Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Kanji & Radicals · Acedra
Home
Explore
Languages
Kanji & Radicals
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
109 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:00
Welcome to the kanji workshop, so this one in particular is about kanji and especially the radicals and we're going to get into what a radical is and what they are and why they're so important for Japanese and they're sort of the key to how Japanese and Chinese people memorize thousands upon thousands of characters with minimal effort. So we're gonna talk about that today and I wanted to also say thank you to JETAA, the Japan exchange in teaching Alumni
0:27
Association of the Rocky Mountains for sponsoring this, they're providing all of the food and tea in the background and so, as I said before, please feel free to ask questions. Anything that you have to say is usually more interesting than my script. So we're gonna jump into this and talk about kanji and how they're designed and how to think about them. So the first thing I was saying before, was that radicals, they are these fundamental building blocks of kanji. If you know
0:54
them they make kanji a lot easier to work with and so we're gonna get into what a radical is and how it works, how it functions and what it does. So these are the radicals, this chart here. So we're gonna talk about this chart, looks a little overwhelming at first. This is from the from the new Nelson Japanese English character dictionary and we're gonna get into why this looks the way it does and I actually have a copy of this for all of
1:24
you to check out . And so as we're jumping into this, one thing I'd actually like to make really clear about sort of how all of this stuff works is that when you look at how characters are put together, it's not dissimilar from how English spelling works. So if I were to
1:48
write that on the board how do you pronounce this? Colonel. How do you know that? You just know it right, like it's something that you've come into contact with. Here's a simpler example, how do you pronounce this word? I and not ey-a, which would make a lot more sense if you didn't speak English? So just keep in mind that we have all of these quirks in our language too - we just don't happen to have ideograms as part of our language but English spelling is a notorious
2:17
aspect of our language for people learning it, so although you struggle with kanji I can assure you that Japanese people struggle with our spelling system. So the feeling of 'why do they do it this way' is mutual so, jumping into it... One of the first things about to rethink how you think of kanji so especially for those of you in the first year of Japanese, you probably think of kanji in terms of strokes. So one two three four five six strokes to write
2:46
this character which is "tera", which means like a buddhist temple but if you think about it in radicals, that really changes sort of the perspective because there's not six pieces of it, there's actually, does anyone I take a guess how many radicals does this character have? Two, you're correct! Right so you have "tsuchi" or "do" on the top and "sun" on the bottom and we'll talk more about this relationship and also when I say that it's made up of radicals that's a little
3:18
incorrect it's a little more sophisticated than that but we'll talk about sort of the true nature of this structure. So the thing with strokes is that it really kind of creates a lot of labor for you when you're learning to memorize kanji and you can kind of see this stroke by stroke method in this lithograph. This is from a book that we own it's about 300/400 years old published in 1670, it's actually up in the CU-Boulder libraries special
3:46
collections and it's a book of a Dutch expedition to Japan. And so if you look at the kanji here you can see how truly awful looking it is, so I think like if you look at this, it's clearly just scribble like they made this up because they couldn't reproduce what they were looking at. I would say, you know this one right here is probably this character and it could have actually even been two separate ones or it could have even been
4:24
one of those two options. This is supposed to be "hikari" so they were looking at in going one two three four five six and trying to write it that way. So this is what happens when you try to write stroke by stroke. If you think of kanji as just being structured in strokes you kind of get a sort of awkward looking writing style and that's not quite how to think about it. There's a better base set of units to work with and so think about it more as that this:
4:58
kanji is made up of different radicals. So if we look at this one up here, how many radicals do you think it's made of? All right yeah give me a give me a hands up for this one. All right so for those of you that said four, you have it. And so you may not know these offhand but this is: 'word', 'grass' or 'plant', 'old bird' and 'later' or 'Mata'. So, 'Mata' 'furutori', 'kusakammuri' and 'kotoba' or 'gen', or in this case, 'gonben'. And so
5:35
this kanji is made up of radicals so what about three? How many radicals are in three? All right it's actually either kanji one and the kanji two. Each of these is their own independent radical, believe it or not. So what it is, is this is 'Ichi' and this is 'ni' and you put them together and that's how you get it. So it's not one three times it's actually one and two together and so when I say that kanji is made up of different radicals, that statement a little
