CJK Radicals Supplement

CJK Radicals Supplement is a Unicode block containing alternative, often positional, forms of the Kangxi radicals. They are used as headers in dictionary indices and other CJK ideograph collections organized by radical-stroke.

Going back to the basics, what is CJK? In the context of internationalisation, it is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, which include Chinese characters. Ok, this is now clear. But what about radicals? A Chinese radical is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary.

The Chinese script (漢字, 汉字) has been the only common alphabet for writing Chinese for thousands of years. The characters and punctuation used in Chinese writing are also widespread in Japanese and Korean. Until 1945 the Chinese script was applied to the Vietnamese language.

The age of the Chinese script is constantly under clarification. In 1962 during the archeological digging of the Neolithic settlement of Jiahu on the Yellow River, there was made a discovery about the inscriptions on turtle shells resembling the ancient Chinese hieroglyphs. The pictograms date back to the VI millennium BC, which is even older than Sumerian writing. Previously, a well-known researcher of Chinese writing, Tang Lan, suggested that Chinese hieroglyphics originated 4-5 millennia ago. In a nutshell, there is plenty of information to research.

As you might know, Chinese writing tends to be called hieroglyphic and ideographic. It is radically different from the alphabetic one in terms of characters, as each character is assigned a particular meaning, not only phonetic, but semiotic too. The number of such characters is huge and it may account up to 10 000 and more! That's why studying Chinese may be challenging for those who have only encountered European languages. I once attended a workshop on Chinese for beginners. The teacher told us that to learn Chinese, “you have to reshape your way of thinking” in order to comprehend the concepts. Sounds impressive, right? So if you decide to study it too, you know where to find the characters. This block offers a huge variety of them and comes in handy, if you don't plan to change your keyboard. Just copy these symbols and paste wherever you need to.