Just a suggestion that would be pretty cool if it could be incorporated:

We already have the option "Also Add Characters When Adding Words". This is nice. What about taking it one step further. Lots of characters consists of a couple of other characters and/or radicals.

Would it be difficult to add a option that would automatically add the components of a character when you add the character.

餐, for example, one of my fav characters consists of a) 歺 dǎi: evil (ancient variant of 歹)
b) 又 yòu: (once) again; also; both
c) 食 shí: eat; food

Would save a lot of time if I don't have to add those 3 characters manually.

What do you guys think?

I think this would be helpful. There is a list of all the radicals, which doesn't take too long to go through and probably has the same benefit as this.

So when a character consist of more than 1 character they are always radicals?

Forgive my ignorance.

Every Chinese character is either a radical in it self or do have a radical part. The radical part is telling some thing about the meaning, like made of metal, something to do with people etc. The other parts of a character can also be "radicals" but are usually telling something about the pronunciation of the character or to make it more clear what the meaning is. There can only be one radical part that have the meaning of radical in a character. This radical part is also used when looking up a character in a Chinese dictionary. Personally i love to learn the radical for every character since that helps me remember them. I am a sucker for logic and this suits my brain perfectly.

So for the original questions, since there only is some 214 radicals they can be studied from Skritter's radical list, see vocabulary. There is also a etymology break down of the characters in Skritter to see the components. There I personally could wish for some more info available in the Unihan file.

Thanks, make sense. So far I've avoided studying the radicals. Def adding them now.

Still not sure however if there can be parts of a character thats no a radical but another character or something. What I basically wants to know: if I study the radicals will it cover all the different parts of a character if it got different parts?

If so, then my original suggestion doesn't make sense and would be substitute by studying the radicals. If not however then my suggestion makes sense and could easily be implemented.

Put is like this then: Could we get the option so that skritter automatically add the etymology of every character in the same way its add characters in a word separately.

Actually they do that. In the practice page, in the lower right corner you have the character composition. The problem with etymology is that it is not always known why a character is written the way it is. Some characters is very much a pictograph while others are totally unknown about the origin. Even for known characters there are often debates about the origin. My teachers here in china all have different opinions about some characters and their origin. still, there is a very clear and wonderful logic in most of the common characters. Take a simple one such as 吗, the question particle. There you have 口 as the radical and meaning provider. You are using your mouth when you are asking a question. The other part of the character is 马 (horse). This character by it self is also a radical and a stand alone character with the pronunciation of mǎ. In the context of the question particle character it provides a guide to the pronunciation of the character that is ma5. It is by no means mandatory to learn this but if you do, after a while you will notice that you learn new characters faster since you already do know the sub components and only need to learn the character composition. This is for me the logic and it is so beautiful, just like computer code:-)

@aharlekyn the answer to your question is "no".

"Radical" is not the same as "shared component" and you have to be careful to distinguish the two. The radicals are simply characters that were used to organize dictionaries and are not supposed to be a comprehensive list of shared character components.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

I have been doing this for quite a while and it has mixed blessings. I did it way too much at first and that contributed heavily to my deciding to nuke and start over.

If you go deep enough into the character breakdown you will quickly run into characters that are archaic and/or rare. Do you really want to spend your time studying something that will never, ever be used? This can have its place if you're using Heisig as those characters are being put into a larger structure, but for most of us those characters are not going to be useful.

A related problem is that many of the component breakdowns in Skritter are wrong or incomplete, at least according to zhongwen and other online dictionaries, and correcting them would require characters which don't yet exist in Skritter (usually because they're archaic and/or rare).

With all that said, it can be quite useful to study these components, but I would definitely not want to *automatically* add all the components to study. Definitely go through the radical list, but instead of adding all components I would suggest that you

-- use mnemonics that use the etymology and component breakdown to reinforce the meanings of the shared components

-- *selectively* add components which are not too archaic and/or rare to study; you can see if the component is listed in one of the HSK levels on MDBG, for example

-- compare the different etymologies for the same character to get a fuller understanding of why the character might be the way it is and give you more ideas for mnemonics

James

Thanks, now it comes together. Makes sense.

Just out of curiosity: How do you look up a character in a dictionary if it got more than one radical. I've been using online dictionaries all the time, and I am sure due to Skritter my university syllabus is way behind me not sure when they will do dictionaries or use them ever.

First, there can be only one radical in a character. even if the character do have two or more radical "parts", only one of them serves as the radical for that character. There are some rules about what part is the radical but they do have some exceptions. With the radical identified you count the remaining strokes in the character. In the dictionary the radicals are listed and in each radical part of the dictionary there are numbers for the remaining strokes. An example: 吗. kou is the radical so that is the part we go to first in the dictionary. ma have 3 strokes so in the kou section we go to the part where characters have three remaining strokes.
And yes, there are some other ways to list characters in an dictionary as well. There are tons of very good on line dictionaries and also several good electronic devices with dictionaries. One very good for Iphone etc is Pleco. Have many very good commercial dictionaries to choose from.