6:09
inaccurate and what I mean by that is technically every kanji has only one radical. And in this case for this character it's this part 'gonben' it's called, and it means to talk. It's actually, this character is used in the word for lawyer 'bengoshi' and so the idea is that, and it means to defend, especially to defend with your words. What it is, is this is the core semantic piece of the character. So the radical is sort of like an identifier, it's the means of looking
6:40
up a character in a dictionary is which is what we're gonna deal with next week. And all these other parts these parts don't actually have a lot to do with the meaning because they're not technically the radical but they can be the radicals of other characters. So this one means grass or plants in a lot of kanji related to fauna or flora rather, you'll see this radical in it. 'Furutori' doesn't quite have a theme that I can think of and one and two
7:07
don't quite have themes either that go together. But certainly for a lot of words that deal with speaking you'll see this over and over again. So if you can remember the kanji for hanashi this is on the left of it also and it literally means to talk. So it's a logical radical but all of those can be radicals too just for different characters. So we have to talk about a few different qualities that radicals can have. So one of the first things that radicals can have is
7:33
position, right? They have to go into a position. I'm sure you've noticed this but you've noticed that kanji when you look at them, they tend to have a very clear segmentation, so like left and right side, left and right side, and the radical can potentially appear in any of these configurations. So in this case what is this kanji? Fire, yeah. So this particular radical is also a character on its own. There's a bunch of radicals that are also independent characters. In this case
8:09
it means 'candle', in this case the kanji means 'autumn'. So you can see these different positions that they can take up. So you can see you can fit them into the corners. In this case I couldn't find an example of this particular radical squeezing into a spot but just know that it can appear in any of those sort of configurations, and we'll see more of that in the next couple of slides. So one is position. How does it get positioned? Does it get positioned
8:35
to the left, right, top, bottom, in one of the corners? Or is the entire radical itself a character? Okay so here's 'kome' or what does this one mean? 'Rice', yeah and so along with position comes compression, so characters, all these kanji have to fit inside of an imaginary square and so you always have to keep compressing the character down to fit inside this imaginary square. So even you have a really complex character it has to fit there. So like, for example, and you can
9:08
see here right before I didn't have examples of these positions but you can see 'kome' fitting into all of these different spots. This one, how many parts is this made of? Or how many, how many strokes are there? Can anyone give me the stroke count of this one? I have 18. So, and I'll admit I might be wrong because I always, there's always one part I always confuse. So it's about 18 strokes, so if you have to memorize 18 individual pieces it's
9:43
pretty tough. How many radicals are there? Two- yeah so does anybody happen to know what this top one means? 'Dear', 'shika', and this bottom part is rice and this character means reindeer. And it's not to say like 'Oh reindeer eat rice therefore this character is..' that's not how this works that's not how characters are combined together. And we'll talk a little bit about that as well. So if this is this character means reindeer and this character up at the top
10:16
means deer, this character the bottom means rice. So which one is the actual radical of this character? Of course right, the deer radical is the radical in reindeer but this 'rice' can be its own radical as well, like it's the radical of this kanji. And so we'll get into some of that again more. So again we have position and we have compression. When you put the radical into one of these positions it has to compress down. The other thing and this is really, really important, this is the one
10:47
that people really struggle with. Is that, radicals can have variation and students really get flustered with this because this and this are the same thing. They both mean 'fire' right? This one, what's this? 'Water'. Does anyone know how to say it in Japanese? 'Mizu' and so over here you'll see two variations and do you know the other pronunciation for this? 'Sui', yeah so this character, what's the word for three in Japanese? So what do you think they call this? 'Sansui'
11:26
that's the name of this particular radical. Three water, and each of these variations actually have their own name. So here is 'heart' and you can see here that there's two other variations on it. This one's a little more, this and this are pretty extreme, right? You kind of have to know and all Japanese people just sort of grew up learning this and knowing it. They take it for granted that they know. The same way you all take for granted how to pronounce 'Colonel' and 'Eye'.
