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I’m on Season 2 Lesson 5, and came across this kanji: 八. The lesson says this is built from the Volcano Radical, but (to me) it looks exactly like Fish Legs. I went back to the two-stroke radical page, and it says that some fonts will display Volcano as having an open top (like Fish Legs). Will I ever see the はち kanji written down with a “closed top” (the vertical line coming off the right stroke)? Does the Volcano Radical look just like Fish Legs most of the time?
Any help would be appreciated. :D
Volcano usually appears at the top of a kanji; fish legs usually appears at the bottom.
分 – volcano at top
貝 – fish legs at bottomThe closed-top volcano is usually only seen in print, I think.
I hate the whole fish legs vs volcano thing… I always pick the wrong one on Anki :(
Thanks for the input Michael. I’ll remember that for when I start coming across more complex kanji.
Same here, Robot! An Anki card asked what radical hachi is built off of, and I’m thinking “oh yeah, I know this one, it’s Fish Legs *smug look*”. Turns out it’s Volcano :O . That created some momentary confusion, but I guess it’s like how ri/ki/sa can appear differently, so I’ll just start mentally grouping Fish Legs and Volcano.
My font has the almost closed vertical top for 八.
Over on jisho.org, when you’re searching for kanji “by radical”, fish legs and volcano are the same thing (though it’s displayed as the “full volcano”). I think Koichi just calls them differently to distinguish the “above” one and the “below” one.
The font here shows the narrow but still open-mouthed volcano; the font at jisho.org shows the pretty-much-closed-top volcano.
Oops, just realised that I said vertical top when I of course meant horizontal.
Doesn’t the volcano radical in writing usually have the right stroke start above the much shorter left stroke? Where as fish legs has a wide separation? I know that’s how we were taught to write はち in class. like this:
Different handwriting styles, different fonts, etc.
Oh, well, I don’t claim to know, because I know very little about kanji (maybe 80 or so before I started here). I just remember my prof being very strict with little things like this. She actually failed me on a quiz because the top of my ほ went a tiny bit above the top horizontal stroke all the time. And I was lucky. I was into Sumi-e, so I was always very particular about the shape and balance of my kana, other people wanted to drop the class over the kana quizzes because they couldn’t figure out why they were failing, to them, they all looked the same. So yeah, who knows, maybe she was just crazy, wouldn’t be the first prof. I had like that… but that’s always how I tell them apart now, and it works well enough for me. Even if it’s BS, it helps me remember and people can understand it, so maybe it’s worth thinking about that way anyway.
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