Reading Chinese Menus: Characters: 四 — sì — four

[kake]

四

四 (sì) is the character for the number four.

The most common use for 四 on the Chinese menu is perhaps as 四川 (Sìchuān), as in Sichuan food (四川菜/Sìchuān cài) — 四川 literally means "four rivers". 四川 is sometimes abbreviated simply to 川 — note that 四 on its own never means "Sichuan", though.

The next most common is probably as 四季豆 (sì jì dòu), or green beans. The literal translation is "four season beans" — I've read that this is a reference to their being in season all year round.

As noted on Monday, the pronunciation of 四/sì is a little tricky. This YouTube video of a woman cooking 涼拌四季豆 (liáng bàn sì jì dòu, or green bean salad) helps demonstrate the proper pronunciation, since she says 四季豆 quite often towards the start of it!

The radical of 四 is 囗 (wéi/enclosure). At first glance, this looks fairly similar to 口 (kǒu/mouth), which is also a radical. The way to distinguish them is this: when the radical is wéi, the character is basically a box with something in; but when the radical is kǒu, the character will contain one or more empty boxes somewhere within it.

A few examples:

味	wèi	(kǒu radical)	flavour/taste — used on menus as e.g. 怪味兔 (guài wèi tù), or "strange-flavour rabbit", a Sichuan dish.
品	pǐn	(kǒu radical)	product/commodity — often used on menus to indicate the dessert section, as 甜品 (tián pǐn), literally "sweet things".
回	huí	(wéi radical)	revolve/rotate/return — used on menus as 回鍋肉 (huí guō ròu), or twice-cooked pork.

四:	sì	radical 31 (囗)	Cantodict	MandarinTools	YellowBridge	Zhongwen

Characters mentioned in this post:

• 豆/dòu (bean),
• 口/kǒu (mouth)

Other related posts:

• 乾煸四季豆 (gān biān sì jì dòu/dry-fried green beans),
• the multiple uses of "i",
• numbers,
• 三/sān/three,
• 五/wǔ/five

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

Comments

[nanila]

So does that last one contain both the enclosure and mouth radicals?

[kake]

My dictionary (Oxford Pocket Chinese Dictionary) only lists 回 under the enclosure radical, so I would say no, kǒu isn't acting as a radical in this case.

I'd have liked to give a less confusing example, but there aren't all that many characters with the wéi radical, and the only ones I've seen on menus are 四 and 回. The apparent similarity between 口 and 囗 confused me for ages, though, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

[pne]

I think it depends on your definition of "radical".

In the broad sense of "component", I think it does contain both; in the narrow sense of "the one component that a character is classified by and that you use to look it up", it contains only one, the enclosure one (and anything other than "the radical" would simply be "remainder" and only classified by number of remaining strokes - three, in this case).

Though occasionally, characters may have multiple radicals in the narrow sense; this is typically for characters whose "proper" radical is difficult to determine and which will be listed under several "candidate radicals" that people might think of when trying to look up the character.

For example, 愛 ai4 "love" is traditionally assigned the 心 xin1 "heart" radical which occurs in the middle of the character, but since the defining radical is usually at the top or left, many people will expect the character to be under 爪 zhua3 "claw", so the character may also be listed under that in radical-stroke indexes. But I wouldn't expect it to be listed under 夂 zhi3, the portion at the bottom of the character -- that's a radical in the broad sense (recognisable portion of a character) but not in the narrow sense (defining portion of a character).

[kake]

瓣/bàn/petal is another one with multiple radicals, as pointed out by pulchritude on my 瓜 post.

Is the "component" definition of "radical" a common one? This is the first I've heard of it, though I'd already noticed that there are many components which are repeated between characters.