11:52
So just be aware of this variation quality. The funny thing is that sometimes the variants are actually more common than the unvaried versions. So this radical you see all the time in Japanese in lots and lots of characters. You almost never see it in it's unvaried form. This is almost exclusively how you see it presented it's almost always part of
12:17
another character. I believe I think there's only one Prefecture in Japan [It's not, I just confused this for another radical that is used in Prefecture names]
12:21
that uses this in its name and that's the only time it's ever used. So we have all these concepts together at once: position, compression variation and the fact that the variants can actually be more common than the unvaried versions and then implied meaning. So what's this kanji mean? 'Rain', so the rain character, if you see it in different characters it it usually has to do with weather. An exception to that might be something like this:
12:56
so here's rain on the top and then, sorry I'm in an awkward position, so rain and the the bottom part. What does this character mean? Does anybody happen to know it? 'Zero', nothing to do with weather at all. So this is not everything I'm telling you is not 100% true all the time and this is something that students hate when they're learning, is you want just a one quick simple answer but you have to be a little critical when you go into these things. It's not always gonna
13:26
be simple and straightforward. So, right, 'meat' or 'niku', when you see this in radical form it tends to refer to parts of the body. So when we talk about lungs, the liver, the brain, you'll see this character appear many times and then 'kokoro' or 'heart' is often used when you're talking about like, personality and emotion and things like that. Not always, again there's lots of situations where I could probably dig up a character that uses this radical and has
13:51
nothing to do with emotion, it'll mean something like window or something like that. So let's talk a little bit about some of this stuff. Oh what's up? You say kanji only have one radical, so how do you know which one is the radical? Familiarity and guesswork and logic there's there is a logic to all of this and that's what the second workshop deals a lot more with, is how to like confront this stuff. So this is a book I
14:22
actually think it's a pretty good one, it's called 'kana and kanji' and what they do is they kind of start you out slow so instead of giving you this really complicated grid that you see in the Nelsons dictionary, they give you this much simpler one. And there's a few things here that are worth considering. So first of all remember before when I said that radicals have a position? So those positions actually have special names, so if the radical is to the left,
14:50
on the left side of the character, that position is called 'Hen'. If it's on the right it's called 'Tsukuri', the top is 'Kammuri', which literally means crown. 'Ashi' which means foot but not the foot that you've learned, there's a different foot character. 'Kamae' and there's a star next to 'Kamiya' because 'Kamae' is kind of like this general enclosure radical. 'Tare' is when the enclosures specifically in the upper top and the left. Then 'Nyō'
15:19
is specifically when it's in the on the left and the bottom. Okay and so there's a few other things going on here. Remember before and I was talking about variation? So look at these numbers, so these are the standard numbers that every radical gets. Every good character dictionary uses the exact same numbers. So if you looked at different kanji dictionaries they would have the same numbering system. And you'll see that 86 and 86 they're the same but they they're
15:47
in different positions and then also even if you look up at 60, the thing about that that's tricky is you look at 60 and then if we look at, where's it's mate... I forgot what my anecdote was about this particular one. So for 60 that one is often confused with this one, 144, but notice that they have different numbers so they're not considered the same thing. They obviously look different but so do these, and they're still consider the same. This one
16:26
kind of gets confusing for students when they're trying to figure things out and we're going to talk about that similarity soon. So making it a little more complicated, here's that whole neat set of naming conventions. I actually have a handout for that, here you are. So again here's all of these different naming conventions and you'll see for the 'hen's, we've got 'ninben', 'nisui', 'kuchihen', 'tsuchihen', 'onnahen', 'yumihen', 'gyōninben'
16:54
'kozatohen', 'rishhinben', 'tehen' 'katahen', then 'hen' keeps appearing over and over again in the names of these things, so if you're a first-year student you don't have to worry about memorizing the names of these things but just be aware that it's very solidly in the minds of Chinese and Japanese speakers. They're very aware of this positioning system that exists and this is one of the secrets to them sort of managing to consume so many characters it's such a
17:17
high speed. That and of course living in a culture where you constantly read this you know the familiarity you have with it makes it easier. So some of the things I've chosen to point out, notice that there is this, 'kozatohen' and 'ōzato' and they look identical but what makes them different?
