The 214 Kangxi
Radicals.

The Kangxi Dictionary (1716) standardised 214 radicals as the indexing system for Traditional Chinese dictionaries — and 214 remains the standard count used in Taiwan today. Earlier dictionaries used different numbers (the Shuowen Jiezi from 100 CE used 540), and some modern dictionaries use simplified groupings. For learners, the Kangxi 214 is the authoritative reference.

No — and attempting to do so as an isolated exercise is a poor use of study time. The practical approach is to learn radicals as you encounter them in characters you are already studying. The 50 radicals on this page cover the vast majority of characters you will encounter in daily life and the Dangdai curriculum. You will naturally absorb more as your vocabulary grows.

Strictly speaking, a radical (部首) is the component used to index a character in a dictionary — each character has exactly one official radical. A component is any recurring structural element within characters, which may or may not be the designated radical. For example, in 清 (clear), the 氵radical is the indexing component, and 青 is a phonetic component. Both are 'components' in the broad sense; only 氵is the 'radical' for dictionary purposes. For learners, the distinction matters less than recognising both semantic and phonetic components in characters.

Many radicals change shape when used as a component within a character to fit more compactly. 水 (water) becomes 氵when placed on the left side of a character. 火 (fire) becomes 灬 when placed at the bottom. 人 (person) becomes 亻on the left. 心 (heart) becomes 忄on the left side. These variant forms are called 偏旁 (piānpáng) and are important to recognise, since the radical in a dictionary entry may look different from the component as it appears in the character.

In a traditional Chinese dictionary, you identify the radical of an unknown character (usually the most semantically obvious component), find that radical's section in the dictionary, then count the remaining strokes of the character to locate it within that section. Digital dictionaries and apps have made stroke-count lookup less necessary, but the skill of identifying a character's radical remains useful for handwriting input methods and for understanding a character's semantic category.