才 radical: "talent" not "genius"

I think it’s because they’re used to it this way and think that’s probably the best way. So they teach what they’re taught, but not think how to bridge differences or do things slightly different from the norm. Personally I think native speakers and teachers would help more in trying to think about things you haven’t thought about, filling in your own gaps and correcting mistakes you didn’t catch yourself (rather than from the ground up).

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First time meeting our friendly neighbourhood troll @plantron ?

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That was simply a quotation of playwright George Bernard Shaw. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hooray! Let’s cancel George Bernard Shaw!

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:roll_eyes: tell your wife Kanjis can have various meanings.
Actually this is pretty funny because it perfectly sustains Matt vs. Japan’s argument: native speakers are (possibly) terrible teachers. :thinking:

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I mean, “genius” and “talent” are anyway very close semantically and Kanji don’t tend to have very specific meanings. I don’t really understand the issue here lol

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I think others have gotten to the nub of the issue…Some native speakers tend to find fault with learning systems that appear to rely on “shortcuts,” why they had to slog through years of rote learning.

My spouse has certainly shared with me her resentment of the hundreds of hours spent learning kanji in school when she feels that time could have been spent more productively on other things.

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I love that this got flagged :joy: what has the world come to? :joy:

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I think maybe the problem is WK calling them “radicals” when they’re a different system from what everyone else calls “radicals”. Really they should come up with a different name like “parts” or “pieces” to emphasize that kanji are made up of smaller parts put together and that WK’s parts are there as a memorization aid, rather than confusing the issue by re-using a term that has a very specific meaning when talking about chinese characters in a linguistics sense

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It got flagged because some people never learned about the Streisand effect :rofl:

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Would suggest “mnemons”. Sounds cute. Kind of like the Memberberries from South Park.

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Did you see the list @Belthazar posted? They track pretty closely to the traditional list with the major exception of kanji that WK uses as radicals.

Yeah, but their audience isn’t linguists, it’s the general public and they’re not going to know or care about the difference.

It’s a convenient shorthand to convey the idea that this thing (kanji) is made up of these components (radicals).

The other thing to remember is that a radical is just an indexing component that’s primarily used by dictionaries to facilitate lookups. That’s the 214 number. Linguists don’t have a number because it depends on what era you’re talking about and what Kanji you consider part of that era.

But I think there’s good argument to be made for either side.

Hah! A mnemonic composed of mnemons? I see what you did there. lol

Heisig called them “primitives” in Remembering the Kanji, but even people who use RTK just call them radicals in the discussions I’ve seen online.

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Doramnemons

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Possibly. But I’m a native Chinese speaker who only learnt partly by rote since I discovered radicals very early on, so it’s hard for me to fully appreciate that frustration. Add to that the fact that I love calligraphy and… well, I’m glad I no longer have tons of new characters to learn every month, but learning new ones is fun for me provided I have the time for explanations and a bit of recreational writing.

I wonder how kanji are taught in Japanese schools though. I imagine they’re necessary knowledge, and I know I’m irritated when I get stuck in a (Chinese or Japanese) news article because I don’t know a character, but if they’re taught without an underlying structure, it’s harder than it needs to be.

Anyway, to return to the original topic of discussion… to everyone quoting resources that use JMDict’s data to justify the idea that 才 is just as much ‘genius’ as it is ‘talent’… I’m not so sure about how it is in Japanese as a whole, but in Chinese, as well as in what I’ve seen of Japanese so far (I’m taking the N1 soon, so while I’m no expert, I’ve seen a few things)… ‘talent’ is definitely the primary meaning. It rarely means ‘genius’ unless it’s applied to a person, unless you’re referring to the mass noun usage of ‘genius’ (i.e. ‘her genius in this domain was unprecedented’). I’d even go so far as to say that 才’s ‘talent’ meaning allows the ‘genius’ meaning by extension of logic as a sort of metonym (one who has a great talent is often considered a genius), and since the ‘talent’ meaning is predominant, it makes less sense to go in the other direction, even if it’s still possible. All I’m suggesting here is that I think the preference for ‘talent’ is justified by usage, and more a matter of defending a cherished belief that’s backed by experience than of resenting simplification, even if that could be the motivation for rejecting simplified systems in other contexts.

Just one final thought: I’ve seen people getting stuck learning new words precisely because they’d learnt an excessively narrow meaning keyword for a kanji that they attempted to apply rigidly. (People trying to understand how ‘greenhouse’ + ‘big’ allows 莫大 to mean ‘exceedingly vast’ come to mind.) You can call it my being a stickler as a native user of kanji or my pride, but especially since I grew up bilingual, all I can say is that all my life, I’ve seen how most kanji can be resolved to a limited number of central ideas that can be connected to all other usages by extensions of logic and lateral thinking. Some meaning keyword choices block off potential connections to related concepts that would be perfectly natural with the primary meaning. Therefore, even though in many cases, simplifications are helpful, I’d argue that oversimplification is also possible, and in some cases, learners could benefit from the choice of a different keyword that’s as simple (or perhaps slightly harder) because it will be helpful over a much longer period of time. What I will concede, nonetheless, is that WK’s choices may be easier to use in mnemonics, so perhaps that is an acceptable justification.

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Agamnemnons?

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Their audience is Japanese learners, who are almost certainly going to come across the concept of radicals in their studies, and in every other context people are going to be referring to the 214 Kangxi radical system and everything that goes along with that. WK using the same word for their own different but related system is definitely going to cause confusion

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Well, they do cover that in the knowledge guide.

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