Hi! I’ve recently started learning Kanji, from Heisig’s RTK. A couple of keywords which he uses are “Primitives” and “Primite meanings”. After doing a bit of research I still can’t find a simple explanation behind what these are and how they differ from Radicals. To be clear I am an absolute beginner, so try to keep it as simple as possible please!
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They are an invention for RTK. They are sometimes the same as radicals but primitives are just there to help you remember certain key parts of a kanji and create mnemonics to remember them.
You won’t find them enywhere else.
The idea of primitives is an RTK invention like the other commenter said, more generally you refer to the different parts of a character as “components”. Honestly components and RTK primitives are pretty similar, although most of the primitive meanings from RTK are made up and completely unrelated to the actual origin of the component Heisig associates them with
The radical is simply one component of a character that’s useful for looking it up in dictionaries since physical kanji dictionaries are generally ordered by radical. For example: 人 (as 亻) for 体, 土 for 地, 辶 (sometimes rendered 辵) for 道, 行 for 術, 心 for 感, and so on
To put it simply: a radical is the part a character is indexed under in a dictionary. It’s important to note that not all parts of a kanji are radicals (e.g. the B-shaped thing in 追). ‘Primitives’ was a term made up by Heisig to avoid confusing the reader, as he employs it for other purposes.