Radicals overview

It's the forth post about Kanji and now we are getting practical. My goal is to learn 2,136 Jōyō Kanji. As I said before, it's a lot better than 6,355 Kanji, learned for Kanji Kentei, but still, how do I get to learn all of them as effectively as possible? Well, here come the radicals for my help.

Radicals (bushu) are the basic components of Kanji. They are the Lego blocks for Kanji construction. Like most of the things related to Japanese writing system, the Chinese are to blame. The Japanese radicals derived from the Chinese radicals. The Chinese created the radicals as a standard to organize their dictionaries and mace some order in all their enormous number of characters. 
At first there were 540 radicals (Han era) in China. But after the year 1615 they have been revised to 214 radicals and named after the era name - Kengxi radicals. They are used in China till today.
When the Japanese adopted the radicals? Who knows. What's important is that there are only 214 of them!

The better news are, that some of the radicals are Kanji by themselves. That's saving some time with the Kanji later. That is, there are two types of radicals:

• Pure radicals - frequent components in Kanji, but cannot be seen by themselves. Their names meaningless and can vary from dictionary to dictionary, so don't waste your time memorizing them. Remember only the shape.
• Radicals represented by Kanji - Kanji which also participating as radical in other Kanji. It's important to understand that while Kanji as Kanji, have meaning, the Kanji as radical can lose it. So don't try to always make sense of the Kanji components. They can help you to remember the meaning, but they also can confuse.

For example:
The two components creating the Kanji meaning "wind" are radicals. The "upside down box" is a pure radical, which means, it cannot be found by itself as Kanji. On the other hand, the "bug" radical, is a stand alone Kanji with the meaning "bug". (How on Earth the bug is connected to the wind? It isn't. It's just a shape.)

And now for the best news. there is no need to memorize all the radicals in one go. Some of the radicals appearing more frequently then others, thus more appealing to memorize first.

It's important to understand, that the radicals are here to help and simplify the memorization of the Kanji, and don't stand as a goal on there own. Therefore, no need to run and learn every radical by heart before you start learning the Kanji. Learn the frequent ones, and add the others as they come.

Lastly, I want to introduce my view of the radicals and the learning process of Kanji.
I want to try and take a different approach than most. I'll take the two types of radicals and divide them as follows:

• Pure radicals - containing radicals by frequency of appearance and not necessarily all the 214 of them.
• Kanji radicals - the Kanji and their variations as radicals.

The reason for my choice of studding can be explained with the Kanji for time  (時).  In the dictionaries you'll find that its radicals are: sun (日), earth (土) and measurement (寸). But I think it's better to view it as: sun (日), temple (寺). But 寺 is not considered as radical. It confused me the first time I saw it. If 寺 is a Kanji and appearing in other Kanji, why not to call it a radical? Furthermore, it appears as a component at least in 13 Kanji, while the official radical 龠 sappers only in 3 and the radical 鼎 appears as component in no Kanji. That's why I'll try to bend the system a little.