Liberal Arts Major
Anyhow, if people are interested, there is a very small chance that I will do a weekly (or biweekly, or never, because I am terrible at keeping up with that sort of thing) "featured kanji" post where I talk as much about that kanji as whatever my edition of A Japanese Reader tells me and the typographical limitations of TFN allow. If one or more of you know how to read kanji then this would be totally useless for you!
Any takers?
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
I'd probably read such a thing.
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
I will be starting on the 80 first year kanji even though a smarter approach would be to go through the radicals instead. I am not a smart person. I'm going to skip the numbers, though, because they suck. I'll link to Wiktionary pages for each kanji while providing a brief and not very insightful commentary on what I find. Also, for readability and because I'm lazy, I will be using romaji instead of kana to give readings. There's almost a 1-1 correspondence, so that should work out well enough.
For general reference, here's a few concepts that you should know about because I intend to use them maybe.
Radicals: A radical is a "simple" grapheme that's used in combination with additional strokes to form a more complex grapheme. Often (always?), the additional strokes are also radicals, so the elements of an ideography - like kanji - are either radicals themselves or compositions of radicals. There are apparently 214 radicals in Japanese. Knowing them makes it significantly easier to remember thousands of kanji. Good thing they're usually an afterthought!
Readings: Most kanji have what is called an on-yomi and a kun-yomi reading. The former is a Japanese approximation to the Chinese pronunciation of the symbol, while the second is a native Japanese gloss. Not all symbols have both, but I believe almost every relevant one does. On readings are usually used when the kanji appears in a compound of multiple kanji, while kun readings are usually used when the kanji appears either alone or followed by kana called okurigana, which denote morphological elements of a word - as well as serving to disambiguate readings, since it turns out there can be multiple on and/or kun readings for any given symbol. Of course! (I will be giving only the readings that appear to be the most important; the rest can be found on Wiktionary.) Naturally, there are zillions of exceptions to these rules of thumb, for instance when a word doesn't have one of the two categories of readings. There are also other readings, many aspects of readings are more nuanced than this explanation, and proper names are the worst, but we'll consider these issues as they arise.
Stroke order: Kanji are often classified by the number of strokes it takes to produce them, which are drawn in a particular order. This is pretty lame.
Incidentally, the complexity of readings is a good reason to know conversational Japanese before trying to learn to read it. But I'm adventurous! Let's begin our adventure. It will involve a lot of Paint.
1. 日 hi "sun", "day"
Strokes
Etymology
According to Wiktionary, this symbol originated as a picture of the sun with a dot in the middle, which is basically an eye so whatever. The dot evolved into a bar. Actually, all the curves evolved into bars of some sort, and hence we go from an eye to a bento box, and all of this is supposed to represent the sun. Not so special now, are you, Picasso?
Readings
On-yomi: nichi
Kun-yomi: hi, -bi
Radicals
This kanji is a radical.
Commentary
Naturally, the very first kanji we cover is a trainwreck as far as readings go. Astute observers will notice that this is one half of the kanji for Japan, 日本 nippon, which implies the reading ni-. However, this is neither on- nor kun-yomi. It is nanori, a reading for placenames that is also used in words that have nothing to do with places or people, unless "daily life" counts as a person. Consistency!
Compounds
昨日 kinou "yesterday"
明日 ashita "tomorrow"
You may notice these don't decompose into the appropriate readings for each kanji in the compound (although there are alternative, homosemous glosses that do). This phenomenon is called jukujikun, where the meaning of the grapheme is derived from a combination of the meanings of the component kanji but their readings are ignored in the gloss for the compound. So ashita is composed of the kanji for "bright" (明) as well as the kanji for "day" (this one), which is apparently how the Japanese view "tomorrow". (The sun'll come up, tomorrow...!) Also notice that both 昨 and 明 contain 日 as a radical.
Irrelevant additional detail: the -no- in kinou appears to be derived from the genitive particle. There also used to be a /w/ in there somewhere.
