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Characters can be grouped according to the stroke count of their radical and phonetic components. This allows one to have a list of characters, and enables one
by wrwills 9y ago
Characters can be grouped according to the stroke count of their radical and phonetic components. This allows one to have a list of characters, and enables one to look up characters that one hasn't encountered before (although nowadays you can also use a Chinese ocr app for that purpose).
- ginko 9y agoYes, I know there's systems for looking up characters. But once you've found your character in your dictionary, what can you do with it if you don't know the meaning or pronounciation? Nowadays there's of course pronounciation guides(through a phonetic script) but I would imagine in the 3rd century BC this didn't exist?
- monocasa 9y agoThey had pronunciation guides back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie
- emodendroket 9y agoIt seems like the purpose is more like saying "here are all the characters; don't use other ones"