17:39
So where are they located, where is each one located? So where where is 'kozatohen'? And 'õzato'? Yeah so they look the same and actually, remember these are variants, so when you uncompress them they actually look totally different from each other. But one only ever appears on the left and one only ever appears on the right. Let me see, what's one of the other ones... oh so here's 'sanzui' again and you'll see up there there's its
18:08
partner 'nisui'. Another one is, so for 'ashi' notice that it says 'hitoashi', notice that the names there don't follow a particular pattern. 'Hitoashi', 'kokoro', 'rekka/renga', 'sara' and 'kogai', then what was one other point I wanted to make? Oh yeah! Remember before I said 'ashi', it's not the foot kanji? So for those of you who are further along you'll see right away that that's a totally different 'ashi' that you've never seen before and that's
18:35
because in Japanese when you're speaking 'ashi' doesn't distinguish between your foot or your leg but the kanji do so the kanji that you learn in like 101 Japanese is foot but that kanji refers to the leg itself. Again, the same book kind of gives you like a clearer list of the kanji and it'll give you generally like a tag word, like this is what each one means individually. So here's the corpse radical, the sprout radical, the mountain radical, the mother
19:13
or not radical, the Lance shaft, alright? This one's kind of interesting because if you look at it it looks like it should be two separate ones and it's not. Alright? That one always trips people up. And here's the other half of them, so if you kind of want to look at a clean, neat summary of all of these radicals, this is a nice little list that's in this little book. Alright so the other thing I want to talk about is that, this is kind of important, so
19:46
sometimes what you get is, when you look at kanji dictionaries and you see this online sometimes, you see it in print but they love to tinker and try and make it easier for you as a westerner, so if you showed this to a Japanese person they would have no idea what's happening. This system created by Spahn & Hadamitsky, I don't know why they did it this way because they made this awesome little book that is really handy, it's a great reference tool but then they made
20:11
their own kanji dictionary, that sort of goes very counter intuitively to like, how Japanese people actually learn the radical system. So be aware that different authors will present different systems and creations for you and yet they sort of put a barrier between you and Japanese native speakers because this isn't how Japanese people understand characters to be constructed. And you can see here it says these other radicals without variants and you'll see
20:42
'3a', it says that the variant is not the variant but it is the variant so I don't even know why they have it flipped the way they do. So you're learning essentially the wrong perception of all of these things. Okay now, this beast of a chart is the most common one used. So this is the Nelson radical index. So when we talk about how, you were saying before, how do I look these up? So you would make an assumption about a kanji and so if you saw this character
21:20
you'd assume 'rain' was the radical and the reason why I assume that is because you assume the top of the character is the radical before you assume the bottom. So there is this hierarchy that goes with that and everyone always forgets this step all and loan that the kanji is itself that the radical itself are sorry that the kanji itself is the radical but there's all kinds of different, odd things going on here, so if you look at the red square, 'c30' and
21:50
'31', so if you know their names, the reason why they're separated is a little more obvious but what is what do you think 30 is? 'Kuchi', 'mouth', it's the mouth radical. Does anyone know what 31 is? It's one of the first kanji you learn actually, but it's missing something in it. It's the country radical. So, 'Kuni' and it's a 'kamae', it's one of those enclosure radicals. So the difference between them is that in with 'Kuchi', you can never put anything
22:21
inside of it. With this radical you always put something inside of it that's what distinguishes them from each other and this is sort of a convention that when you just look at this it doesn't make sense at first, but when you see how they're used it makes a lot more sense. So if you look at 162 right here, you'll notice if you kind of look at the order it starts with 1 and then you have 1 in brackets 2, 2 in brackets, 3 4 and on and on and then all of a sudden it
22:46
makes this giant leap to 162, right? So what is that? Why does it have 162 all of a sudden in these special brackets? What is it implying? It's a cross reference. So if you look at 162 over here, so we count up, here it is and you'll see it re-references back, so it's sort of referencing itself through the chart. So if you're looking at a kanji and you actually see this version of it, this is actually how they used to write
23:20
it before World War II and that's how they write it now and this is what it looks like without a variant. So these square brackets mean that you're looking at a variant. If there's no square brackets you're looking at the unvaried version, so they're all these subtle implications about what's going on and if you read the foreword of the dictionary it'll explain how all of the symbolism fits together. Pretty dry stuff in the modern era with the internet and
23:42
all that but when you use an online dictionary you don't actually engage in a process, you give it information it spits it back out with you but you don't know why it works. Why it works the way it does, so there's real value to using a paper dictionary. So the next one is if you look up at the green box, 32, 32, 32, so you can see these really this gets really unusual. So here's earth and then occasionally there's a variation where the lines are just slightly different but there's also a
24:14
completely separate radical that means soldier, and then there's this guy which is 'tsuchi' on the left if it's not when it's varied and then actually look at 130, 'niku', you can see there's a few slight changes there and what's really confusing about the variance there? What does one of the variants look like? 'Moon', yeah so the third one looks like the kanji for moon, we're gonna talk about that in a moment and then remember before I was
