information on rules of stroke order, refer to the section in this page titled Stroke Order Rules And Counting
Strokes 笔画规则与笔画数).
Assume the character we want to look up is this: 干. Using the stroke order rules, the first stroke in this character will be 一 (横heng2 Horizontal) which we will then regard/treat as we would a radical.
2. Since 一 (横heng2 Horizontal) contains just one stroke, the next step is to go to the Radical Index 部首表
and find the section where the 一画1-stroke radicals are located. It can be seen in that section, the 一 (横 heng2 Horizontal) stroke is radical number 2.
3. The next step is to locate radical number 2 in the Character Look-up Index 检字表 . It can be seen in the index that radical number (2) is identified by the heading 一 部.
4. The next step is to count the remaining number of strokes in the character 干. Using the stroke-count method discussed in the section titled Stroke Order Rules And Counting Strokes 笔画规则与笔画数, we can
determine that the remaining number of strokes is two.
5. The next step is to find the section under the heading 一 部 where the 2-stroke characters are located. That section is labeled 一至二画 (1-2 strokes). The character 干 is the fourth character down in that section. The pinyin to the right of the character is "gan1(first tone);gan4(fourth tone)".
6. The character entries in most Chinese dictionaries are arranged alphabetically, so therefore when looking for Chinese character entries in the dictionary, you can use the first character of the pinyin as your starting point. In this case, since the character we are looking for is "gan1;gan4", we turn the dictionary to the page where the "G" pinyin entries start, then continue to turn the page until we find where the "gan" pinyin entries start. Since "gan1" is a first-tone pronunciation, we first look at the Chinese characters whose pronunciation is first-tone.
7. The final step is to visually scan every Chinese character whose pronunciation is "gan1". During the scanning process, your objective is to find the 干 gan1 character among the entries. Once the character has been found, you'll then be able to read the dictionary's definition of the 干 gan1 character. In this case, 干 gan1 means "dry, empty". Since 干 also has a pronunciation of gan4, we then repeat steps 6 and 7 to locate 干 gan4 in the dictionary. Dictionary definitions will vary among publishers and editions. For more
information about selecting dictionaries, see the web page entitled Chinese Language Resources.
Exceptions to treating the first stroke as the radical:
The rules of stroke order are not an exact science and there will be times when the first stroke of a Independent Character 独体字 can not be treated as a radical. You will know this to be true when after identifying the first stroke of a character, you can't find the character in the Character Look-up Index 检字表. When you encounter this kind of situation, an alternative is to identify the second (or third, fourth, etc) stroke of the character and then treat that stroke as the radical.
For example, in the character 头 tou2, the first written stroke is the upper-left "、" (点dian3 dot), but in some cases, depending on the writer's point of view and style of writing, 一 (横heng2 Horizontal) will be the first written stroke. Therefore it's possible that "、" and/or "一" could serve as the radical. The point here is that if you know the rules of stroke order, you can sequentially go through all of the strokes in a character until you find the one that the Character Look-up Index 检字表 regards as the character's radical.
3. The Total Stroke Count Method:
The third way of looking-up characters in a dictionary is called the Total Stroke Count Method. Some dictionaries provide what is called a Stroke Count Character Index 笔画检字表. Unlike the Character Look- up Index 检字表 which is sorted and arranged by radical, this index provides a listing of all the characters in the Chinese language sorted and arranged by stroke count.
Stroke Count Character Look-up Index 笔笔笔笔画画画画检检检检字表字表字表字表:
Please click on this link to view the Stroke Count Character Look-up Index 笔画检字表and it's
explanation.
There are two cases when the Total Stroke Count Method can be very useful for looking-up characters in a dictionary:
1. The character is very complex and contains a large number of strokes, thus making the identification of the radical very difficult. These kinds of characters are called
2. The character is very simple and contains a few number of strokes, particulary in the case of Independent Characters 独体字, thus there is no clear and apparent radical.
(If you are dealing with a character that meets the criteria specified in 1 or 2 above, then it might be more feasible to use yet an alternate look-up method specified in the section titled: Looking-up Independent Characters and Difficult To Look-up Characters 如何查独体字及难检字)
The Total Stroke Count Method contains four steps as discussed below:
1. The first step in looking-up a character using the Radical Method is to count the total number of strokes