Is there a site that can split characters into radicals?

Question

For example, let's examine character heaven. It has a Ren radical (men). And then we add a strip to become Tha (big). And then we add another strip to get heaven.

Now, is there a site to do so?

I think that'll be the easier for me to understand.

Answer 1

The online chinese dictionary MDBG provides radical information for every character in its database. For instance, if you search for the character 天 (tiān) and click on the first result, the "Rad/Str" column reads 大 + 1, i.e., the radical 大 plus one stroke.

Zhongwen.com also gives information on character decomposition. The entry for 洋 reads "Water 水 with 羊 phonetic."

As Alenanno pointed out, not all parts of characters are radicals, but these two resources can give you more information about how characters are constructed.

Answer 2

You seem to assume that characters are only done by radicals, which is not true. Not all parts in a character are radicals.

Consider for example the character 他. The radical is 亻 which is 人, the other part is not a radical; its appearance is the same as the character for "also": 也, but this is not a radical. Radicals are very useful, since you can understand the probable "topic-area" of a character:

烊 has the radical 火 (fire), and means "melt"; 洋 has the radical 水 (water), and means ocean.

In the case of 天, the radical is the #37 in this page, which is 大 + another stroke (4 strokes in total).

If you want to learn characters by stroke, (for example for the character 天) you can use some sites that help you with animations/pictures showing the stroke order; you can also start from the wikipedia resources regarding stroke orders.

Answer 3

As mentioned in a question on searching by character parts, tatoeba.org has several tools related to character structure. The one you're interested in would be the one that explodes a character. It's not perfect, and your 天 example produced this:

一 大 大 一 大 大

However, 他 produced this:

亻 也 乜 丨 乚 乛 人

You can always go to the source data at wikimedia commons, but it's not as easy to use. There's a similar data source on codeplex.

Answer 4

The etymology part of the YellowBridge dictionary will show you this. Look up any character here, then click on etymology, and you will see the radicals in the 'etymology explorer'.

Answer 5

Another user here runs a site called HanziJS that does what you're asking for. (Sorry, I can't remember that user's name, but I discovered his website while reading here!)

http://hanzijs.com/