I’m doing radicals and got confused because in radical it’s evening/half-moon-moutain but in tofugu:
タ is the katakana for た (ta).
タ looks like a kite. Kites are called たこ (tako) in Japanese. This is actually a taco kite, too. It looks exactly like a giant taco flying high in the sky. Tacos are all the rage these days!
(wasn’t it “tide” before?)
Some fonts may make distinctions (e.g. the font browsing these forums on my phone doesn’t have the middle line fully cross over the right line in katakana タ, some fonts make all kanji bigger than kana so will have 夕 larger). But these are font choices and not guaranteed to be universal. It’s not the only such pair either, in a lot of fonts the katakana ロ and the kanji 口 (くち / mouth) can look very similar too.
The best way to distinguish them is context which will get easier as you learn more vocab. The kanji are usually only used in a few words, so once you can rule out those words from context, you’re left with knowing that it’s katakana (especially if you recognise the katakana word it’s part of).
For example, if you see the sentence:
ごはんをタべ、家に戻りました
“I ate my meal, and returned home”
Even though someone has made the unusual choice to write たべ (the formal conjunctive of たべる / to eat) in katakana, and it now looks identical to 夕べ / evening, you’ll know that it should be an action because of the を and so you’ll know it can’t be 夕べ / evening so it must be eating.
(As for why someone might write a non-loan Japanese word in katakana, it’s usually a stylistic choice to make the word seem odd for some reason, sort of like using italics in English. E.g. maybe the sentence is dialogue from a vampire and by eat they mean suck blood)
The pair that gives me nost trouble in the wild (mostly reading handwritten stuff in manga) is 力 and カ. You can’t always tell by the size difference and 力 (the kanji) has so many uses that it can be a bit tricky to decide which way to go even in context.
夕 is comparatively a less common kanji with a more restricted meaning, so it’s not usually a problem to distinguish or in context.
But yeah you need to consider them as two completely different things that happen to look similar. Like and V in English, one is a checkmark and the other is the letter V. Similar looking but completely different uses.
A week or two back, I came across what I thought was the katakana オ, being used for years-old (さい, 才). The kanji doesn’t look quite like that in the main Wanikani font, so it confused me (my brain kept saying “o”), but I suppose these font similarities are just something we have to get used to.
and V in English, one is a checkmark and the other is the letter V. Similar looking but completely different uses.