Names of the Radicals

[FutureSpy]

SimL, thanks for sharing all these invaluable infos. Since when I learned Japanese I never bothered learning about radicals (my teacher went through them so that we could use 漢和辞典 [it's how Japanese call a kanji dictionary] and I still remember a few names, but I can only barely guess what's the radical of a kanji) 'cos there were already enough online aid-tools back then such as mouse input on Japanese IME, and then I could easily look up characters on online dictionaries.

Anyway, I'm thinking now of properly learning hanji and radicals. I already have a list of hanji appearing on the first lesson of one of my textbooks with their corresponding radicals. Now I just need to look up every character to get colloquial and literary pronunciations in Taiwanese. [EDIT: I removed part of this post and created a new thread 'cos I don't want to disturb the on-going here with something off-topic. Sorry ]I read on Wikipedia that Quanzhou has a third pronunciation they call "vulgar pronunciation". Anyone has any clues if there's such a thing in Taiwanese too? And if not, how useful could it be learning them from Quanzhou sources?

Just some off-topic note: I remember having seen 讠 in handwriting by elder Japanese people living here in Brazil, and some traditional characters such as 會 and 學...

[SimL]

Hi FutureSpy,

Very thoughtful of you to try and keep things on topic. But don't worry too much about it... discussions go off-topic all the time on this Forum . (But still worthwhile trying to avoid, of course!)

Just some off-topic note: I remember having seen 讠 in handwriting by elder Japanese people living here in Brazil

Haha, ok, perhaps off-topic, but quite closely related to my other point on character simplification. Namely: up to the early 1900's many of these forms existed side-by-side, in print, in handwriting, etc. I have an old scroll, recording the intended marriage of my (Baba!) grandparents (must have been written in the early 1920's). It's a very formal affair, hand-written in beautiful calligraphy, and written more or less in Classical Chinese. On it, one can find abberrant forms and "simplified" forms. Even in the preface to the Kangxi Dictionary (mine is a facsimile edition, so showing how it looked in the late 1800's), one can find abberrant forms and "simplified" forms.

The idea of "one standardized traditional set" only slowly arose as computers gained ground (Big5 was one of the first standards, and once that had been established, the form of writing each Big5 character also started to get standardized by font designers). [Again, everything I say always has to be qualified, because nothing is black and white. Even long before computers (say between 1800 and 1970) there must have slowly been movements towards greater standardization (with the coming of the daily newpaper, for example). But it was nowhere near the degree of standardization which we are used to nowadays.]

See, I've managed to move this thread slightly off-topic .