Learning & Education
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PROJECT DATA
Learning & Education
Status: Finished
Availability: Public
Overview
The Chinese Radical Companion is a complete, illustrated reference to the 214 Kangxi radicals, the building blocks dictionaries use to organize Chinese characters. Each radical gets its own page, laid out the same way all the way through, in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Each page covers the radical's meaning, its stroke order, how its form changed over 3,000 years, and example characters that show it at work. The finished book runs about 335 pages, with front and back covers, three indexes, and full source citations.
Background or originating question
Most Chinese learners meet the radicals as a chart at the back of a textbook: a list of shapes to memorize, with little sense of why they matter. I wanted to know whether I could build the reference I wished I'd had, one that shows where each radical came from, how to write it, and how it shapes the characters it appears in. A second question ran alongside the first: could AI tools help one person produce a carefully sourced, consistently designed reference book of this size, with me directing the work and making the decisions?
What has been created
A 214-page core, one page per radical in dictionary order, each with the same set of sections:
meaning, and what the earliest form depicts
stroke order, frame by frame
five historical stages, from oracle bone to regular script
component forms and look-alikes
dictionary lookup tips
example characters
940 example characters, sorted by whether the radical carries the character's meaning or its sound
715 historical glyph images and 1,105 stroke-order frames, each from a credited, openly licensed or public-domain source
A "How to Use This Guide" section, plus indexes by stroke count, by pinyin, and by example character
A Works Cited organized by radical, and a page of licenses and notices
Original front and back covers
A submission-ready book proposal with sample pages
ChatGPT by OpenAI helped locate source materials, draft content and create the covers. Claude by Anthropic helped revise, edit and compile the book into its final layout.
Current status
Finished
Key outcomes, themes, or findings
Consistency comes from the specification, not the effort. Two written specs, one for sourcing content and one for page layout, kept 214 pages identical in structure. Automated checks then caught what a page-by-page read would miss.
Accuracy beats completeness. Where no reliable example or image existed, the page says so rather than filling the gap. Some radicals have fewer examples or an empty historical frame, and that honesty is part of the design.
Small details carry a lot of weight. Simplified and Traditional characters need separate typefaces. One rare character, 𠯑, needed a font of its own. Stroke numbers that looked fine on screen were unreadable in print. Each of these sent the work back a step.
Sources shape the format. Full citations on every page pushed the layout past one page, so they moved to a compiled Works Cited at the back. Merging repeated sources then cut that section from 3,606 entries to 2,544.
AI works best with clear direction. The tools were fastest at gathering, drafting and repetitive production. The judgment calls stayed with me: what counts as accurate, what to leave out, and how the book should feel.
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