This study utilized eye-tracking to investigate 63 intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners' real-time radical preferences. Radicals are components of Chinese characters and give clues to the meanings and pronunciations of the character. This study aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) What type of radicals (semantic/phonetic) do CFL readers most rely on when reading characters? (2) Does reliance on one type of radical (semantic/phonetic) correlate with accuracy in character recognition? (3) Does awareness of semantic/phonetic radicals affect the accuracy of character recognition or reliance on radicals in real-time processing? The results found that participants demonstrated a phonetic bias in that they had more proportion of looks on phonetic over semantic radicals in real-time reading. Furthermore, participants' radical awareness and radical identification scores positively correlated with accurate character recognition. Pedagogical applications drawn from this study suggest that future instructors should explicitly teach radical identification to CFL learners to facilitate character decoding.