日曜日 nichiyoubi "Sunday"
This bad boy has two instances of 日: one with an on-yomi reading and the other with one of the kun-yomi ones. What gives? It turns out this word is a compound of 日曜 nichiyou and 日. Thus, we have a lexical compound 日曜 + 日 which includes a graphical compound (日曜). It would appear that since the first element of the lexical compound is a compound of kanji, the on-yomi readings are used. Then because the second element stands alone, a kun-yomi reading is used: in particular, as the reading hi apparently cannot be used as a suffix, -bi is given instead. It is also possible that someone just woke up one day and decided to throw a bunch of readings together. Did I mention that 日曜 means "Sunday"? This word is literally "Sunday day".
Misc.
This kanji is used as a counter with the kun-yomi reading -ka (or -nichi), representing some number of days or a day of the month (e.g. 九日 kokonoka "ninth day of the month").
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
...
It turns out the Japanese classification/educational program for kanji-learning is designed to introduce simple concepts first, as opposed to simple kanji. This is why, for example, you get 赤 in first grade and 己 in sixth grade.
Of course, there is some connection between the grade level and the complexity of the symbol, but again, the system is intended for native Japanese speakers as they slowly progress in their intellectual development, so non-native adult learners have some interesting obstacles to overcome.
I didn't take Japanese in coolege because I was too busy retaining no knowledge of Arabic and skipping Danish class, but I assume that they follow a hybrid program of introducing both complex kanji and radicals simultaneously. My high school Japanese class, however, followed the Japanese educational program, with mixed results (by which I mean it was a failure).
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Strokes
Etymology
Like 日, which supposedly resembles the sun, this is supposed to resemble the moon. It seems arcs of a circle are transformed into straight lines over time. Personally, I find this one looks a lot closer to the moon than 日 looks to the sun.
Readings
On-yomi: getsu, gatsu
Kun-yomi: tsuki, tsuku
Radicals
This kanji is a radical.
Commentary
An interesting feature of tsu, which in kana is a single symbol, is that it is sometimes used orthographically to indicate gemination in the consonant component of the following symbol, in which case it isn't read (and is written like a subscript). Apparently this practice translates to kanji readings ending in -tsu, as the last compound example below shows. One wonders if 月 is introduced into compounds that have nothing to do with the moon or the month simply to take advantage of the combination of the kana for ge/ga and tsu, but the only indication of this I can see on Wiktionary is maybe the really excessively complicated kanji for matchmaker, 月下氷人 gekkahyoujin.
Compounds
日月 jitsugetsu "sun and moon"
One reading for 日 I didn't include in its entry is the on-yomi jitsu, which is used in this compound. The word itself is kind of odd looking, and Wiktionary only has a Mandarin reference for the grapheme glossing it as a "literary" way of referring to life or livelihood. Whether this carries over to Japanese, I don't know. On the other hand, this is a delightfully straightforward symbol. There's the sun! There's the moon! It's both of those things!
半月 hangetsu "half moon"
半月 hantsuki "half month"
The on-yomi reading of 半 han is used for both of these, but according to Wiktionary, it's a homograph with two different meanings and readings: one using on-yomi and the other kun-yomi for 月. I would speculate that this is due to an underlying syntactic ambiguity: "half moon" could be a compound noun, while "half month" is a noun modified by an adjective (presumably as an adjunct). If both are now considered compound nouns, the latter is so general it was probably collapsed into a single constituent over time while the original use of 月's kun-yomi reading (due its status as an isolate) remained. Of course, a major deficiency in this baseless conjecture is the consistent use of han in both words.
月経 gekkei "menstruation"
First, 経 kei means "pass through" or something like that (it's grade 5, whatever), so this is quite the appropriate ideograph. More importantly, this is an example of the phenomenon I discussed in the commentary: the -tsu of getsu is unread and the consonant onset of kei is doubled.
Misc.
Wiktionary presents this as a usage note:
"When used in compounds counting a number of months with "ヶ"(か, ka), 月 is pronounced as げつ (getsu). When used in compounds for modern months of the year, it is pronounced as がつ (gatsu). When used for poetic or lunar months, it is pronounced as つき (tsuki)."
I take this to mean this isn't used like 日 as a counter for months (that's ヶ's job maybe), and I don't know what a lunar month is so whatever. Like 日, the names of the months include this symbol, but they appear to be simply compounds of the number of the month plus 月 meaning simply "month": 五月 gogatsu "May", literally something like "five (fifth?) month".
