Bihua - Part 3 - Search Words based on Number of Strokes

This is the last feature for bihua website that you should know, search words based on number of strokes, 笔画数查字 bi hua shu cha zi.

Click on the circled part and you will see the following page

It will show you the categorization of words based on the numbers of strokes. As you can see, there are 10 words that has 1 stroke, 52 words that have 2 strokes, 99 words that have 3 strokes and so on. 

Let's look at the words with 6 strokes.

Here is the list of all Chinese characters that consist of 6 strokes.

From here, you should know what to do right? Are you looking for meaning? or are you looking for strokes order? Or are you looking for words formation?

You should know where to click to get the information that you need. if you don't please refresh your memory by referring to the first post on Bihua website.

That's pretty much about Bihua site. If you notice, the page is actually linked one to another.

The main thing to know is that you can search words based on pinyin （拼音查字 pinyin chazi）, radicals 部首查字 (bu shou cha zi) or the numbers of strokes （笔画数查字 bi hua shu cha zi）.

The second thing is you can look at 3 main aspects of each character that you found on bihua.com, they are:

1. Dictionary (CH - EN / CH - CH) 字典 zi dian

2. Chinese Strokes                           笔画 bi hua

3. Word formations                          组词 zu ci

Please do not rush things! Learning is a lifetime journey. Reread all the posts on how to use Pleco and Bihua website effectively and put it into practice.

Search for words that you might use often in your daily conversation, such as:

1. Hello

2. Good morning/afternoon/night

3. Good bye

4. Eat

5. Come

6. Pronouns (I, you, we, etc)

Hope you find the posts useful and practical. Would love to hear any constructive inputs :)

The real thing start next week.

Happy Exploring,

Linda Tan

Bihua - Part 2 - Components of Character (Search Words based on Radical)

Open up bihua website. Click here!

It will take you its homepage that looks roughly like the following. Today, we are going to look at 部首查字 bu shou cha zi, word search based on Radical. I have given a short simple explanation on radical. Please refer to the explained a little about Radical in the May 31st Post. Please revisit it to rephrase your memory.

Click on the circled and it will show you the following. There are about 268 radicals. It is categorized based on the number of stroke.

The question is how to use this?

1. Use this feature to enrich your vocabularies

You can click on the one that you interested the most (maybe something that you encounter often), such as the following:

Under the 2 strokes radical, please find the first one above, and click on it. It will take you the following page:

The circled part above is the name for it. Unfortunately, they don't give you the pin yin. At this point, you can use Pleco just to find out on how to pronounce it.

is known as 单人旁 dan ren pang. 单 dan means 'single' 人 ren 'human' 旁 pang comes from pang bian that means side (this is often found on the left side of the character). The shape of this radical is actually a modified 人 ren. Thus, if you notice, the first character that consists of 2 strokes (right underneath the circled part) is called "ren". We always write it in this form when we use it as a word by itself.

On this page, you can see all the words that carry this radical. It is usually used on the left hand side of the character.

From here, you learn each words by click on the blue hyperlinks that will give you either the meaning (CH - EN or CH - CH), the order of strokes or the words formation. If you need to refresh what I am talking about, please see the previous post.

2. Use this feature to search for words

If you ever need to use PRINTED Chinese Dictionary, the thing am about to mention below will come handy for you too

If you encounter new word, let say "花", and you want to know more about this word, the meaning, the strokes or the possible word formations, here is how to utilize the site to satisfy your need.

a. Find the radical.

I have mentioned that Chinese character has a few components, as what you can see on Pleco when you search for a word. Thus a Chinese character can consist of only the radical (the most basic word, such as; 一，人） or it can be formed by a radical + other parts which are non-radical.

So, if you look at 花 you will probably break it down to:

 + +

In which it is all possible for the 3 components above to act as "radical". So how? Try one by one! :)

If you decide that the radical for 花 is , then click on it and see if you can find it.

So you have to count the number of strokes for 花， which is 7 strokes. Scroll down to strokes 7 see if the character that you are looking for is there. In this case, it is NOT! So you know that you have got it wrong! The radical is not dan ren pang.

You will definitely find out that the correct radical is   草字头cao zi tou。

Don't worry if you are concern about the radical that is split in the middle (looks like 2 crosses instead of 1 joint fence). They are the same. They both come from the original character of cao (meaning: grass) that looks like this: "艸". 

So that is the 2 usage of "word search based on radical" 部首查字。

Please take your time to digest ALL the posts (about both Pleco and Bihua.com) and do the following exercise:

1. Using Pleco, please find the components for the 4 characters below:

鱼，猫，妈，上 (what is the radical and what other parts that you can find in those characters， how many strokes each and what is the total strokes for the character).

Then, Write down the meaning for each one of them and pronounce them.

For example: "神 "

Answer: I will use the simplified handwriting mode on my phone to find this word on Pleco (because  I do not know the pinyin). Then, once I found it, I know that this (神) is pronounced as shen that means "god/mind/..."

The components that form the characters are as followed.

The radical is shi or widely known as 示字旁 shi zi pang.  The other part of that form the character is shen (meaning: to state to a superior).

The radical has 4 strokes, while the other parts have 5 strokes. Total strokes for the character is 9 strokes.

2. Using Bihua.com, please find the components for the 4 characters below:

让 (rang)，收 (shou)，六 (liu)，胖 (pang)

(what is the radical and what other parts that you can find in those characters and how many strokes each and what is the total strokes for the character).

Then, Write down the meaning or each one of them and pronounce them.

Do the same like the sample above. In this case, please use Bihua.com

If I am looking for the same word on bihua 神. Here is what you can do.