24:49
saying left side, right side? Here's what 'õzato' and 'kozato' hen, here's what they look like without their variations. So this chart, if you spend time with it it starts to make a little more sense but you have to figure out what it's trying to tell you it's not immediately obvious, it's a little obtuse, admittedly. But it has all the information you need. How about this blue one right here? What's going on here? This one's a little tricky you have to know a
25:16
little bit about history. Any guesses? Some of you are a little more advanced you should definitely know the 211 in brackets but it's the variant, so what this is, is this is pre World War II, post-World War II. This is a simplified character and so the original is the one on the left. This is how tooth was written before World War II. In the modern era post World War II, they simplified it to make it easier and so technically, even though the variant is
25:46
the one they write today, this is actually a simplification of the original and there's a couple of kanji, a couple of radicals on here that have that same result. So let's look at a few, so to go back to it radicals can also be deceptive, right? This one is, so this means, if I remembering correctly, this one is intestine, I'm forgetting this one and this one is lung and they're all parts of the anatomy. So whenever you see moon on the left like this it's actually
26:18
the 'meat' radical so we actually call it 'Nikko Zuki' in Japanese which literally means 'meat moon', so just know that this is one of those strange conventions that you kind of have to be aware of and it's particularly confusing if you're seeing it without anyone kind of explaining it to you, but this is always was definitely one of the most unusual things for me when I moved to Japan and like 'I don't understand why this moon radical is in all these
26:44
anatomical words it's really strange' and it turns out that because I didn't understand how variation worked it left me really like confused and trying to figure out what was going on. Then of course, this goes back to that there's no perfect answer for everything, so if you look in the Nelsons dictionary there's only two variants but if you look in this other kanji dictionary there's three and this is that dictionary I was showing you before that I thought was
27:13
arranged a little strange. So this is really counterintuitive for me, I can't understand what's going on, and most Japanese people would look at this pretty baffled, so you really want to be using a system that makes sense also to the Japanese. And one thing I also want to point out is this radical system, right, everything that you're seeing here, the thing about this system is, is that this was only invented in the 1700s. How old is the Chinese language? Couple
27:46
thousand years old. So the way it's arranged now is in its infancy, right? Before this, there was a totally different system for arranging. There was actually a 512 radical system, right? So this was a attempt to make it easier so just be aware that this is sort of an imperfect solution. It does not perfectly represent every character. There are all kinds of situations when you're reading characters where none of them quite fit
28:15
into this whole system and that creates a lot of situations that don't seem to make sense and you're going to encounter situations where it's like 'everything I learned doesn't seem to apply to this one thing' and that's because you're dealing with a 300 year old 'two' for a thousands of year old language. I should say writing system. So I want to talk about the enclosures again. So if we start with the kanji on the upper left here this means 'street'
28:44
and specifically it means like a busy city street, that's usually the implication of it. So how many pieces are there? All right give me the number of pieces you think it has. Okay, all right. So it's three, there's three pieces to it. So there's 'tsuchi' two times, what's the other piece? 'Iku', to go, right? So it's actually.... that right? But there's situations, there are other characters where just this is the radical and that leads to a lot of
29:27
confusion. All right so if we look at the character on the right how many pieces is that made of? So I see twos and threes. It's actually two and it's this one is especially tricky. So one piece is ... this, the other piece is this and so what happens is if you look at this top, right here they they rip it apart and they put something in the middle. So just know that this system of squeezing and compression and changing can be quite flexible and complicated.
30:19
So this one means this character means lake. So how many pieces is it made of first of all?
30:34
Right, three. This one is three. So three pieces, two pieces, three pieces. So it means Lake, so what's the radical? Sansui, right? The three water radical, so this is really this like an obvious kind of radical. You have something about the radical is related to water, it means lake, does anyone what this one means? 'Old' and is this meat or is it moon? Why is it moon, why is
31:05
it not meat? How do you know? Yeah because it's on the right side of the character [actually, I'm wrong! This is the 'nikuzuki/meat moon' radical!] it's not on the left side if it's on the left side you know it was meat. Okay and then this last one here is 'namakemono' okay, and this one means lazy. So what's the radical in this one? 'Kokoro'. Why is kokoro the logical radical? It's an emotional state , it's a personality trait so the heart radical
31:35
is a good fit for that. And again this is actually made of three pieces: self, mouth and heart and also this by itself is a separate character altogether as well and it has a different radical than this character. Okay so this is gonna be interesting. So what is the radical for this character? First of all how many pieces does it have? How many radicals are there in this?
32:09
[I'm about to be wrong, it is actually 'double x' - but there is a dictionary I used that listed it under the 'no' radical with across-reference to 'double x' being the correct radical, I didn't see the cross-reference.] So it is five but the trick is which five? So I want to point out that this is one radical, right? In English they just call it double x, it's the mixing radical but its very rarely used in kanji. So which character in this is the radical? Anyone want to take a guess?
32:41
I'll kind of give you some hints.
