Learning to read the radical way

Following a link from YuppieNomad to a cool tool that helps you generate a map of the places you've visited in the world, I came across another interesting 'fun' project by this Dutch Google engineer. Among the many people who have wanted to learn Chinese, he believes the way to go is not to first learn to speak, but to read (and only read silently, for that matter, as he has no interest in pronunciation). I'd say that's a pretty big task given the 50,000 or so characters in Chinese, according to Wikipedia. His rationale is because it's just plain hard for speakers of 'completely different languages' to learn Chinese but you could also argue because of the many variations and vastly different dialects of spoken Chinese.

The method to his particular madness of learning to read Chinese is to first learn all the radicals as a way of trying to understand how words are constructed. To this end, he's made a program that teaches and tests you on the radicals and associated characters. Sounds like an interesting idea, though as one person comments, somewhat complicated by the fact that many Chinese words have completely different meanings when used in combination with other words. Thus, while the radical may give you clues to one meaning of the word, it may ignore the many other meanings the word (and its associated phrases) can have.

One other thing, he's counted 215 radicals used in simplified Chinese. Makes sense to use simplified, I suppose, given that written Chinese was 'simplified' to improve literacy (by reducing the number of brush strokes). As someone who started by learning traditional, though, I find the many more meanings attached to a word confusing and by 'simplifying' the words, sometimes the radical is changed or taken out all together. How much does it really help then to know the meanings of the radicals to begin with?

At any rate, it's food for thought, especially as I've been trying to practice speaking Cantonese and been thinking about trying to become literate beyond a kindergarten level. Besides, my years of Chinese school and tutoring in both Cantonese and Mandarin seem to have had minimal results. Who knows, maybe I should give it a whirl...