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
learning the important kanji first, eh?
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
3. 火 hi "fire"
Strokes
Etymology
This symbol was originally drawn as a bulbous fire with three flames; it is not a stretch to assume the two flourishes on the left and right as well as the central upward protrusion are derived from those flames, while the body of the fire (the bottom of it) was jettisoned due to a relative absence of informational content.
Readings
On-yomi: ka, ko
Kun-yomi: hi, -bi, yaku
Radicals
This kanji is a radical. It also has an alternate form that can be used as a radical on the bottom of a grapheme, namely 灬, as seen in 煮 ni[ru] "boil", "cook".
Commentary
Isn't it neat how this shares most of its kun readings with 日? They both have something to do with fire! The sun is basically made of it! But more interestingly, the /h/ in /hi/ is actually not an English /h/ at all. It's the same sound as in the German ich, which is a lot like the sh-sound in English. So these are pronounced "chi" more than "hi", if that makes any sense. More generally, this is the pronunciation of the consonant-vowel combination represented by the hiragana ひ.
Compounds
火気 kaki "fire"
火器 kaki "firearms"
The second of these two isn't really all that interesting on its own and I just included it because it happened to have the same kun reading, which I thought interesting. Fire and firearms are homophones in Japanese! Except I don't really know if the first one means fire, especially since 火 on its own allegedly means fire (there is also 火炎 kaen "flame" but, as you can tell by all the instances of 火, this is closer to "a fire" than "fire"). According to the Wikipedia page, it has an alternate reading hoke that means things like "steam", which would make more sense. But then Wiktionary drops this example:
火気 厳禁
かき げんきん
kaki genkin
fire prohibited
花火 hanabi "fireworks"
火花 hibana "spark"
Note that 火 is read -bi in the first of these and hi in the second. This phenomenon is called rendaku ("sequential voicing"). You know how kana come in pairs like ひ and び? The second symbol, which has the two "dots" (called dakuten or ten-ten), is the "voiced" counterpart of the first, which is the "voiceless" form. (Of course, these are not phonetically accurate descriptions, since the voiceless analogue to /b/ is not /h/, but /p/, and the voiced analogue of /h/ doesn't occur in Japanese.) Rendaku is the phenomenon whereby sometimes the initial consonant of the second word/kanji in a compound is pronounced in its voiced form, as seen in these two examples. There ultimately isn't a distinct -bi reading for 火; it's just the hi reading undergoing rendaku.
火星 kasei "Mars"
Apparently Mars is the fire star. Too bad English speakers decided to use the name of some lame Roman god instead.
火の鳥 hi no tori "phoenix"
This isn't actually a kanji compound, though it is a compound noun in the usual sense of the term (compare "homework" and "dinner time"). The semi-direct translation is "fire's bird", though this construction is often translated in the form "bird of fire", which is more precise in this case (the two English expressions are identical in Japanese).
Misc.
Wiktionary suggests the following phrase that has undoubtedly appeared in phrasebooks everywhere:
火の手が上がる "burst into flames"
I don't know how to pronounce it, but I know I'll be using it daily.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
4. 水 mizu "water"
Stroke Order
Etymology
This is simple enough: the original form of this symbol depicted a river. In that respect, it is similar to 川 kawa "river", which Wiktionary points out because it knows everything. Anyway, the line down the middle can be taken as the general shape of the river and the marks on the left and right can be taken as the currents.
Readings
On-yomi: sui
Kun-yomi: mizu
Radicals
This kanji is a radical. Like 火, it has an alternate form, 氵, only this is (obviously) used as a left radical rather than a bottom one. It's apparently read sanzui and can be seen in e.g. 湖 mizuumi "lake". The alternate form of 火 has a number of readings as well but I didn't list those because it looked like too much work.
Commentary
This is my favorite kanji of the four I've looked at so far, and one of my favorites overall. Incidentally, Suicune is one of my favorite Pokemon. His name is probably derived in part from the on reading of this kanji. According to Bulbapedia, the rest of his name is probably derived from 君 kun "monarch", and its Taiwanese name is written 水君, which more or less confirms this theory. It is also probably not a coincidence that Pokemon Crystal was named that way, since "crystal" is 水晶 suishou. And just like that, a previously mysterious and apparently creative name falls right back into the Porygon pile.
