This study compared the effectiveness of deductive instruction and guided inductive instruction for developing semantic radical knowledge of Chinese characters. The evaluation was conducted through a quasi-experimental 3-week intervention involving 46 intermediate learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The results indicated that guided inductive instruction generated significantly greater gains in learners' use of radical information for radical form-meaning mapping and for Chinese character recognition and inferencing. This study further found that the effectiveness of inductive instruction in strengthening radical form-meaning mapping varied for semantic radicals of different complexity levels. These findings suggest that instructors should apply guided induction in teaching semantic radicals, but also be flexible in varying instruction in response to the complexity of semantic radicals. The findings suggest that the inductive-deductive nature of instruction and the complexity of semantic radicals are important variables to consider in future research on the learning and instruction of Chinese characters.