1. Using the handwriting mode just like the above. I will get the following. Try your own!

The homepage

From the website URL we know that this site is intended for checking of bi shun (Chinese strokes). So by default your input, will return you with the page above. You can click on the blue bold character and it will take you the following page.

From here you can open up the 字典 （zi dian）= dictionary to show you the meaning of the word. See the screen result below.

2. Identify the radical yourself by guessing, just like what we do to the character 花 above. Try it yourself.

As a reminder, do not overwhelm yourself with all the information that you are trying to absorb now. The post may look long, but put into practice it is actually very brief. So, step by step!

What I am showing to you is the usage of the tools that might come useful for you now or in the future. So if you find that certain things are not relevant to the level you are in yet,  do not use it. But when you reach certain point and need it, you know where to look.

One more post on bihua.com's feature, then I might probably introduce you to hanyu pinyin. :)

加油 Jia you!      => Look up the meaning  and make yourself one phrase richer than you were!

Linda Tan

Bihua.com - Part 1 - The Introduction (Search Word based on Pin Yin)

Please bookmark this website

Bihua 笔画 means strokes. Each Chinese character is formed from one or more than one strokes. The stroke here refers to each movement of your pencil to form a Chinese character.

For example:

三 (san) consists of 3 strokes, to be exact 3 same stroke of horizontal line “一” that we know as 横 (heng) which are all different in length. 

十 (shi) consists of 2 strokes, 2 different strokes. The first is “一” that we know as 横 (heng) and the second is the vertical line“丨”, known as 竖 (shu) .

There is an order to follow when we write Chinese character and this is what we called 笔顺 (bishun). Thus, for 十 (shi), we CANNOT start with “丨”. We have to start with the horizontal stroke “一”, then followed by “丨”

This is the correct bishun (order of strokes) for 十 (shi) which means 10 (Ten)

There will be a post dedicated to bihua/bishun later on. As of now, Let's focus on the bihua.com The webpages look messy because there are many external links and ads on it. This is one of the way that they do to make sure that they can maintain good website for people like you and me. So, don't complain! Do not lose yourself in the sea of Chinese Characters that might seem alien to you. I will show you what to focus on and what to ignore.

This site will help you with your writing and structure of characters in Chinese. It also works as dictionary (Chinese to Chinese and Chinese to English).

First when you open the site, their homepage looks roughly like this:

Please focus on the circled part in the middle. That is where we are going to input our Chinese character. Underneath it, there are 3 blue hyperlinks in the square brackets:

1. 拼音查字    pin yin cha zi              Looking for characters based on pinyin

2. 部首查字    bu shou cha zi            Looking for characters based on the radical

3. 笔画数查字    bi hua shu cha zi     Looking for characters based on the numbers of strokes

Let's look at the first one: 拼音查字    pin yin cha zi     

When you click on it, it will take you to the following page

Just for example, you can click on "bai". This will show you ALL Chinese characters that are pronounced as "bai" in any tone.

I am gonna explore more on the circled character of 白 bai

As you can see there are 3 blue links beside each of the Chinese characters that say:

字典     zi dian     dictionary

笔画     bi hua      strokes

组词      zu ci       word formation

Let's click on the first one: 字典     zi dian     dictionary

This is what you are going to see.. It consists of a few parts. I will break it down for you further, so easy to understand.

The first to look at is the header part (the one on top!)

As you might have guessed, the black squared part is the pinyin. You can click on the speaker to listen to the recorded audio on how to pronounce it correctly.

The 3 red squares are (from the left)

1. Left: 简体部首 jian ti bu shou  

This is to show you the radical. Please read about the simple explanation about  radical on the previous post. Please click here

2. Middle: 部外笔画 bu wai bi hua  

This is to show you, after excluding the strokes for the radical, how many strokes are there. However, because 白 is radical itself and it doesn't contain any other parts, so it shows you 0 (zero)

3. Right: 总笔画 zong bu shou

This is to show you total strokes for the character 白

Moving on is the second part in the middle, this is the Chinese to Chinese translation for 白. Do you see the red part underneath, that is called 注音符号 (zhu yin fu hao) ths is the national phonetic alphabet (used before the current Chinese phonetic alphabets that we know as pinyin). From my knowledge, Taiwan is still using this.

For your information, here is how the old version phonetics represent the current hanyu pinyin

Last part of the dictionary page for 白 (bai) that might come useful for you is this:

The red squared parts above show us the translation for 白 in English.

The blue squared part is the words that are related to 白, it includes the antonym and synonyms.

Other than dictionary, this site also will show you the bihua or strokes for the character. If you still have this page open, click on the second one that say: 笔画

This link will take you the following page:

The part on top, the 6 boxes, are showing you the order of the strokes when you write 白. Underneath it, you should know what the first 2 rows refer to, the character and the pinyin. 3rd row is the radical, as shown in the dictionary page too. The 4th row shows you the total number of strokes, which is 5 (five). The 5th row shows you the order of the strokes. The 6th row is to show you the name of each strokes in row 5, respectively. There is even an animation on how to write the characters as you can see on the right side, the black character.

Last part you can either go back to the initial page here, or you can continue from the page above.

组词 (zu ci) means word formation. It will show you all the possible words formation that come from one character of "白"

You can click on either one of them and see the long explanation of the phrase. It is super detailed explanation. This will not come useful for beginner as of now. I try to click one, on the second row, 白水。It shows me this page:

The first paragraph shows you the explanation in simplified Chinese and the second paragraph in Traditional Chinese.

So, basically those are the things that yo have to pay attention to. The Chinese to Chinese translation is very useful for people who are already know Chinese and would like to explore more in depth. It works just like English to English dictionary.

End of this week, I will continue to part 2, where you can use bihua website to look for characters based on their radical

As of now, you explore more on the first item, search based on pinyin.

Happy Exploring,

Linda Tan

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