32:48
The shape of me is one of the radicals. Which is? What does dye mean? Big? It is not that character. What's another possible pick? There's some obvious ones floating there. Right so there's this one, there's also this one 'jin' or what does 'jin' mean? 'Person', it's not the person radical which would be a good guess. No good guess as well, the enter radical which looks very similar to person but with a slight difference. So the radical for this character is
33:29
this and this character means 'sawayaka' it means 'refreshing', you see it all the time on like ice cream packaging in Japan. So and here's the great thing is that this particular radical, the name of it in Japanese is 'kana-no' like literally the katakana for no which is that, and here's the thing is that radical doesn't inherently have any meaning and so this character means refreshing so how could this possibly be like the semantic indicator? And this is what I meant by
33:59
not everything fits together neatly, because the thing is is that every character needs one radical so they can put it somewhere in the dictionary and they just all for this one agreed that it was that, and they put in. But here's the thing, is that some character dictionaries make a compromise. They know that this is really confusing and so they just tell you that this is the radical because that's what everybody thinks it is but it's actually not but
34:26
it's such a common mistake they've sort of turned it into a convention. Okay and this is the the cruelty of one-stroke radicals. So if you're getting really stuck on a character there's a really good chance that the kanji probably has a radical that's only one or two strokes and so it's really really hidden inside of this complicated looking character. There's a few other examples of that situation that do exist. So you know on
34:56
the one hand a character like this actually gets really complicated and confusing but on the other hand really complicated looking characters can actually be broken down into their basic parts, so let's kind of hash this one out. So first of all how would you start to divide this character? What pieces does it have? What sides does it have?
35:27
Yeah so, well I would say it has a left and a right and then and this is the important part, right? There we go that's what I wanted to hear right, so there's not a middle part, there's no middle. So there's a distinct left side and there's a distinct right side. And then the right side has two distinct parts as well and how would you explain those sides, right? If you look at your sheet you can tell me the actual names. What's this part called?
36:03
And then this is the inside of it and actually one way to talk when we talk about this in English we say the inside and the outside, even though it's a little strange to say it that way, that's just how we make the distinction. And so, you know try to diagram this stuff out in your brain because each white piece you can fit yet another diagram into it and another diagram into and a diagram, within a diagram, within a diagram. So let's try this one. So what
36:32
are the distinct parts of this character how would you divide it up initially? Yeah, so a top part and a bottom part. Then which chunk can be divided even more? And how would you divide the bottom part? It's an outside, inside situation yeah. So it's like this. So this 'Mon gate' this is east and this is grass and this actually means orchid or 'ran' and it tends to be associated with the Netherlands or Holland. And that's another talk for
37:10
another day but ...and so when things get really really complicated it starts to, this like graphing system ,starts to break down a little bit it gets really really hard to do. Does anyone happen to know this word? On Japanese TV they always bring this word up as like a challenge, like 'can you write this? Can
37:30
you read this'? Right, this is the word for rose or 'bara' and so if we try to hash this one out, so what's ... first of all what are the radicals for these? Right if it's a rose then the top part means grass or plant so that's why those are the radicals because this radical is associated with plants. So obviously we're talking about roses, things like that and then if we try to start breaking this down, how many pieces or radicals are inside this first character
38:04
would you say? That's the basic division, if you did the whole thing how would you try to break this down? How many pieces are in here? Six, yeah so grass 'tsuchi' or earth, person, person and then this one, right, remember this? What's the outside one? 'Kuni' right the country radical and what's this one 'kuchi', yeah and one thing to point out too and this is where some of this breaks down, but if you're familiar with this character, does anybody know the meaning? Yeah or 'to go
38:49
around and around' and this is country and this is mouth and these radicals are not being used because of what they mean, they're being used because it creates a visual interpretation of the thing it's trying to convey. Okay and so when you start to look at something like the Nelson's, so how you start putting all this stuff together and making sense of it. This is what I did back in 2000-2004 when I was in school, the internet was not quite
39:18
what it is today but when you take the Nelson's dictionary and you start looking through it and the big thing is is we're gonna talk about the many many numbers that are built into the dictionary, but you'll see here's the beginning of a radical section this is 'hitsuji' or sheep, goat and it actually tells you what it's called. It tells you what it's called at the left and what it looks like and it tells you what it's called at the top. Because there's all
39:42
these variations and some radicals have more than one name because just different parts of Japan had different names for it and different conventions and so you have to build all that in and you can see 'hito' is a particularly complicated one, it's called 'nimben' when it's on the left at the top you can call it 'yane' or 'hito-yane' or 'hitogashira', right? And so now it's not just like 'oh i'll remember one word', now i have three words to remember?
