Radical Explorer — How We Organize Radicals

🧭 Radical Explorer — How It’s Organized

Welcome — this is the place to learn the basics about radicals. A clear grasp of radicals will give you a smarter, more efficient path to mastering kanji and Japanese.

If you’ve already tried our Radical Explorer, the following explanation will make more sense. If not, you may want to tap the back tab and expand a row or two first — so you can see how the Explorer displays each group of radicals in action.

Well, as you’ve seen, this is how Kanji World organizes radicals so they’re easy to learn and look up.

In Kanji World, radicals are grouped by position in a character. This makes patterns easier to spot and speeds up lookup.

In Kanji World you’ll find just over 200 radicals in total. If we count only the positional groups — へん, つくり, かんむり, あし, たれ, にょう, and かまえ — there are a little more than 100 radicals. The remaining ones are placed in the Other (そのほか) category. Within this category, a subset of 44 are classified as Self radicals — kanji that act as their own radical.

In terms of count, positional and non-positional radicals are about the same. But in actual usage, the positional groups dominate, since many more kanji are built around them. The Other category, on the other hand, is the single largest block by number. It includes radicals that cannot be defined by position and that often appear in different places within kanji, so they don’t fit neatly into “hen,” “tsukuri,” “kanmuri,” or the other positional groups. That’s why focusing on positional radicals first usually gives learners the biggest advantage.

Inside this group, we also list Self radicals. These are characters that serve as their own radical but are not used as the radical for other kanji in the elementary set. Because of that, we don’t create a dedicated radical page for them. When we expand coverage to the full Jōyō kanji set, some may receive their own pages — but others will remain classified as Self.

Some families are especially important in the elementary school kanji set. For example, にんべん (亻 person radical) appears in about 44 kanji, and さんずい (氵 water radical) appears in about 40 kanji. These large families give strong semantic clues and are worth learning early.

This uneven distribution is why it’s worth tapping to expand each row. You’ll discover which radicals belong where, and how some families dominate the system while others are rare. Over time, you’ll start to notice patterns — like 亻 pointing to “people” or 氵 pointing to “water” — that make the meaning of new kanji easier to guess.

Now, hop back to the Radical Explorer and expand へん｜Left-side to see the hen radicals. Tap にんべん (亻 “person” radical) or さんずい (氵 “water” radical) to explore their kanji families. Looking through a few examples will show how these large groups hint at meaning and make new kanji easier to recognize. Then return here for the rest of the explanation.

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