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Hi. I’ve been studying Japanese at an evening class for about 1 year. In October I will be proceeding onto an improvers course where they begin to teach kanji. I thought I’d get a head start over the summer by doing some self learning. I understand that a better way to learn kanji is by radical, rather than stroke by stroke. I know that radicals are smaller components that make up individual kanji. I am a little confused though. Some radicals appear to be kanji in their own right and have meanings, ON and KUN readings. For example 人、女、山、川、子、水、火 etc. If these radicals are used in a kanji it can give some clue as to the kanji’s meaning. Others do not appear to have any specific meaning or pronunciation at all and are just shapes. I’ve been looking at TextFugu’s kanji radicals cheat sheet and a number of other internet resources in a effort to learn the radicals. On most of these, the radicals that don’t appear to have meaning or pronunciation are just given generic names based on what they look like e.g. legs, lid, open box, stick, roof etc. Do these ‘meaningless’ radicals have any meaning at all? Do they provide some kind of clue as to the meaning of the kanji they are part of e.g. if the ‘roof’ radical is part of the kanji, does it mean the kanji has something to do with buildings? Or are they just shapes to remember so it’s easier to write a complicated kanji rather than memorising each individual stroke? Which radicals have meaning and pronunciation and which don’t? How did you go about memorizing the radicals? Did you just memorize them by their generic names/shapes or did you memorise all their meanings, ON and KUN pronunciations. I want to try and categorize the radicals (other than by stroke count) so I can learn them in a systematic way. Any ideas?
Radicals help you to learn and identify Kanji. It’s a much quicker and efficient way than learning Kanji by number of strokes and stroke order. Here on TF, you first learn a set of Radicals and then a set of Kanji that uses those Radicals. Gradually, as you learn more complicated Kanji you should already have learnt the Radicals that make up that particular Kanji, thus you shouldn’t have too many problems identifying it.
Each Kanji usually has a meaning, and two readings: On’yomi (Chinese) and Kun’yomi (Japanese). However, a Kanji might have more than one meaning and more than one On’yomi and Kun’yomi reading or no On’yomi or Kun’yomi.
In the early stages of Kanji learning here on TF, a lot of the Radicals have the same meaning as the Kanji which means they’re easier to remember. I’d just follow the way Koichi tells you to do in the lessons.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
I understand that some radicals have the same meaning as the kanji e.g. 水 = Water, 火 = fire, 山 = mountain, 川 = river etc. So in my limited understanding, these actually mean ‘something’. However, looking at the list of radicals, there are lot which are just given names like pot lid, spiky stick, top of head etc. My question is, do these ‘shapes’ mean anything as well? Or are they just there to help memorise stroke order by breaking more complicated kanji down into smaller chunks?
David Crowther:
Or are they just there to help memorise stroke order by breaking more complicated kanji down into smaller chunks?Yes, pretty much that. Once I initially learn a radical, I don’t usually keep revising them.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 3 months ago by
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