When I saw the Sekiro game, I wanted to know what it meant.
From what I have seen the kanjis are 隻狼.
狼 isn’t in Wanikani, reads ろ and means wolf.
But 隻 IS in Wanikani, reads せき, but Wanikani learns it means ship counter and does not mention any other meaning while in the game it means one handed.
Why is there this difference ? It is something Wanikani forgot to tell ? Or is there a lot of kanjis that have other meanings that the ones Wanikani tells us, meanings who are maybe rare ?
It’s this one - language is complicated, and plenty of kanji may be used in ways that are rare, old, unusual, or just hard to explain.
In this case, 隻 can mean “one-” as in 隻腕, one-armed, or 隻眼, one-eyed. The wikipedia page for 隻腕 describes it like:
「隻」とは「対(つい)になっている物の片方」を数えるときに用いる助数詞である。
So it can be a counter for one item of paired things (like when one arm is lost).
Wanikani maybe only didn’t teach that because “counter for single items out of paired things” is hard to convey in SRS! And it might be more rare nowadays than the other things it counts that wanikani does teach (I don’t know).
You might be able to see how this meaning is relevant to Sekiro! The wikipedia page for Sekiro explains how the name is a shortening of 隻腕の狼 (because he has one arm in the game):
キャッチコピーは「隻腕の狼、戦国に忍ぶ」。略称は「SEKIRO」、「隻狼」
(also not a big deal, but note if you study it, 狼 is usually read ろう in compounds, not ろ - it seems like sources disagree on how to actually read the official Japanese name, which is just the English title, in English, “SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE.” I feel like maybe they just made it a short ろ to fit more exactly the romanization they wanted to use…)
