Chinese is one of the most difficult languages to study, mainly because it uses thousands of characters. However, research shows that breaking characters into bite-sized pieces—known as radicals—may help.
To the untrained eye, Chinese characters look incredibly complex—featuring squares and various combinations of straight and curved lines. With some training, however, characters can be broken down into smaller pieces known as radicals, which provide context to the character’s meaning (semantic radicals) or to its pronunciation (phonetic radicals).
While teaching intermediate-level Chinese learners at BYU, graduate student YiHsuan Wood (Second Language Teaching MA ’24) couldn’t help but wonder what role radicals play in character recognition. Working in conjunction with Assistant Professor Jeffrey Green (Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics) and Associate Professors Ellen Knell (Second Language Acquisition, Curriculum and Instruction) and Rachel Yu Liu (Chinese Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition), Wood performed a study to see which radicals learners focus on to decipher Chinese characters. They found that teaching students semantic and phonetic radicals may improve their ability to read Chinese.
Radical Experimentation
The researchers broke the experiment down into two tasks: In the first, they asked participants to locate the character meaning bridge out of four characters with overlapping radicals—in this case 橋, 僑, 俸, and 棒. Looking at the semantic radicals 亻and 木, respectively meaning person and wood, and the phonetic radicals 喬 and 奉, pronounced qiao and feng, the participants could discover 橋 as the correct character for the word “bridge.” The second task did the opposite and required participants to choose the correct English definition for one provided character.
Using the Language Sciences Laboratory’s eye-tracking machinery, the researchers recorded where participants looked while examining each character with the hopes of understanding how language learners take in and read Chinese: “The eye tracking is important because if we just asked them to click on the right one, we would never know which part of the character gave it away,” Green explains. The researchers noticed patterns in the students’ propensity to look at either semantic or phonetic radicals. “In the first task, participants looked at the phonetic radical more; they look at the semantic one too, but they always favor the phonetic one,” Green recalls.
The second task showed similar results as, once again, participants seemed to favor the phonetic radical, focusing much less on the semantic radical overall. Their findings suggest that students tend to lean on phonetic radicals when approaching new Chinese characters. Follow-up surveys confirmed the researcher’s findings and led them to one important conclusion: not only do radicals help students decipher meaning in characters, but 90 percent of the participants also want to learn them.
Classroom Applications
Knowing how radicals can help students grasp character reading and writing has changed the way that Wood approaches teaching: “Most of the students don’t see the character as whole but use the radical to retrieve the meaning and pronunciation,” she notes. “So, I started to teach semantic radicals to [help students] understand that they can infer the meaning of new characters if they rely on semantic radicals.” Wood now recommends teachers introduce radicals into the classroom and that they help students make connections between both the semantic and phonetic radicals used in everyday words.
Ultimately, Wood hopes these findings will encourage other educators to teach radicals regularly. “Chinese characters can be difficult to learn,” Knell concludes. “We ought to be using all the tools we can to help our students understand.”
Read more about their research here.