Why is the scooter radical so common?

Japanese Language Kanji
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Not sure if this category is the right one or not so apologies if this post was supposed to go in the questions category instead.

I’ve recently hit level 10 and i’ve noticed that there are already quite a number of kanji using the scooter radical (i currently have 8 of them unlocked, and i know there are 2 more on that level), so i got curious, checked the radical page and… Realized there’s a whopping 56 kanjis using this radical, which is a LOT. A lot of them seem to be related to movement too. I’m kinda wondering, why is this radical seemingly so common? I know kanjis are mostly chinese characters, but i don’t know why they are “constructed” that way, if that makes sense; for example, some kanji i feel like the meaning is pretty implied by the way it looks, for example 雨 (my personal favorite kanji so far) just looks like rain on a window so it meaning rain makes sense. Is the scooter part of kanji supposed to convey the idea of movement? I feel like that’s it but i’m not quite sure, and the fact it’s so common feels crazy to me
On a slightly related note, what’s the most common radical, is there a way to see that other than looking at the page of every single one of them?

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Yeah, it does express movement. The radical dictionary I have (specifically all about radicals, not the kanji), lists several meanings for it.

  1. 移動する “to move”
  2. 距離・場所 “distance / place”
  3. 道路 “road”
  4. その他 miscellaneous other meanings

The entry occupies more than 2 pages of the dictionary, so I can try to scan it later for a fuller explanation rather than trying to summarize it here.

Its Japanese name is しんにょう or しんにゅう. It’s common for the names of radicals to be based on a primary example of their usage, and it’s used in 進, which has the on’yomi しん. The にょう or にゅう part of the name refers to the way it occupies the left and bottom parts of a kanji.

Do you just mean on WaniKani? I’m sure someone can scrape that info and tell us.

If you mean in a broader sense, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to figure out for something like the joyo set, but there’s not really a complete list of “all kanji”, and some sources have over 50,000 total characters (though modern Japanese only uses several thousand regularly), so it’s tricky to nail it down exactly.

There’s also the issue of “what is a radical”, since what WaniKani calls “radicals” are really more like “kanji parts”. The stricter meaning of radical (the one part of any given kanji that is used for indexing purposes) is easier to figure out, because you only have to worry about one radical per kanji.

There aren’t many kanji that aren’t Chinese in origin. There are only a handful of common ones invented in Japan (込 and 働, for instance). And yes, that’s exactly how most are constructed. A huge majority of kanji consist of one element that expresses the meaning, and one element that expresses the pronunciation.

In Chinese, there is generally only one pronunciation for a given kanji, so it’s a lot easier in Chinese to be like “oh, this is the one related to movement, that sounds like this other kanji.”

The complicated history of Japanese importing Chinese characters obscures it a lot. But most of the time, the links are still visible. For example, you have 交, with the reading こう and then you have 校, which also has the reading こう. That’s not a coincidence.

The technical term is “phono-semantic compound.”

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Henshall’s Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters says that the ⻌ radical is originally from 止 (which means “stop” as a character on its own, but is originally a simplified picture of a footprint) plus 彳(the left hand side of 行 which is originally a picture of a crossroads). So footprint + crossroads combine to express “movement”, and as @Leebo says it’s used in a lot of kanji to indicate that the kanji means something movement-related.

The radical 廴 (used in e.g. 建) is apparently the result of a slightly different simplification of the same pieces.

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The top 20 of most used radicals on WaniKani:

位 WK radical 数 % (/2080)
1 口 (mouth) 128 6.2%
2 氵 (tsunami) 116 5.6%
3 木 (tree) 115 5.5%
4 ｲ (leader) 94 4.5%
5 日 (sun) 86 4.1%
6 扌 (fingers) 85 4.1%
7 一 (ground) 70 3.4%
8 土 (dirt) 68 3.3%
9 月 (moon) 66 3.2%
10 艹 (flowers) 66 3.2%
11 糸 (thread) 65 3.1%
12 言 (say) 65 3.1%
13 ⻌ (scooter) 56 2.7%
14 夂 (winter) 54 2.6%
15 宀 (roof) 54 2.6%
16 心 (heart) 52 2.5%
17 十 (cross) 47 2.3%
18 貝 (shellfish) 46 2.2%
19 女 (woman) 44 2.1%
20 丶 (drop) 44 2.1%

If we’re talking about radicals in the more traditional way, where every kanji has only exactly one radical, then Wanikani’s top 20 looks like this (cross-referencing with Kanjidic):

位 部首 数 % (/2080)
1 水 (氵,氺) 114 5.5%
2 人 (亻,𠆢) 97 4.7%
3 手 (扌,龵) 90 4.3%
4 木 84 4.0%
5 口 76 3.7%
6 心 (忄,⺗) 70 3.4%
7 糸 (糹) 63 3.0%
8 言 (訁) 62 3.0%
9 艹 (艸,䒑) 51 2.5%
10 ⻌ (辵,辶) 49 2.4%
11 土 47 2.3%
12 肉 (⺼,月) 39 1.9%
13 日 38 1.8%
14 宀 35 1.7%
15 女 34 1.6%
16 貝 34 1.6%
17 金 (釒) 31 1.5%
18 阜 (⻖, 阝) 31 1.5%
19 刀 (刂,⺈) 30 1.4%
20 火 (灬) 28 1.3%

Note that there are very significant differences in how these radicals are handled compared to WaniKani, for instance 心 and 忄 are considered variants of the same radical, while WaniKani considers them different radicals.

If I look at all 13,108 kanji in kanjidic the distribution looks like this:

位 部首 数 % (/13108)
1 木 700 5.3%
2 水 (氵,氺) 656 5.0%
3 艹 (艸,䒑) 617 4.7%
4 人 (亻,𠆢) 469 3.6%
5 口 465 3.5%
6 手 (扌,龵) 458 3.5%
7 金 (釒) 456 3.5%
8 心 (忄,⺗) 405 3.1%
9 糸 (糹) 319 2.4%
10 言 (訁) 300 2.3%
11 土 293 2.2%
12 虫 290 2.2%
13 竹 (⺮) 260 2.0%
14 女 230 1.8%
15 肉 (⺼,月) 217 1.7%
16 魚 207 1.6%
17 火 (灬) 207 1.6%
18 山 203 1.5%
19 日 202 1.5%
20 王 (玉, 玊, ⺩) 201 1.5%

Here ⻌ drops to position 24 with 175 entries.

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