40:03
Oh god this is the worst system ever but it's something you get used to over time for sure. And one of the points I would make about all this so this is 'yami' or 'yamai-dare' and the 'dare' is the 'tare' meaning like to overhang like this and so we're dealing with all these systems and names and conventions and oh my god wait I have to learn all this stuff and the answer is yes you do, because you're good students. But to back it up for a moment, a kanji, this is
40:30
this is an analogy, just run with me for a minute, but a word in English with its spelling and its quirks and all that is very much like a kanji right? The kanji is made of pieces, a word is made of pieces so kanji have radicals, English words have letters and you know one of the things we forget about is that we take all the things that we do as native English speakers for granted. So for example, how many letters are there in the English language? Okay if you didn't
41:00
speak English why would you ever think those two things are the same? Okay you just take this for granted. So one more time, how many letters are there in English? Okay then how many letters are there in English right but what about when you see something like that and you get the variant, right? Why would you think that those are the same? They look similar but are they the same I don't know! What about when you start italicizing things, right? We just take
41:36
all that information for granted and so we're like oh there are 26 letters in English but there's not there's more like a hundred and twelve or fourteen right? We take that all for granted and then all the conventions that go into how we spell words and why they are the way they are you know that's something that we spend years learning about in school and Japanese throw them spending years learning all of this stuff and putting it together over time it doesn't
41:59
come immediately it doesn't come quickly but in bits and pieces you slowly start to put the picture together. And so knowing that there's a sort of structural system in place can start to make sense of all this stuff and why it is the way it is and why it's set up the way it's been set up. And so this is actually the final slide of my presentation and so what I want to know now is what are some of your questions and curiosities about how all
42:22
this stuff is set up? What are some unusual situations you feel like you've run into that you want answers to or what looks super confusing on this? You know there's not that many, that's that's the beauty of it. Right because you become, so this is when familiarity becomes really important so let's take an example in English actually. So if I say, so if I write this this word for you 'potion' right? This 'tion' you know is pronounced 'tion' and you start applying
43:09
this to a lot of other scenarios and situations, so 'multiplication' like you at least know that that end part has a certain way to be pronounced 'tion', so you see TION and over and over and over again in different English words. So what starts to happen here is, yeah maybe the radical is one but chances are really good that it's not. And if you follow if you follow this hierarchical system, this is what students always mess up when they learn to identify radicals, but if
43:40
you follow this, you'll pretty much set yourself up for success right away. For identifying it clearly and of course you know this is the paper version and I think there's a lot of value in it but of course eventually you guys are just gonna use something online like I do that all the time myself but I did bust my chops on these paper dictionaries and so I actually understand sort of all the relationships that are occurring together with all
44:04
these characters. There's a lot of value in sort of trying to find it in a paper dictionary and failing and then having to reevaluate and figure out what you did wrong and guess again and kind of move through that process. There are some truly difficult and infuriating characters but you will get a feel for it. Right? Just like how we all know that 'Colonel' is spelled in a really funny way, most Japanese people they're like 'oh
44:26
this one character it looks like it should be this but it's actually that' like it's just common knowledge amongst the population that speaks the language. What else are you curious about with all this stuff? As you stare blankly and fear at it all and I would tell you that depending how you look at it you could do you can learn all this in a weekend. There's online flashcards, it's pretty manageable and there's different ways to approach it.
44:56
So for example you know for those of you in the 1000 level just starting out, the thing that probably matters the most is just knowing the English nicknames and just having a feel for it that way or even just being comfortable with the positions. You don't have to worry too much about what to call it in Japanese but I can tell you that when you're on the phone with somebody, you know the way they talk is they talk in terms of this 'tare' and this 'hen' so right now the
45:22
consular general in Denver his name is Hira Koba and so Hira I could imagine in my head and then I was like well what's the ko and what's the ba and we had to talk it out over the phone together because I was writing a thank-you card and I was like I don't actually know the the kanji for the consular generals name and so they had to explain it to me over the phone what it looked like and because I knew how to talk about it, I could visualize in my head what was being said to me.
