Like the kanji for starving, 飢, whose parts are “eat/food” and “table”. What?
It’s about being so hungry that you can eat the table itself…
I mean fair. I wonder what others are weird like that tho.
Or, instead of “table”, you can associate with “skin” (肌)
Originally, the kanji was a semantic/phonetic pairing - the 食 half is the semantic component, which contributes to the meaning of the kanji, while the 几 half is the phonetic component, which contributes to the reading (Wiktionary says that reading was “*krilʔ” in Old Chinese, but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to read that).
You’ll find that most kanji are semantic/phonetic type, which means that the components aren’t necessarily entirely useful for generating a mnemonic (though WaniKani generally ignores that concept and makes a mnemonic anyway).
the fact that Belthazar the cat just said the phrase “haven’t the foggiest“ in a Japanese forum is simply amazing and my life is nearly complete
Search on Youtube for “Potato Jason”. He ran a few very entertaining presentations on weird kanji ![]()
Is that the guy who lives in a cave and skews the stats on how many potatoes the average person eats in their lifetime?
It’s 3 AM here.
Why do I suddenly have a craving for a ‘loaded’ baked potato, with cheese, bacon, and sour cream on top?
My microwave oven is calling my name.
With a bit of finesse I can rewrite that as a crude attempt at a 5-7-5 haiku:
By calling my name
My microwave oven is
A cruel master