Since Chinese characters are composed of radicals, it is an intuitive to recognize the radicals inside a character before recognizing the whole character. In this paper, a partial matching algorithm, which is based on a modified relaxation method, is proposed to perform radical recognition on scanned input characters. The standard radicals are stored in the database, and thirteen transformations are developed to represent a radical appearing in thirteen different positions (13 types) inside a square character. The matching of a radical is done by modified relaxation and also nuder some constraints on the positions and the number of strokes of a radical appearing as 13 types. Experiments were conducted on 204 constrained handwritten characters, each containing two to five radicals, for matching 16 radical templates. The total recognition rate was 63.3%, but the rate of identifying at least one radical in a character was 97%.