Kanji are the mysterious Chinese pictographs used in China, Japan, and to a limited extent, in South Korea. While they can seem like meaningless chicken scratches at first, they're actually a well organized complex system for communicating meaning. There are several fundamental ways that kanji are constructed, the most common being organized by radical, where similar words are grouped according to their meaning. For example, the characters for "read" "speak" and "language" all have a left section that looks like a stack of books, and words related to the weather such as "snow" "lightning" and "cloud" all incorporate the character for "rain" into them. When you look up a word using a kanji dictionary, searching for the radical first is a quick way to find the character you need to look up. Despite the complex structure of kanji, there are some characters that are made in such a way that their meaning are immediately communicated, even to beginners. Words like the kanji for the numbers for 1, 2 and 3 are easy, as are some basic words like mountain (yama). The character for "old" (furui) looks like a little Western grave stone, while the kanji for "meat" (niku) is a little rib cage. One of the simplest characters is ki (tree), which can become hayashi (woods) if you draw it twice, or mori (forest) if you draw three of them. Easy as pie!
6 comments:
Got to love those easy Kanji. ^_^
Oh! That clarifies some things for me. I like being able to relate images in memorization.
You forgot 女 that goes to 姦.
I kid I kid!
But it's interesting how it all fits together...
I especially like how electricity and lightning share a common kanji. A nice sort of logic there. I guess you all have noticed by now that entering Japanese script is quite useless on this page: comes up as a strange font.
sadly yes, it's very annoying
For posters here, you can post japanese, but to see it correctly you may have to change your page encoding to Unicode UTF-8. In Firefox this is done by selecting View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) from the menu bar.
The underlying problem is that while there is a meta tag with a Content-Type specifying the page as UTF8, the web server is serving up the page with a Content-Type header saying that the page uses the Latin 1 character set:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Which encoding is selected (header or meta value) may depend on your browser - they might weigh them differently. On my Mac both Safari and FF pick the wrong encoding (based on the header being wrong). I'm not sure if this can be changed, but it'd likely solve the problem.
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