Every kanji has a story instead of lines haphazardly drawn which apparently draws everyone away initially, fact known to many, provided or venture into the knowing the building blocks of kanji known as radicals. lets dive into one of the Kanji “teach” .Following is a “teach” kanji or rather google the teach kanji, caz this one wont enlarge even if i prompt it. 教
So on the left side, child radical is below the elder radical, symbolises the child supporting, respecting, and being devoted to the elder.
The right side kanji depicts enforcement, via two radicals combined. The hand with a stick in it.
So in short, this reflects a traditional view of education,not as a passive transfer of information, but as an active, disciplined process of moulding a character and imparting moral values (starting with the most important value: respect for one’s family)
I think this one is coffin, child, and winter. Meaning something like teaching children stuff to prevent death, and it also happens to be winter. And the kids want to go to Kyoto…
On a similar note, I thought people were playing a joke on me, but you really do start to see Kanji in the environment. Once the pattern is in your mind it might appear in shadows or reflections, the sky, etc or wherever makes a pattern.
Those are WaniKani’s names for the components, but in the “canon” radical set, “coffin” is a variant of “elderly”, while “winter” is “strike”, so OP is completely correct in that regard. Etymologically, it’s thought that the character represents a teacher… not necessarily actually striking a child, but certainly in posession of a cane that represents authority (so that implicit threat of violence is certainly there…)
Henshall says that the left side of 教 is not actually “elderly plus child”, but was originally a pictograph of two crossed sticks over 子. The crossed sticks are thought to mean “emulate” (because to weave together sticks you have to make the two sides match each other), and the “hand holding a stick” right hand side is “strike/coerce/cause to do”. So the whole 教 is then “force a child to emulate something”, which is to say teach. The right hand side ended up looking like 孝 (in which character the top part really does mean “elderly”) because simplifications over the centuries resulted in them being written the same way despite not sharing an etymology. (The crossed-sticks component also is visible as part of the old pre-WW2 form of 学, 學.)
This kind of thing is why I don’t find kanji etymology much benefit for learning them: the same component in a modern character can arise from multiple different origins, the etymology can be unknown or disputed, the meaning of the character may have shifted radically from what it started as, multiple components may be used in different characters for the same meaning, often components are picked primarily for their pronunciation and only secondarily for meaning, simplification of characters can completely obscure the etymology, and so on. It’s much more efficient to ignore all the historical detail, and assign each component one memorable keyword and make up mnemonics to suit yourself, rather than hoping that etymology will provide workable mnemonics. (If you do want to look at etymologies anyway, Henshall’s book isn’t bad.)
Wiktionary agrees that it’s crossed sticks 爻, but also suggests that it’s a phonetic component.
A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters, yeah? That’s been on my shelf since forever, but I’ve never gotten around to reading it. That said, I’ve never been entirely sure whether those are actual etymologies or just mnemonic stories that are slightly better grounded in real etymology than WaniKani’s.
I am certainly no expert, but I have seen it said that his etymologies are good and grounded in what was the consensus at the time of publishing (1988, but there’s a new edition out under the title “The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji” which updates it), and the fact that he notes when things have multiple proposed origins or are uncertain makes me more confident when he does list just a single origin for a character. The “mnemonics” given for each character are sometimes “don’t worry about the real etymology, go with this” but he tells you when he’s doing that.