Compounds
Wiktionary has approximately a billion different compounds, most of which have some obvious relation to water, so I would direct you there for a more thorough overview. Did I ever point out that the first instance of each kanji in the headings of these entries is a link to the related Wiktionary page? I removed the underline to make it more legible, so that's not obvious, and I forgot if I ever pointed it out. It's been over a month since I first started this and I've just now gotten around to pointing this out. Anyway.
炭水化物 tansuikabutsu "carbohydrates"
This is literally a compound of 炭 tan "carbon" and 水化物 suikabutsu "hydrate (noun?)". This struck me as odd because I've never associated carbohydrates with water because they appear to have nothing to do with water. Did you know that the molecule structure of a carbohydrate is carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen with the latter two proportioned in a 2:1 ratio as in water? I did not know this. Perhaps one reason Japanese students do better than Americans in the sciences is because they write everything out with suggestive pictures. Is it too early to write my MA thesis proposal?
水割り mizuwari "whiskey diluted with water"
This is apparently a thing.
水臭い mizukusai "standoffish"
An explanation and an alternate translation, "distant", is available here if you can read Japanese or Google Translate guesstimates. It has something to do with diluting your food with water (though presumably not your whiskey). Also, Google Translate has no idea what this word is.
月水金 gessuikin "Mon-Wed-Fri"
Notice, again, the geminate /s/ due to 月. English-speaking college students could use a word like this to describe their schedules.
水入らず mizuirazu "with no outsiders present"
I'm going to go out on a limb and say Wiktionary's gloss could be less vaguely racist. This appears again in the idioms section, where it's given as "by ourselves". These two translations appear on the same page. Lexicography by committee is just as good as everything else by committee.
水墨画 suibokuga "India ink painting"
This is literally "water ink painting" from 墨 boku "ink" and 画 ga "painting" (these are all on readings), so I don't know how India got into the picture.
水爆 suibaku "hydrogen bomb"
Again with the chemistry!
水俣病 minamatabyou "Minamata disease"
This is a compound of 水俣 Minamata, the name of a city, and 病 byou "disease"; the city's name uses one of the nanori readings of 水. Minamata disease is a neurological ailment resulting from mercury poisoning.
水商売 mizushoubai "chancy trade"
You know, Wiktionary, "risky" would have made more sense and sounded less ridiculous. Anyway, this is a compound with 商売 shoubai "business".
Misc.
So let's see, we have loneliness, weapons of mass destruction, mercury poisoning, and the name of one of the worst episodes of House. This was not a cheerful entry. In closing, here's an idiomatic phrase and/or proverb to lift your spirits, courtesy of Wiktionary:
水 到りて 渠 成る
mizu itarite kyo naru
water arriving ditch becomes
"as time flows, everything falls into place"
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
I know the feeling.
Is it bad that I don't really see how "water arriving ditch becomes" means... anything? man, translation is weird.
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
That's probably because of my choice of words. A contextually superior translation for 成る is "results"; the word is used to generally mean a transition between one state and another. (For instance, it's used in the refrain for the Evangelion theme: shounen yo shinwa ni nare "boy, become a legend" or something like that.) 到りて is the -て form of a verb, which is usually analogous to gerunds in English so I used the -ing form of "arrive". However, this sort of construction does not appear in English, since the -て form is the Swiss army knife of Japanese verbs. A more descriptive translation might be "the arrival of" - however, that isn't literal.
Add in some subtext and you get: "When water arrives, a ditch results."
EDIT: The Japanese text encoding died on me the first time I posted this. I wonder why.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
...I probably should have been able to figure that out on my own.
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
Well, technically... >_>
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Stroke Order
Etymology
The original form of this grapheme was a vertical line with little dashes emanating from the top and bottom, symbolizing the branches and roots. The roots became the longer lines on the sides and the branches became... well I guess they became a straight line somehow. Hey, if the sun can be a rectangle with a line through it, anything goes.
Readings
On-yomi: boku, moku
Kun-yomi: ki, ko
Radicals
This kanji is a radical.
Commentary
This kanji sucks.
