Phonetic Families & Components
Sound Roots & Semantic Radicals Explorer
Decode Chinese characters by their shared sound roots and see how semantic radicals split their meanings across tones.
Popular Roots:
先
11
Family Characters
4
HSK Words
Tone Fan-out (先)
How this root's pronunciation drifts across the Mandarin tone spectrum:
4 Active Tones
Tone 1xiān
Tone 3xǐ
Tone 4xiàn
Tone 5
Family Characters (11)
Root: 先先
xiān
HSK 1Phonetic Root (声旁 / Sound Core)
first, beforehand, earlier