available (source : www.mandarintools.com) |
| Column 7 | r | An indication of the frequency rank of the character. 1 corresponds to the 500 most frequent characters (1-500). 2 corresponds to the next 500 (501-1000) etc. up to 9 (4001-4500). |
| Column 8 | Meaning | The meaning of the character. |
The fields are the same for the dictionary with pinyin access but the order can be different.
Please see the resource and download page.