Compounds
Wiktionary doesn't really provide any interesting compounds in the Japanese section, so you have to look in the Mandarin section instead. Also, unrelated to this, one should note the ko reading is apparently only used in compounds.
木石 bokuseki "unfeeling person"
This also means "trees and stones" - 石 seki means "stone" - but that doesn't seem like something anyone has ever said. 石 is a first grade kanji, so we'll be seeing it again sooner rather than later.
木星 mokusei "Jupiter"
So Mars is the fire planet, but Jupiter is the tree planet? Does Japan have a variant of rock-paper-scissors based on the solar system?
木琴 mokkin "xylophone"
I point this one out mainly because I have no idea why the /k/ is geminate; there doesn't appear to be a motsu reading for 木 (based on my exhaustive search!) and the other kanji in the compound is simply kin.
Misc.
I should just rename this section to "proverbs" or something. Today's entry (with kana this time):
猿 も 木 から 落ちる
さる も き から おちる
saru mo ki kara ochiru
monkeys and/also tree from fall
"even monkeys fall from trees"
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
I thought Jupiter was the wind planet. Japan is basically identical to Golden Sun, right?
---
"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
6. 金 kane "metal", "gold", "money"
Stroke Order
Yeah, I didn't draw that very well (in stark contrast to my previous masterpieces). The "try to write the stroke number using a mouse in Paint" plan seems to break down once you get past 4-5 of them.
Etymology
I vaguely recall being told in my first-year high school Japanese class that this was supposed to be the storehouse for all the gold, but apparently the original form was a pictographic representation of a bell. Were ancient Chinese bells made of or plated with gold? I mean, why not show, I don't know, a sword or something? Swords are awesome. What kind of bells are we even talking about? It certainly couldn't be church bells.
This question prompted me to look beyond Wiktionary's brief etymological statement and go here. Apparently these were a kind of musical bells that were played like the xylophone. I didn't even know these existed. Look at all I've learned!
Radicals
This kanji is a radical.
Readings
On-yomi: kon, kin
Kun-yomi: kane, kana
Commentary
Of the kanji I've covered so far, this one on its own probably provides the most useful word, (o)kane, after 日 and 月. For instance, I now know enough kanji to describe my bank account: お金はありません。
Compounds
金魚 kingyo "goldfish"
It should come as no surprise that 魚 gyo (on-yomi) means "fish". Apt observers will note the alternate form of 火 in 魚; however, it is not a radical. In fact, 魚 has no radicals, as it itself is one. The 火 on the bottom is just a "component" of the kanji. Each kanji is either a radical itself or contains a single radical. Kanji can be "pure" or they can contain multiple components. (Every kanji I've written about so far is pure.) Sometimes multiple components are classified as radicals, but at most one component can be the radical for any particular kanji. Here is a dictionary that lets you look up kanji by their radicals (sorted by stroke count) and also lists their components (parts) in each entry. It is very handy.
Additionally, it's not necessarily the case that each component is derived from some other kanji. Consider, for instance, the component 艹, which shows up in e.g. 芯 shin "wick". This is a three-stroke radical that doesn't correspond to any kanji: it is in fact the alternate top-radical form of the hanzi 艸, which isn't used in Japanese and appears only as a component in other imports. It also has its own fancy name, kusa kanmuri, where typically radicals are just named "standard kun-yomi" + -hen, as in kanehen, the name of the subject of this post. You probably forgot about that by now!
錬金術 renkinjutsu "alchemy"
I feel like I'm the last person in the world to find out that 術 jutsu means "technique" or "art". Meanwhile, 錬 ren means "smelt", so this is "gold-smelting art".
白金 hakkin "platinum"
This is a compound with 白 haku "white", which is silly to begin with considering white gold is not the same as platinum, but I digress. Once again I don't know where the geminate consonant comes from. I guess the compounding process smushed the /k/ in haku together with the one in kin and someone (Godzilla) ate the /u/ in the middle.
Misc.
Wiktionary gives the following as a compound:
一刻千金
ikkoku senkin
"Time flies when you're having fun"
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
7. 土 tsuchi "soil", "ground"
Stroke Order
Etymology
According to Wiktionary, this was originally drawn as a "lump of clay on a potter's wheel". So, in other words, a stick with a line through it. Sounds about right.
