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While
Chinese characters are often thought of as overly
complex, in fact they are all derived from a
couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs
in ways that are usually quite logical and easy
to remember. These wen (or zigen) are the true
radicals of Chinese as identified by Xu Shen
in his classic Shuowen Jiezi nearly 2000 years
ago. Xu Shen also devised the bushou, meaning
"section headings", to help organize
his dictionary into more manageable parts. With
minor changes this bushou system has been the
foundation of almost all subsequent Chinese
dictionaries. Often mistranslated as "radicals",
not all of the bushou are true radicals in that
some of them can be further broken down into
their component wen. Moreover, many of the true
radicals are not included in the list of bushou.
 
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