This one has an annoyingly broad range of meanings, including order/decree, fate, and life.
I suppose you can tie those together by saying that the decrees of the gods dictate your fate, and that your fate determines the course of your life. (And perhaps the real etymologies made similar jumps.) Still, that took some work.
Visually, I like that it combines 口 and 令, though sources seem to disagree on whether this is historically accurate or not.
Some useful words include 命令 (order) and 運命 (fate), along with the standalone 命 (life).
We learn the on’yomi for 老 on WK, but we don’t learn 老ける or 老いる. Both mean ‘to grow old’, and are also listed as common words, according to jisho. 老ける refers to someone looking old as opposed to actually being old.
I learned these readings for my N1 study, which I’m secretly glad is being postponed to the summer, this year. I’m nowhere near prepared!
I must comment on this one first, because I am buried in it right now.
How does a kanji with over a dozen meanings in Chinese come to concern youth in Japanese, which is not at all one of the meanings any version of Chinese languages, now or in the past?
@JK22, welcome to Wanikani! Please feel free to participate in this wonderful community.
Those kanji that actually picture what they mean are rare but nice. This is a valley between two mountains. And we have an added bonus that it has the same meaning in Chinese.
The best thing about this kanji is that it is used in 渋谷 (the station, in 東京) And the best thing about 渋谷 is that it has ハチ公!
(The sign says 犬 寝る and then KEN NEL. If we read the 犬 as ケン instead of the usual いぬ, and we read the 寝る normally, we get a bilingual pun on the English “kennel”, where a dog sleeps.)
肉 shows up very frequently as a radical, although it can be difficult to tell. This is because it is often disguised as the 肉月, which is indistingushable from the moon radical.
For example, this is very commonly seen in kanji representing bosy parts, such as 腕 (arm), 胸 (chest) and 背 (back).
肉 may also appear tilted, as in 然, where the phonetic component, 肰, means “dog meat”.
In Japanese, it also appears like a “cleat”, as in 将, which is the shinjitai version of 將.
There is a new bar coming soon to Amsterdam: 青 Aobar. I noticed it when I rode past it this morning. The covered windows were definitely blue, but 青 can also refer to green, as seen in traffic light terminology, and 青葉 fresh (young green) leaves.
The first was as a phono-semantic compound, taking the meaning of 木 and the sound of 卜 to give the meaning “bark”, which is how it’s defined in the Shuowen Jiezi (ca. 100 AD).
However, this meaning appears to have largely been forgotten, and now it is used in China to refer to the Chinese hackberry (pò) and in Japan to refer both to the Chinese hackberry (えのき) and the Japanese bigleaf magnolia (ほほ).
However, it has also long been used as either a a phonetic loan character or a simplified character for the character 樸, meaning “simple”, “plain”, “honest” or “unpolished”. In 1956, 朴 was officially made the Simplified Chinese character for 樸, making it one of several hanzi to simplify 業 as 卜 (including 僕 → 仆).
樸 is not commonly used in Japanese, but its meaning has passed on to 朴, appearing in words such as 素朴 (“simple, naive, unsophisticated”) and 朴念仁 (“blockhead, obstinate person; quiet unsociable person”).
The reading ぼく is listed as kan’yōon, suggesting that it is based on “a corrupted or otherwise non-standard reading”. I don’t know quite how this happened, but I can’t help but imagine that somebody back in olden times just looked at 樸 and figured it must be pronounced like 僕, and nobody called him out on it because they didn’t know enough about trees to dispute it.
This kanji seems to be relatively unused in Chinese. In Japanese, it is used in scores of words, always relating to the direction South in some way.
Except, it is used as an 当て字 in some common Buddhist terms.
南無三宝 three jewels
南無阿弥陀仏 Pure Land Mantra
南無妙法蓮華経 Hail Lotus Sutra
The interesting thing about this is that it is a Japanified version of the greeting Namaste which is heard all throughout Hindu areas of the world (and also has caught on in the U.S., especially around Yoga ). It may be translated as “I bow to you.” or “Not I.”, which is identical to the sense in which it is used in Buddhism in Japan.
There exist several theories about the origin of the character 方. One of them is that it originally represented a knife, sword or plowshare (刀) with its edge marked with a line (一), with the meaning of “blade”. In that sense, it would be similar to 刃.
The meaning of “direction” or “side” appears to be a phonetic loan. Still, one can’t help but wonder if this choice was in any way inspired by the thought that the blade as a directional marker.
It may seem obvious that the kun’yomi 方 is cognate with 片, as they both have to do with sides, but according to one source, 片 is actually a Korean loanword.
If they are related, however, it would mean that 方 is also related to 刀, which comes from 片刃 (side+edge).
I’ve often thought of 方 as being a very reliable phonetic component, but according to this report it is only 50-59% reliable.
That being said, that report appears to only count kanji whose on’yomi are exactly the same, whereas the phonetic component 方 has two common on’yomi readings: ほう and ぼう.
Is it? According to this list, 南 is the 307th most common hanzi in written Chinese, whereas this list places it as the 494th most common in Japanese.
(Probably not wise to get too into the specific rankings, but it does suggest that it’s fairly common.)
This is definitely not a 常用漢字, though I have seen it in the wild.
It appears in the Ace Attorney spinoff series逆転検事 (Ace Attorney Investigations, lit. Turnabout Prosecutor), in the fictional country name 西鳳民国 (Republic of Zheng Fa). This country has a picture of the mythical bird 鳳凰 on its 国旗 (national flag).
In 逆転検事２, it also appears in the name of the character 鳳院坊・了賢, a retired assassin with a pet dog.
(The name りょうけん is a pun on 猟犬.)
The character 鳳 also happens to be the Chinese-language personal name of someone I interacted with a long time ago on an open source project. They taught me a lot, and I hope they’re doing well.
Wanikani calls this “Chinese”, and says that is made from the canopy, brush, and mouth radicals.
Jisho says that the words using this for China are archaic, except for 唐 meaning the Tang Dynasty.
Other than that, in common use we have
唐辛子 capsicum pepper
唐突 abrupt, sudden
In names, this kanji is voiced as 唐.
Meaning that sometimes people use it for 空手. 唐手.
My glib and inaccurate comparison of usage was simply that Wiktionary didn’t lists very few uses of the kanji 南 in the Chinese languages, but had several in Japanese.
Also, no one answered my quiz! 西向く侍 is the months with less than 31 days. 二四六く士 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 1
Meaning: nest, den (for example a bird’s nest, badger’s den or spider’s web)
The traditional interpretation of this character is that it represents a small bird (巛) living in a nest (田) in a tree (木).
However, it’s also been suggested that the top part is actually a container, similar to 甾. This would then be a container in a tree. The 甾 may also be acting as a phonetic component.
This is a snake, which means it’s time to talk about the origin of the word 蛇口, meaning “tap”/“faucet”.
When outdoor plumbing began to appear in Japan during the 明治時代, many of the water outlet fixtures were imported from England, and happened to be decorated in the shape of a lion’s head.
When the Japanese began to produce their own fixtures, they adapted this practice by decorating the outlets with a more locally-familiar water guardian: a dragon.
Due to the associated between mythical dragons and real-life snakes, these water outlets became known as 蛇体鉄柱式共用栓 (“serpent-form iron-pipe-type shared-use outlet”).
When private plumbing became more widespread, the smaller outlets used for that purpose came to be known as 蛇口.
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, which means it’s time to talk about the