Biggest Realizations / Mind Blows You've Experienced Learning Japanese: Emoji means what?!?!

国 is from chinese tho, and the China flag sure doesnt have a ball :no_mouth:

seems like an extraordinary coincidence :sweat_smile:

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Not massive realisations, but I love learning a word in Japanese and being able to make a connection to a common Japanese word we know in the West.

Like i just learnt paper - kami, rendaku’d to gami in a lot of words and realised it was the end of origami so already I had known paper in Japanese for years without really knowing! Now I can bore anyone who says origami that gami means paper (not got to the ori bit yet, I’m assuming it means folding… ).

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When I first learned this I felt so enlightened! Finding out the meaning behind loanwords that you’ve known for years can be pretty crazy, like recently I realized the ‘su’ from “sudoku” comes from 数「スウ」being the kanji for number / figure. I still don’t understand the 独 part, but it really seems pretty trivial to me now that the word is related to numbers.

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Not really to rain on your realization, also since it helps you remember that way it’s a good thing… I’m unsure who stole the 国 character from who, but it is likely taken from simplified Chinese.

I have a background and love of traditional Chinese so I never had to make that roundabout connection, but I’ve always associated the middle character with jade as China has always appreciated jade almost more so even than gold for pendants to bracelets and charms. From my experience Japan never absorbed this penchant for jade.

So yeah… just various ways of looking at it.

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?? What animal makes this noise?

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A rooster says that :slight_smile:

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Wah, in Dutch it says “kukelekuu”. An English speaking rooster sounds cuter tbh

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The concept of 当て字(あてじ)、and the fact that the kanji for sushi are not connected to the actual meaning of sushi.

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Just found out today that the overwhelming majority of verbs use the kun reading, but some forms have a modified -suru (〜する) → -zuru (〜ずる) → -jiru (〜じる), so 禁じる or 存じる are actually using the usual pattern of UN reading+する.

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I think among those verbs, most people learn 感じる and 信じる pretty early on.

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I was checking on 信じる just now and WK mentions that both KUN and ON is しん, can that be correct? Maybe they mistook exactly this.

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In many cases Simplifications were variations that had existed for a very long time. This version isn’t in the Kangxi dictionary but 囯 is.

@UntitledName Your mind is really gonna be blown when you figure out the Kanji for the Warring States period.

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Not impossible for a word to have the same Kunyomi, but in this case, 信じる doesn’t have a Kun reading.

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I was referring to the WK page for the kanji 信 itself, it seems you can consider it to be “ON only” instead.

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Kanjipedia shows kunyomis, but none of them are しん. They’re also nonstandard I believe.

http://www.kanjipedia.jp/search?k=信&kt=1&sk=leftHand

It’s ki­ke­ri­ki in german. Strange how none of these sound the same.

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I didn’t realize triangle was TRI + ANGLE until I learned it in japanese … 三角. I think it’s because I learned the word so early on that I never thought about it’s composition.

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Right, if I had to guess it’s simply because of how 信じる works as a word and they autogenerated the Kun fields, but 信 doesn’t have a Kun reading at all.

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Obviously a French rooster would say ‘cocorico’ :sunglasses:

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I used to walk around literally translating everyone’s names from the name plates on their houses, which is pointless (and often wrong) but an amusing way to practice your kanji:

森口 - Forest Mouth
久田 - Long Time Rice Paddy
松山 - Pine Mountain
高橋 - High Bridge
田中 - In the Rice Paddy
山本 - Mountain Origin
中村 - In the Village
小林 - Small Woods
吉田 - Lucky Rice Paddy
山田 - Mountain Rice Paddy
山口 - Mountain Mouth
松本 - Pine Origin
木村 - Tree Village

…and so on.

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