45:57
The answer is sort of, the answer is yes. so in the Kanji radical system which is What that is those are the 214 radicals and then it ends but like I said that was only invented in the 1700s so the fact that those are the only ones is sort of like a malleable feature because it's just a product produced at that time and that's the standard ever since then. So the answer is yes, kind of no, but mostly yes like there's not a, see how there's like not a clean answer to
46:28
your question? Like it's just good enough and now that's what a lot of these things are these systems I'm showing you. These are good enough, they're not going to get you through every situation and you have to make a decision when you run into situations where you can't take all these rules and mash them together in a results. Yeah and actually of that there's a subset of about 60 that overwhelmingly take up most of it because there's one, for example this,
46:59
where is it...so if you look at radical...give me a sec here to find it... it's a good one, I'm glad that they specifically set it aside to make it that special. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven yeah ... Oh here it is, 192 if you look at radical 192. So that radical is only the radical of two or three characters and that's it. It's the radical of nothing else. That radical means 'ceremonial wine jug'. In a way you know these radicals are sort of an expression of
47:46
what's important and I love the idea that ceremonial wine jug is so important that it got separated out as its own distinct radical. And you'll almost never see it that's the thing. Like sure you could learn it and then you'll never see it the entire time you're in Japan. So there's this sort of sense of investment, if you googled around for like the most common you get a listen about 60 or 66 of them and that is the most productive use of
48:12
your time. Like the higher the count gets the less and less likely you're gonna see it. Like this character here 'Hana' or nose it's actually a fairly common word but it's the radical of barely any characters but you'll see it plenty of times because it just happens to be incorporated into a common word and many of these radicals stand for things that are very common to every day life, the bug radical, the dish radical, the tongue radical. Some of them are kind of like
48:38
culturally unique like the 'usu' radical which is refers to the wet liquid at the bottom of a mochi making bowl right? Very culturally significant idea, so things like that is kind of mentioned. You get a little hint about like sort of what are the things in the, you know this is again, three thousand-year-old systems so we're talking about the priorities of people 3,000 years ago right but this system itself was invented in 1700s, so it's the values in the 1700s
49:07
of what people thought was most important. So you know, a system is always imbued with its cultural significance in some way. What else is up here that intrigues you? Oh and actually before I forget, so this guy right here is the motohashi daikon wagiten, you probably will never need to use this unless you become a master's student and pursue a PhD in Japanese but this is a one-volume of I think 14 volumes, this is the index volume. This
49:43
dictionary set has every character, ever made, that's ever been written, ever, with every variant that could ever have happened in the written history of Chinese and Japanese. It's massive it's one of the only dictionaries in the world that even competes with the Oxford English Dictionary in terms of size and breadth and the only reason it's shorter is because Japanese as a language is much more densely packed and it's writing system. So it's actually really
50:07
cool you can find some of the most interesting characters in here there's over 50,000 I think? And almost all of them are not in use but, but I just love knowing that there's a kanji, you know there's this kanji right and there's this kanji and there's this kanji and I just love the fact that this is actually a character. Sure it means like jungle or something but it's really in there that's the crazy part so, but most of its out of use but if you're
50:45
ever interacting with like older texts this may be a valuable asset. But the thing about this that I really wanted to show you is, so this really messy looking paper that you see here with all these cross references and different things to look at, if you actually look at it the way it's done in this dictionary you'll see it's so much cleaner and that's because there's a base level of assumption about the user of the dictionary. So Japanese people
51:10
just understand so many more of the conventions that I'm teaching you today that they don't need the cross referencing system. They just know that for example, you know this and this is this and this they know that already. So they know what they're doing when they're looking in the character dictionary same thing with mikazuki there's not like this whole explanation for it in a lot of dictionaries. They just know that that's one of the ways
51:33
that it's arranged and they just know where to look. So they're not looking under, you know one two three four strokes they're looking under one two three four five six strokes. So they see this and even though it's four they're thinking six in terms of the number of strokes because this radical system is actually, so this part is actually arranged by the number of strokes, so...
51:58
what else is floating in your brains?
52:21
Okay wait is that the skip code system? Is it this dictionary right here? So this is a is a system created by Jack Halpern and he's done a few quite a few interesting books on Japanese so he created a different system called the skip system, which basically every character has a three number code and so, first is the character left right, is it top bottom, is it inside outside or is it other? So those are the only four structural categories and then it's the number of strokes for one side of the
53:00
character and what a number of stuck to the other side and then this looks like a great system for people learning Japanese, except no Japanese person knows what you're talking about. This is completely foreign to Japanese people and it is useful and actually this is a fantastic dictionary, it's actually a good investment, this dictionary although the way you look up kanji is really unusual and the thing I don't like about it is that it it takes you away from how
53:27
the kanji are actually structured and it prevents you from actually learning, in the long term, how kanji are arranged and how to handle learning thousands of characters because you're sort of being taken away from the structural system that is actually in place and then you can't talk to Japanese people because this isn't with how they understand the arrangement. That being said, the semantic capacity of this dictionary is fantastic it's does such
53:52
a good job explaining what the characters mean and how they're used and why they're used the way they are. It's absolutely fantastic on that level, I just don't like the way it looks up but I have a copy anyway because I think they do such a fantastic job sort of explaining the meaning of character. So there's a compromise happening there, I know this isn't the right way but it's really great for other reasons so I roll with it and I use it sometimes yeah.
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat