But has Leebo ever Leebo’d Leebo’s self?
5 Likes
When that happens they have to reset the servers, and so I try to be careful about it.
16 Likes
Only seen 幼虫 used for larva, but that was specifically for セミ。
Interestingly daijirin lists 孑孑 as
蚊の幼虫。体長5ミリメートル前後。体は細長く，胸部が発達。水中を上下に泳ぎ，水面に出ると尾端の呼吸管を水面上に出して呼吸する。汚水中などに多く見られる。
so maybe 孑孑 specifically means 蚊の幼虫。
1 Like
Yeah, 孑孑 is unequivocally mosquito larvae I believe. I just don’t know about other uses of that kanji potentially.
When Leebo is complaining about absurd Kanji it is time for the rest of us to turn tail and run.
For real thought this is crazy. I am going to add it to my list of Kanji I use to surprise Japanese people.
11 Likes
Okay, now that I’ve given my brain some time to rest, I decided to spend some time digging around on mosquito-related subjects, and being from the South, the logical first step is the Mosquito Hawk. I tried a quick google translate of it to find some basis for articles on it, but got nowhere with that (蚊のタカ).
So I pulled it up on Wikipedia in English and flipped it over to Japanese, which got me the actual name (大蚊 aka ガガンボ). Interesting that it actually has a kanji in it that means mosquito.
Just in case anyone cares to know, these are easy to catch and make amazing bait for fishing.
1 Like
I think the kanji were having a party one night and got a little too drunk. 孑 said, “Watch me confuse everyone!” and 孒 said, “Hold my beer.”
9 Likes
Hahaha, the kun’yomi is ‘[the one that] doesn’t have its left arm’.
14 Likes
And “short”.
I think that was from when the other kanji started picking on it.
7 Likes
< bawling under a blanket for some reason > “Leeb Leebo aleeboーne!”
3 Likes
Hi, new to WaniKani here (less than week), I would just like to let ya’ll know that this is now the most ‘advanced’ kanji I know, It is stuck in my head thanks to this thread.
11 Likes
I find this version really bizarre and it makes me wonder if it’s just a font issue… I’ve never see the kanji on the right in its handwritten form. (Hm… a quick look at the Baidu Encyclopaedia shows me that it does exist in Chinese though… but based on its pronunciation, it’s probably an alternative form of 孓)
Anyway, here’s the version we normally use in Chinese:
孑孓 (jiéjué, which sounds nothing like ぼうふら)
It’s fairly rare, but I remember coming across it fairly early, perhaps as a teenager. Must have been in some article involving dengue fever, which is fairly common in SE Asia. I don’t know if all Chinese speakers would recognise these kanji though. I personally had to look up the reading even though I knew what the kanji themselves meant. My way of seeing it is that mosquito larvae are the offspring (子) of something, but that they wriggle in water, which gives you the funny slanted shapes.
While we’re on this subject, Chinese has other similar funny character pairs, so it’s not that surprising. Here’s another one: 乒乓 (pīngpāng) usually means ‘ping pong’ (as in the game). (It’s an onomatopoeia.) I guess this doesn’t really help as far as Japanese is concerned, but you’ll notice that in Mandarin, the kanji in these character pairs often sound almost exactly the same, with only one sound changing along with the angle of the stroke, which helps with remembering the kanji.
5 Likes
Not too surprising when considering the 棒を振る origin of the original Japanese word.
3 Likes
OH. I see. I misinterpreted that post as meaning that 棒を振る was linked to the kanji origins, not the origin of the word. My bad. That makes a lot more sense. Anyhow, I was just making a general remark: the Japanese word clearly isn’t an on’yomi, so I wasn’t expecting them to line up. I can’t explain why the Chinese pronunciation is what it is though… maybe the compression of air required for pronouncing ‘jié’ and ‘jué’ in Mandarin translates the wriggling motion? Hahaha.
When I type “boufura” it suggets to write it in Katakana (like most animal names, I suppose) or as 孑孑. I wanted to complain that this weird word uses the “repeater” and both times they’re read completely differently 
2 Likes
Now that’s just two 子 dancing!
With those highly specific terms I like to imagine two people talked about insects so much that at some point they decided “look, we can’t keep calling them mosquito larvae, that’s just too long!”
1 Like
Well, I mean, they kinda look like they’re dancing on the surface of the water in some bizarre way, and they are the ‘children’ of something, so… 
Possibly! I have a feeling the Japanese term was just meant to be descriptive, whereas the Chinese term is really probably an onomatopoeia of some sort (unless these kanji were actually used independently at some point). I mean, these words were probably created before people realised there were different sorts of larvae and just called all of them ‘worms’!
1 Like
but hey, you’re level 3, what could you possibly know?
jk Leebo <3
3 Likes
Even though these are extremely rare kanji, I still thought I’d leave this here…
Opposite meaning kanji off by a single mark!! No difference in stroke order either as far as I can tell ;(
Thank you kanji for being so straightforward 
(jk I love you kanji 
)
Actually.....
when I looked up the “actual” meaning of the radicals used, 干 as a kanji can mean recede. so sun + recede = dusk which is surprisingly intuitive
and for 于 (which seems to be a very weird kanji on its own, like I mean it seems to be the kanji behind so many core grammatical concepts like を and に among others?) which means from or going. so although this one is less intuitive than dusk, there is kind of a connection with sun + going (from earth/rising from earth or something like that) = dawn
6 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.