radical meaning

Transcript

1. I mentioned before that some characters have changed their meaning a lot over the years. This means that some characters now have two (or more!) seemingly unrelated meanings.
2. Some characters that are used as building blocks have two different kinds of meanings...
3. ...one meaning that is used commonly in Chinese today, and second meaning - the original, ancient meaning
4. Why on earth would you want to know the ancient meaning?
5. A very fair question!
6. Well, the ancient meaning is the one that helps you to make sense of how and when that character is used in combination characters
7. Which in turn will make learning all the combination characters easier. And making learning easier is what we are here to do!
8. This ancient meaning is called the radical meaning. If one of the definitions is a “radical” meaning, we will put that in brackets after the definition, just to make it clear
9. I find that it is worth knowing both the ancient and the modern meaning of characters... ...but if you are do want to ignore one of them - ignore the radical meaning!
10. Next is a little bite-sized level introducing a few of these characters, just to get you used to them!