There is some order to the madness that is Chinese characters. All of the thousands of characters are built using a set inventory of 214 basic symbols, called radicals. Radicals combine together to give hints about the pronunciation, or meaning, of a character. For example, take the character 召. Someone familiar with the radicals would recognise it consists of the radicals 刀 (dāo, meaning knife) and 口 (kǒu, meaning mouth). From this they could infer something about both the pronunciation, and the meaning: the character is most likely pronounced something like dāo or kǒu, and the meaning is most likely something related to mouths or knives (or possibly both). In fact, the pronunciation is zhào (similar to dāo), and the meaning is 'to call for someone' (hence the mouth). The radicals don't always provide these hints (or the relevancy of the radicals has been lost to history as meanings and pronunciations evolve), but for the large majority of characters, they do. The prevalence of some of the 214 radicals over others is quite surprising. For example, the radical 艸 (cǎo, meaning grass) forms the basis of 1,902 characters, while 艮 (gēn, meaning stopping) only 5.
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