In this article, you’ll learn about how to master Chinese characters step by step. When it comes to learning Chinese characters, it is important to start with the radicals. Once you master the 214 radicals, you can begin to master the characters.

You should also decide whether you will be learning the simplified characters or the complex characters.

The complex characters have a tradition that is 1,000 years old. If you are going to live in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, you’ll want to focus on traditional characters. For Mainland China or Singapore, you will want to focus on the simplified characters. Overseas Chinese may use either set of characters depending on the community.  
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So let's dig into the importance of learning radicals to master characters in Chinese.
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How to Master Chinese Characters For Beginners
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Why focus on learning Chinese radicals first?

It is a good idea to focus on the radicals first because these are the building blocks of the written Chinese language. You can take radicals and put them together and create new characters. One of the things you’ll like about learning Chinese characters is the history and logic of the ideograms. You’ll be able to enter a fascinating new world and see things in a different way.

Radicals are often stand-alone characters as well as building blocks for further characters.

One Chinese radical on top of the other

Here is an example: 田 is a field. Imagine that you were in China floating above a rice field looking down on it from above. You might see something that looks like 田.

Now let’s take another radical: 力, which is strength. So if you need to use your strength: 力, to work in the field: 田 you have a new character: 男 which is man.

Notice it is radical for the field: 田 is above the radical for strength: 力. You may also notice that the size of each radical is reduced by half. This is because each Chinese character needs to be the same size, regardless of how many radicals it uses.

While 男 is an example of creating a new character by placing one radical on top of another, there are other ways to combine radicals as well.
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One Chinese radical alongside the other

Here is another example. Woman is also a radical, 女. As with most radicals, you can create new characters by using them as building blocks. Take another radical, 子,  which means son or child. Place '女' and '子' side by side and you create a new character, 好, which means good.

This is an example of how you can create new characters by placing one radical alongside another.As we mentioned, there are 214 radicals to learn. A great source where you can start to learn Chinese radicals is Yellow Bridge, which lists the radicals by the number of strokes.

You’ll notice that some radicals have variants, meaning that they change form depending on their position in the new character. As mentioned earlier, the radicals take up less space when you use them as building blocks for new characters. Cchar has a program online to help you see how to properly place the radicals in the spacing when you are writing them by hand. It also has stroke order animation to help you learn the proper order to write the characters by hand.
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Using a computer to type Chinese characters

The great thing about using a computer to write Chinese characters is that you can type in a Chinese word using pinyin or the Mandarin phonetic alphabet and the characters will pop up on your screen. For example, if I set my keyboard on a MacBook to Pinyin - Simplified and type in ‘ma’ I will see the following:
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Once I see this selection bar, I can choose which ‘ma’ I wish to type. The complex radical for horse is 馬 which in simplified form is 马.  Notice it is number 4 on the selection bar. Let’s say I need to use the character 吗 instead. This character uses the radical for mouth, which is 口. This is the character we often use in Chinese when we want to ask a question.

Since you need to use your mouth to ask a question and the sound of this oral Chinese ‘question mark’ is similar to the sound of a horse, ‘ma’, we can see the first choice is 吗 which you place at the end of a sentence to ask a question. We already saw the radical for woman 女 and now we encounter it again with 妈 which means ‘mother’. This is another example of how radicals can be used to provide semantic clues as to the meaning of a Chinese character as well as to the pronunciation of a character.

The sound is again is ‘ma’. So the radical 女 gives us the hint that the character relates to a woman while the 马 radical gives us the hint that the character has the ‘ma’ sound. Which elements do you find among the radicals?Learning the elements is a logical next step in mastering Chinese characters. Here they are:

• 火 is fire
• 土 is earth
• 金 is gold
• 木 is wood
• 水 is water
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Creating new Chinese characters from radicals

‍You can create new characters using these elements as radicals. You can also use them as stand-alone characters and add other characters after them to create new words.

Here are some examples using two additional radicals as stand-alone characters:

车 (simplified) or 車 (traditional) is cart or car

Take the character for fire 火 and add it to the character for cart 车 / 車 , and you have a new word, train:  火 车 / 火 車山 is mountain.

Take the character for fire 火 and add it to the character for mountain 山, and you have a new word as well, volcano:  火山

In another example, for the word map, 地图 (simplified) / 地圖 (traditional), notice how the radical 土 has taken its place alongside 也 to create the new character 地.金 in 金色 is to show you golden color.

Whereas in 银 (simplified) and 銀 (traditional) it is part of the word for the bank as in 银行 (simplified) and 銀行  (traditional).

One illustrative example of using Chinese radicals to create new words is how 木 can be used to say forest in Chinese: 森林. It’s easier to write forest than to write tree. In Chinese, you would write tree by using the 木 radical on the left side in this character: 树 (simplified) or 樹 (traditional).Next, we will look at 水, which is interesting because in many characters it changes to become ‘three drops of water’.

Take a look at the ‘three drops of water’ on the left-hand side of these water-based examples: soup: 汤 (simplified) and 湯 (traditional) and in the character for lake: 湖.
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Final thoughts: It takes time and patience

When it comes to mastering Chinese characters it takes patience, persistence, and consistency. Make sure to spend some time every day reviewing the characters. You can make your own paper flashcards or use apps and programs such as LingQ, Memrise, and Zizzle. What you need to remember is to just keep going. It’s better to review your Chinese characters every day for 15 minutes rather to binge study.

While a lifetime is never enough to learn all the Chinese characters, you will find yourself able to read comic books once you can read around 1000 characters. By the time you reach 2000 characters, you’ll be able to understand a lot of print journalism.  

For most people, Chinese characters go hand in hand with speaking Chinese. So check out our complete guide to learning Chinese for beginners as well if you’re just getting started with Chinese.