This is not meant to be a deep question, I’m just curious about why the kanji
is described in the lesson as being made up of the radicals
When it seems like the clearer top radical would be
I see “lid” before I see “ground,” as the “ground” radical requires that the “rice” radical pokes through it, while the “lid” already has the exact shape.
I’m sure there’s a reason for it, but it’s not obvious to me.
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but I think it helps with the meaning. We can remember the ‘rai’-ce coming out of the ground.
As for not using lid, I suspect it’s because a lid radical wouldn’t be connected to the other radical.
Two answers in and it makes sense that the “lid” radical would be expected to sit “on top of” the “rice” radical with a small gap. I’m satisfied with that perspective. It’s still going to throw me a bit if this sort of thing is common, but hopefully I’ll pick up on patterns. Thanks.
I dunno about “common”, but for an example of a kanji which is actually “lid” on top of something else that makes it look like a single vertical stroke, see 市. (Unfortunately, it’s not always drawn with a visible gap in computer fonts, but it’s still written as separate strokes by hand.)
it’s a bit more niche than readings per se, but learning the stroke order for kanji is occasionally useful! “lid + rice” would be 8 strokes, whereas “ground + rice” implies 7, which matches how 来 is normatively written.
If you’re curious about the actual etymology of the character, there’s no actual way to break it down into elemental parts, it’s originally a drawing of an ear of wheat. 来 is the simplified form of the character, used in standard modern Japanese (新字体) and Simplified Chinese. The traditional version is 來.
米、木 and 禾 are also pictograms originally and don’t derive from one another, rather they evolved side-by-side.
WaniKani links them together for ease of learning but it’s not actually how the characters came to be.
It has more to do with the way the kanji is written. You can memorise it with the lid radical if you want, but you wouldn’t write the lid radical separately from the rest. Every kanji has a stroke order that must be followed to write it correctly, and that’s directly related to the radicals.
