Stroke order is not decoration — it determines how the character looks handwritten and how dictionaries index it.
Almost every kanji is built from a small set of reusable parts. Learn the parts once and you stop memorising thousands of unrelated shapes.
The radical is the part a paper dictionary files a kanji under, and it usually hints at meaning. 鴿 is filed under 鳥 (bird) — radical number 196 of the 214 in the Kangxi system.
Three quick games built from this character's real data. Your streak is kept in this browser.
Kanji Duel pits 鴿 and 3,000 others head to head. One life. How long can you last?
鴿 means Dove, Temple Pigeon.
鴿 is read on'yomi (Chinese-derived) こう; kun'yomi (native Japanese) はと、どばと.
鴿 is written with 17 strokes. The animated diagram on this page shows the correct order.
The radical of 鴿 is 鳥 (bird), radical number 196 of the 214 Kangxi radicals. The radical is the component a dictionary files the character under, and it usually points at the character's meaning.
鴿 is built from 合 (fit) and 鳥 (bird). Learning kanji as combinations of a few hundred reusable components is far more efficient than memorising each character as a separate shape.
Signed in, we would remember every character you have looked at — and write you reading you can actually get through, built from exactly those.