Radicals
This kanji is a radical.
Readings
On-yomi: to, do (rendaku)
Kun-yomi: tsuchi
Commentary
Compounds
土産 miyage "souvenir", "present"
First, this is another example of jukujikun, like 昨日 and 明日, meaning the kanji are used for their meanings and an unrelated reading is assigned to the whole compound. (I'm not sure, but I think 産 means "product". It's a grade 4, so pfft.) Second, a variant of this word is お土産 omiyage, which follows a pattern we've previously encountered in e.g. お金 okane. The prefix お- o- is used as an honorific and many words require it for politeness: in the case of 金, I suppose the difference is kind of like the difference between "money" and "dough" in English.
土竜 mogura "mole (animal)"
This is another jukujikun, together with 竜 ryu "dragon". (Potentially interesting note: this reading is on-yomi. The kun-yomi is tatsu and apparently means the same thing. Google Translate gives the on with the kanji in isolation, so I assume this is the standard reading.) The reading for the compound is derived from the verb 潜る moguru, which means to go under something. It turns out jukujikun are often written in kana, so this word is usually モグラ.
率土 sotto "face of the earth"
Here, 率 sotsu (on) "ratio" follows 月's tradition of doubling the following consonant onset. How these two symbols combine to form this meaning remains a mystery to me.
土星 dosei "Saturn"
Of course Saturn is the earth planet!
Misc.
土を踏む tsuchi wo fumu "enter [a] foreign country"
Wiktionary provides this phrase and gloss but it's unclear to me where the word for "foreign" appears in the Japanese: 踏む fumu means "tread on" and 土 doesn't seem to have any such connotations. Google Translate doesn't insert "foreign" in there, either. I think it's safe to assume Wiktionary has failed, either in providing idiomatic background or in providing English.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?
Editor
Kanji can eat a bag of dicks though.
For instance, I now know enough kanji to describe my bank account: お金はありません。
A+
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"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
"I have no money" or "My bank account is sad"
<->
"What the fuck is Alice doing in Wonderland anyway? Who the fuck told her she could leave the god damn kitchen in the first place?" -Random guy on Xbox Live
http://www.backloggery.com/kodan882
Editor
...I want to say it should actually be お金がありません, though. But I was never that great with particles so who knows!
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"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
Yeah, I've been "scouting" information on what exactly I might be getting myself into. A few minutes on wikipedia pretty much told me that hiragana and katakana would be relatively easy and something I could probably do in a few days if I actually put in the effort, which backed up everything I've heard and seen.
Kanji though. Man.
I just envision that being beyond terrible.
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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?
Liberal Arts Major
It should, if spoken out of context, but I had already mentioned my bank account as the topic, so I figured %u306F would be appropriate. On the other hand, I don't know Japanese, so I'm just shooting in the dark here.
Yeah, I've been "scouting" information on what exactly I might be getting myself into. A few minutes on wikipedia pretty much told me that hiragana and katakana would be relatively easy and something I could probably do in a few days if I actually put in the effort, which backed up everything I've heard and seen.
Yes, the kana are easy to learn, although just as easy to forget without frequent. I'm pretty good with hiragana but katakana are basically nonsense to me, even though I first encountered and "learned" them ten years ago.
Kanji are difficult, but not absurdly so. If you think about the 216 or whatever radicals as the "letters" from which more complex kanji are constructed, I think it's a lot easier to put two and two together. But this is only if you want to be able to recognize and understand the meaning behind written text - not if you want to read it out loud. The chief difficulty comes in not knowing how to pronounce a given kanji even if you can recognize it, due to all the readings and compounds and so on. That's why it's recommended you learn Japanese with kana and romanji before going down the kanji rabbit hole.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Editor
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"You're childish. What are you getting? Are you getting strawberry? Ha! That's such a childish flavor, only children eat strawberry."
Liberal Arts Major
...I want to say it should actually be お金がありません, though. But I was never that great with particles so who knows!
I decided to google translate the first one.
It says "There is no money."
<->
"What the fuck is Alice doing in Wonderland anyway? Who the fuck told her she could leave the god damn kitchen in the first place?" -Random guy on Xbox Live
http://www.backloggery.com/kodan882