While studying kanji, I noticed that many characters have multiple meanings. It seems to me that each of these kanji contains a core meaning—a unifying, central idea that ties together all their definitions. I think this core concept is what native speakers instinctively grasp, even though English translations may list several distinct meanings due translation .
For example
中
Common meanings: “middle,” “center,” “inside,” or “in”
Core meaning: centrality
生
Common Meanings: life, birth, raw, to live, to grow
Core Meaning: vitality
上
Common Meanings: up, above, to rise, to ascend
Core Meaning: elevation
That’s what came to my mind while studying it just I thought not saying it’s true or wrong just wanted to know from you what do you think about it and to know if I am wrong only.
Kanji were derived from Chinese characters, which for some part are “depictions” of the thing to be named, for example 中. So, yes, you got that right, but it gets meddled quickly. For example there are other Kanji for inside or center. And the more complicated often have little to do with the radicals that they are comprised of.
This is sometimes true (usually a kanji started as a Chinese character with basically one meaning and then the additional acquired meanings are obvious logical or semantic developments from that). But sometimes it’s not true, for instance if two different characters got simplified down into the same shape at some point, or if some completely unrelated meaning got added to it, or if the original meaning is now not used at all.
Incidentally, the kanji you learn early on are not very representative of kanji as a whole – they’re more likely to be “simple pictograms” rather than “part to indicate area of meaning plus part that indicated pronunciation in old Chinese” (which over the whole 2000+ kanji is the.most common type I think).
Personally I prefer not to worry too much about “kanji meanings” – it is vocab and vocab meanings that matter in the long term.
Cool, did you think of these core meanings yourself or was it on a dictionary site?
I think going about it that way can help when learning different vocabs of said kanji.
No, This thought just came to me so I asked ChatGPT to help by providing all of the kanji meanings then asking him to give me the core meaning from them
Yeah, I think that’s about right - at least in 90% of cases or so, so it’s probably worth learning that way. Usually there isn’t a single specific English word for the core meaning though - and using the ones here probably won’t work for all cases (for example using “centrality” for 中 might lead you to believe 中学校 means “college” because college could be considered central to a number of things and is arguably more important than the rest of your schooling, but it really just means middle school). Generally you’ll get the picture after enough vocabulary so you don’t need to worry about never truly understanding the kanji, but try not to just assign a word to each kanji when you learn it.
I’ve always just thought of them as being approximately something like this, with more common kanji correlating with a meaning space that’s more unshapely and gradient-y because they end up losing their tightness and precision in exchange for being more useful in communication.
Yeah, that’s kind of similar to my idea, except mine is I think that a kanji has a core meaning—like a common thread tying all the other meanings together.
For example, words like law, rule, command, and guideline all have different meanings, but if we strip away the differences, we can find a common thread like behavioral constraints.
Similarly, rectangle, square, and triangle all share the common thread of being polygons.
But is “in the middle of the year”, isn’t it?
(at least in French that meaning of ~中 can be rendered by “au milieu de ~”).
And if you put English aside, the kanji meaning isn’t changed in ~中 vs ~の中.
The core meaning is “included in a range between and excluding the extremities”.
Doesn’t “middle” in English has the same meaning?
In French “milieu”, or Spanish “medio” has the meaning of 中 (Spanish “medio” also means 半、which is a logical extension. If you point something at its 中 and draw a line, you have two 半).
中 DOES have a different meaning : “(modern) China”. But that comes as an abbreviation of 中国/中華、 just like 日、米、仏、独 、etc. also mean Japan, America, France, Germany, etc.
I am not a native, but sometimes when interpreting isolated Kanji, unknown words, or words with alternate Kanji, I imagine (a) representative word(s) bearing the Kanji, sometimes only 1 word to be remembered in advance. (e.g. 闘う、格闘の闘)
And it also works with Kanji readings, particularly On’yomi.
Probably not too helpful for eventual vocabularies, but sometimes core concept of a Kanji bifurcates into 2 or a few, with seemingly no overlap.
I think this concept makes sense early on and is really interesting to think about, but as others have mentioned in this thread it becomes more difficult to apply to more complex kanji, especially with kanji simplification like Shinjitai forms.
There’s also the inherent difficulty of finding an English word broad enough to cover all the possible meanings of a kanji, especially when a kanji ties together multiple concepts that don’t necessarily have the same linguistic relationship in English. For example, 消 is taught in WK with the single definition of “extinguish”, but in the context of the verb 消す it can also mean “to turn [a light, a switch] off” or “to erase”. “Extinguish” might be the best word to broadly describe all of these actions, but when I conceptualize the meaning of the kanji I find it easier to use multiple words and even imagery. I do the same thing with 中, since “middle” or “center” doesn’t also convey the meaning of “inside” to me.
Over time as you get more familiar with kanji in the greater context of vocab and overall usage in writing/speech, I think it becomes easier to feel out the “core meaning” without having a specific word in English to use as a scaffold. I’d consider it similar to the ability to understand a word without translating it to English first (ie hearing リンゴ and having the image of an apple appear in your head).
