Why would wanikani have different meanings for the same symbol kanji and vocab?

Your expectations for what you’re going to get from WaniKani as far as explanations are completely different from mine…

I guess we just have to agree to disagree.

The definition provided is one aspect of the meaning of 然 and not all of them… and I’m fine with that.

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Oh I know what I get :grin: I said maybe we should get…
Anyway thanks for clarifying that kanji further for me :slightly_smiling_face:

You should be immersing and not spending your time on pointless arguments carried out in English with random people on the internet… just sayin.

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Correct me if I’m wrong but Kanji don’t have “meanings.” They are just parts of the words.

That’s actually where you’re probably wrong :wink: You might say, symbols in different writing systems can have different degrees of abstraction. If you’re interested, you might want to read up on terms like pictograms, ideograms, logograms and the like.

As a short overview (and to the best of my own limited understanding :wink: ): Pictograms are stylized or simplified drawings of physical objects, that developed into symbols representing those objects. Pictograms are a part of the larger category of ideograms, which also include symbols that represent abstract ideas. Ideograms are generally not connected to specific sounds or to a specific language.You might say, they carry meaning, and only meaning.

Logograms are at a greater abstraction level, so to speak. They can represent a sound (or multiple sounds, see kun’yomi vs. on’yomi vs. nanori), and they represent elements of a specific language (so they’re less universal than ideograms). Logograms are kind of “middle ground”, as they carry meaning and sound.

Alphabets and syllabaries are even more abstract than logograms. They carry only sound, the original meaning of the characters isn’t used anymore. For example, the origins of the latin “A” are probably in a pictogram representing an ox head, but today we use the letter “A” in all kings of words. The origins of the letter “B” are probably in a pictogram representing a house, and so fort. Over the centuries and milennia, those developed in the alphabet characters we’re familiar with today.

Kanji are logograms. That means, they carry sound and meaning. In modern Japanese, there’s something called ateji. That refers to the use of kanji just as phonetical representations, without regard to their underlying meaning. But in general, with kanji you need to take the sounds / readings and the meaning into account.

There are other quite interesting aspects to the variety of writing systems. For example, (to my knowledge) the Japanese writing systems don’t know a canonical order. We learn in grade school (or before that) in what order the A, B, C and so on goes. But with kana and kanji, there’s no equivalent to an “alphabetical order”. It would be… interesting to have a little kid recite tens of thousands of kanji in the correct order, anyway :wink:

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Noted.

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For kana the most common way to group them is to use Gojuon (五十音) although there is also Iroha.

For kanji as far as I know they are normally grouped by radicals for dictionaries etc.

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You lack fundamental knoweldge of the japanese language. Which is fine, but not if you’re going to blame WaniKani for Japanese being the way it is.

A kanji used as a root-word in jukugo words can have a different meaning than the word itself. Like how “pat” in english means “to gently tap with the palm, typically in a reassuring manner”, but “pat” means “father” when used as a root (such as "paternity, patricide, etc).

Every language is different. WaniKani is doing it’s job and teaching you properly.

Well, with kana you do have 五十音順, which I think gets recited like the alphabet gets recited:

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Of course, etymologically it does, but it still is a bit removed. Just like in the example given, it isn’t hard to see how “fate” may evolve into “life,” or vice versa.

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For kana the most common way to group them is to use Gojuon (五十音) although there is also Iroha.

Yes, that’s basically what I wanted to convey: There’s not the one authoritative order, like with the western alphabetical order. There are several ordering methods, with Gojuon seemingly the most common.

For kanji as far as I know they are normally grouped by radicals for dictionaries etc.

Grouping something isn’t the same as ordering it, because with grouping you don’t necessarily have an order for the elements in the same group :wink: But we might be getting sidetracked here :slight_smile:

What dictionaries use something other than gojuuon (not talking about 漢字辞典)? And what kids don’t learn it?

Saying “there are others as well” and “seemingly the most common” makes it sound like you could pick up any random dictionary and not be 100% certain it will use gojuuon.

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