Hi everyone, hope you're all studying well...

So ive recently came back to skritter after the HTML5 boom and im so pleased its actually here! Its great to learn again after a long time (1 year)

Anyway enough small talk!
I basically started again with HSK 1 and 2 which was fairly easy for me as ive been able to read these for a couple of years.
Once I started HSK 3 I found it quite daunting!
It suddenly dawned on me that I dont know most of the radicals, therefore having trouble remembering how to write characters that are very similar.

Would you guys and gals say that I should totally memorize all the radicals to help build better mnemonics I.e think of funny ways to make a story about charcters for memory. Then carry on with HSK3?

I would like to know how other people are doing it, and what is working for you.

One last thing... would it be a fair assumption that ALL characters (excluding the independent radicals that are words I.e 火,口 etc) are made up using all the radicals? I know most characters have a radical on the left, on top etc, but is the rest of the character also built up of radicals?
Example: 照 (sun, knife, mouth, fire)

I may have answered my own questions but would like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading, look forward to hear your successes!

Cheers
Tim

I highly recommend learning the radicals for anyone around the time they are at HSK 2-3 level. I think I did it at the same time as HSK 3. There's not that many and it did wonders for my comprehension ability.

But of course it's not the only method- my daughter attends a Mandarin primary school and even though her level is now beyond what might commonly be on an HSK test, it looks like they only relied on teaching a few of the most commonly used radicals.

If I understand your later question correctly, many characters are made up of only radicals as building blocks but I think there are quite a lot of exceptions to this as well. For example 印 yin4 meaning to print (also used in the name for India) has the radical on the right half but the left half is not comprised of any particular radical.

I don't think e.g. 肃, 兼 are made up of radicals, but depends what list of radicals you use maybe. I spent a lot of time looking up words in dictionaries by hand when I was at your level, and pretty soon knew most of the common radicals - I didn't / don't bother too much about memorising radicals on their own but it doesn't hurt to at least be aware of the meanings of simple components, I still check the "etymology" of characters I don't know occasionally. I don't really make up stories for memory, prefer to spend the time on repetition and practise. I do occasionally find the one's in Skritter useful though. E.g. 辑 in 编辑 as edit, gather up, being car, mouth and ear kind of makes sense to me.

tgack, ximing, thanks for your input!
Ok so not necessarily all characters are made of radicals.

I shall continue to learn the radicals, im nearly half way through already, just find it hard to memorise the pinyin! Though I suppose thats not very important, as long as I know the meaning and how to write it should help me with building a character.

Thanks againg guys, happy learning!

I really think this helps, compared to my classmates who didn't learn my vocabulary increases much faster (although they don't use skritter). If you like the mnemonics way of learning, which I personally think works well as you can start linking so many characters together. You should try memrise.

Most of the characters I can think of are made of radicals(not all, but a substantial majority), it has helped me very much learning them.

For me the clue lies not in tackling them separately (rads) but naturally studying a lot of different vocab and finding patterns, doing progressively gets easier to guess the meaning of new characters and memorize them.

Thanks everyone, sound advice! Ill get cracking...

Cheers
Tim

You should definitely learn the most important radicals ( ~70 in different appearances), but don't waste your time on the pinyin and infrequently used ones.
I don't use mnemonics at all, but I always open the information tab to get the breakdown of the components of characters and the pronounciation of the components. Then it's already very clear most of the times what the "logic" behind the character is.

If you haven't done so yet, I highly recommend you read up on the different ways characters are built. They are classifiable by how the meaning is derived from the written form. I forget the terms in Chinese, but if you are not familiar with this, I'll look it up for you.
Then when you see a new word you can try to understand it's "heritage" rather than making up your own stories to help you memorize. The component breakdown feature of skritter is very very helpful for this.

Cheers,
Zacharias

Personally, I think learning the most common radicals is a must for remembering the visual components of a character and for getting some sense of the "category" of an unfamiliar word, but you don't need to get a deck with every form of every radical and memorize them all. Your time is better spent plowing through vocab and before long you will learn the radicals as a side effect of your hard work. While learning a few radicals (20 or so)is quick and helpful, I say don't waste your time with a large radicals deck.

Being familiar with radicals is VERY helpful when remembering how to write words, but in most cases is NOT as helpful as some would lead you to believe for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words.