Actual radical names script

Oh interesting. I learned something new! But yeah, I guess the point stands that most Japanese people wouldn’t know these kinds of things :slight_smile:

Studying for kanken and that first one’s radical made me think of this topic. I asked a Japanese friend, who did a double take, then said “exception?” so my head hit the desk.

You gotta be careful these days. They’ll stick meat in anything even when you’re not suspecting it!

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What book is that?

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8級ステップ, the yellow books. this one has a bunny!

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Yeah, that’s にくづき (meat moon!). So all those body parts, 腕, 脚, 膝, 肘, 腸, 背, 肌, etc… aren’t moon-related, they’re “meat” related, and the shape just got simplified.

There’s no way to just look and know if the radical is 月 (like in 服) or 肉 (like in those above) though, so you just have to remember it.

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Thanks for this! I will watch out for meat moons

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There’s probably a sci-fi/horror film script in here somewhere.

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Meatmoon is the best thing I’ve heard all day.

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Well, there was one episode of Farscape…

Quick update for those interested :
I dowloaded an Anki deck (kanjiAlive radicals) to learn the “real” radicals.
Saved me the trouble of adding them to WK

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I’m conflicted with WK, on one hand, I find useful many of the radicals meanings they use. On the other hand, they don’t want to use the original names in many.

I’m fine with WK creating “radicals” to help us with the mnemotechnics, although sometimes they name the “radical” one way and when you see the real kanji, it’s a completely different thing.

I would like them to keep the original radicals with the corresponding name. Some make more harm than good.

The same thing can happen in Japanese. 欠 as a radical is called あくび (yawn) in Japanese, because it was originally a drawing of a person opening their mouth. But nearly all of the ways that Japanese students will learn the uses of the kanji itself have to do with words that use the “lack” meaning.

It does appear in the word 欠伸 (yawn), but this is considered a difficult reading that isn’t going to be taught in elementary school along with the kanji.

The point being that there’s no one way to refer to the shapes that will universally be “perfect” or anything. Does “yawn” help you with 欠 more than “lack”?

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I just started WaniKani a couple of days ago. Today, my wife was talking about someone else with the same name as her, but the characters are different. She explained hers by starting with "Watashi no ha kihen ni . . . " which is, Mine has the ‘ki’ radical on the left side. It’s not the first time she’s done it. I can read some Kanji already just because I remembered them from station signs and such, and she sometimes thinks I know more than I do. It’s not the first time she’s explained Kanji to me by listing the radical but, in the past, I didn’t really understand what she was doing. I realize now that knowing the names of radicals will help.

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