Let's Share! Radicals 🐟🐠🐡

There is another, valuable point here: it’s good pedagogical advice never to teach what has to be untaught later on. At some stage, presumably, it will be necessary or at least useful (or even just interesting) to know the genuine origins of radicals. Then those guns, toes and sticks have to be abandoned for something more authentic, i.e. they’ll have to be unlearned/untaught. (In any case, why abandon something as fascinating, with its historical and cultural associations, as a “divination” for a humdrum toe?)

I agree, but I’m fairly sure that it wouldn’t come into everyone’s definition of cool. :smiley:

The radicals don’t have much to do with the etymology of kanji. They were introduced as a means to sort kanji in a dictionary. Specifically, every kanji has exactly one radical, they are not meant to be fully decomposed into radicals. What jisho or WK are doing is already separate from the classical radicals, and there is lots of confusion by just calling everything radicals.

Now, the idea that a kanji is a indicative composition is wrong for the vast majority of kanji. (Like: 思=think? “Oh, it’s a heart and field! How poetic!” It’s rather that 田 is a simplification of 囟, which is supposed to be a cranium and mainly used for its phonetic value し. Semantic 心 indicates the mind. It looked like this (font permitting): 恖.)

Most kanji are constructed by semantic-phonetic composition, which fits very well with the classical radical system. You take a kanji for its reading (often chosen to fit the theme, but not necessarily) and a radical that indicates the meaning of the kanji. For example 花 has phonetic component 化 which says “I’m read as か or け” and 艹/艸, which indicates that the kanji is related to vegetation. Take leather 革 as your radical and you get shoes 靴, read as か. This construction has one part taken from the traditional radicals, but the other kanji could be anything, and in my opinion it makes no sense to decompose it. Many later “radicals” in WK are other kanji, so the system agrees with me :slight_smile:

WK doesn’t try to introduce the real radicals, I would only blame them for calling things “radicals” that clearly aren’t. This has been discussed many times before, however, and there is supposed to be a mythical update that will solve all problems eventually.

If you are interested in etymology, I mainly use http://dic.nicovideo.jp (it’s admittedly looking strange and it’s a wiki, but there are many committed kanji lovers there) or the Japanese Wiktionary. If you just want to see random kanji https://kanjiportraits.wordpress.com is interesting (and in English), it’s mainly about how kanji developed from bone script.

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The book A Guide to Remembering Japanese Kanji by Henshall (published by Tuttle) has full etymologies of all of the joyo kanji. At least, I’m fairly sure they’re the proper etymologies. I confess I’ve barely touched the book since I bought it, and currently it’s at the bottom of a pile, so not easy to extract.

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