I am listening to Anonymous 4 sing about the end of the world (in the year 1000). It’s funny how soothing the sound is and how terrible the actual meaning of the pieces on their CD: 1000 A Mass for the End of Time.

The Beginning Oxford Chinese
Dictionary I bought has
exercises in it. This is a great
dictionary. The first set of
exercises ask you to look
at a character and determine
which part of it is the radical.
Radicals are little bits of
characters by which
they are classified. Once
you determine the correct
radical, you see a list of
characters that contain it grouped by the number of strokes it takes to make the character. The character is followed by the pinyin pronunciation which you can look up and find the meaning.

There were eleven and I missed one. Cool.