On the princess kanji word the explanation says “The king’s woman is the princess"… what? Shouldn’t that be the queen? How is a daughter the woman of the father? Or am I missing something here? I would suggest a change in that explanation.
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I’m a little confused about what you’re asking for here. 王女 is a Japanese word. It means “princess.” No one at Wanikani (or anywhere else) can change the Japanese language to make it easier for you to remember.
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Sorry for the apparently hard to interpret phrase. As I mentioned in the final quote: “I would suggest a change in that explanation.".
The explanation below this first sentence is very good, but the first sentence can cause misinterpretation, because as I said, the king’s woman is not the princess, isn’t that a false sentence? Or am I missing something?
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Yes, the first time I was very confused because the difference of the two word is just the order, the explanation confused me but after finally reading with attention I could understand the word play, but again, this can be just me being dumb or it could be something to improve.
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I think you’re looking for something from the explanations that they’re not really meant to provide. A lot of Japanese vocab is composed of kanji that have a very tenuous relationship with the meaning. An example is wakame, a type of seaweed formed from the kanji for young and cloth. No English explanation is going to make that make sense, it’s just a quirk of how the language developed.
Most of the vocab “explanations” are more like mnemonics, sentences that might help you remember the word or might not. As with most things in WaniKani, just use it if you find it helpful and ignore it if you don’t. Trying to get Tofugu to change things will just lead to frustration - most of the content was made well over a decade ago and has barely changed since then.
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The mnemonics here are implicitly trying to give you a hook to remember which way round 王女 and 女王 are, because otherwise you’re inevitably going to muddle them up. It would be helpful if the explanation text actually said this (i.e. if they both mentioned the other word and highlighted that this mnemonic is set up to be distinct from that one), because that would signpost the pitfall here and explain the motivation for the mnemonic. As it is, it leaves it implicit for the reader to figure out once they encounter the second word.
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**As a general rule for learning JP, translation can be a trap - instead focus on conceptualization.
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That being said, with your OP you noted that this is the “king’s woman.” You added a layer that isn’t present in this kanji explanation; possession. If you wanted a literal translation of that was “King’s woman” then it would be the kanji for King + no + kanji for Woman.
When I say translation can be a trap, this is what I mean. If you conceptualize the kanji for king is just “king” or “ruler” without the gendered aspect to it then you understand the core concept for the kanji “king.”
Now add the kanji for woman and the conceptualization of this word is now “ruler+female” or something to that effect.
With this tool in your toolbelt, you’ll be able to quickly conceptualize entirely new words just by knowing the individual kanji/radical concepts.
Hope this makes sense! Good luck in your studies!
apologies for romaji, no jp keyboard where I’m at atm
王女 is easier to remember when you pair it with 王子.
You can also think of how in japanese and Chinese noun-noun compounds, the first one qualifies the second.
女王 : a 王 that is a 女
王子/王女 ： a 子/女 that is related to a 王