It’s been a few days since our last installment, so it’s high time we explained another one of the recent updates: the character decompositions.
Users have been suggesting we include radical decompositions almost since we launched. But until recently, we always had something bigger to fix or add. We went to several educational conferences and were asked seemingly non-stop about the availability of the precious radical decomps. Well, now they are finally a reality on the practice page.
We are still missing some decompositions for characters, and we welcome you to point them out to us. We have almost all of the decompositions on our backend, but they need to be processed before they can go live. So, if you see a character with the text “missing radical” in the decomps area, drop us a line, and we’ll make sure we deal with it when we do our big pass in the near future. Also awaiting processing on a few Heisig keywords.
The only other limitation to the system is that if you are currently using the foreign language settings to translate our dictionary, the language setting will not effect the decomposition definitions.
So, why are we making such a big deal out a few radicals? The reason is that seeing the radicals is enormously helpful not just for remembering individual characters, but for increasing your ability to remember all characters.
Being able to create your own mnemonics quickly without a dictionary is a skill that scales, and scalable improvements help a lot when you are trying to memorize those 3,000 character you need to read the daily paper. The hope is that with the decompositions you’ll gradually see the characters differently and create mnemonics to aid your memory. For example, you’ll stop seeing “谢” as a 12 stroke behemoth and instead remember “speech,” “body,” and “unit of length.” The measure word for car, 辆, becomes the radical for “car” and “two.” And from these decompositions come incredible mnemonics! So with that in mind, can you guess the characters for these two mnemonics?
“Someone who has a hook in their tongue is a real mess. “
“Cheap is EVEN MORE convenient for a PERSON”