Chinese characters are generally made up of two components: the radical and the phonetic.
The radical component gives a clue to the category of the meaning,
e.g., hand radical characters involve the hand, whether they are verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs:
打 dǎ / (V) to hit, beat (扌is the radical)
扫 sǎo / (V) to sweep
技 jì / (N) skill
e.g., water radical characters are to do with water, whether they are verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs:
洗 xǐ / (V) to wash (氵is the radical)
流 liú / (V) to flow
海 hǎi / (N) sea
河 hé / (N) river
清 qīng / (adj) clear (not muddy)
The radical component, therefore, is in general pretty straightforward (and predictable).
However, there's no such thing as "easy" in the Chinese language. You'll have to learn the list of radicals first, in order to be able to recognise and identify individual ones. Learners of English have to learn the Latin or Roman alphabet first, but it's only 26. The traditional list of Chinese radicals is 214 (called the Kangxi radicals), with between 188 and 201 for simplified characters. That's just the radicals I'm talking about.
The phonetic component, however, is a dodgy character. I will cover it in another blog, as it's more complicated and grey.
Even though I already knew about Chinese radicals, this blog made me think of an interesting fact: there are some words (in any language, for sure) that are just more basic and "important" than others. I put "important" in quotation marks because I don't claim to have a clear way to decide. For example, "hand". It's a more important word than "sweep". From "hand" we can think of many words that are somewhat related to it, for example "sweep". So "hand" has its own radical, while many of the words derived from it such as "sweep" do not (right? correct me if I am wrong). One interesting (to me) consequence is that we could use the Chinese radicals (only around 200 according to your post) to make a list of the corresponding words in the English (or any other) language that must be more "important" than others. We need a linguist here... and I am surely not one....maybe all this is either trivial or plain wrong.
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