Jisho.org Forum

lol ... i appreciate your blooper 'cause i'm usually the one making it ... lol ...

Glad to hear my post was helpful :-) I was going to edit it to a proper question at some point so it didn't look so stupid, but I guess it's too late for that now.

Incidentally, I've been wondering a couple kanji questions and I was going to try to think about them some more on my own before asking, but I guess I'll just ask now:

1) Does anyone know the origin of the kanji 着? I got a kanji dictionary which gives 成り立ち for a lot of kanji, but it just tells me it came from 著 (if I read it properly), but no real etymology. (I have some other kanji books that might have the answer, but they're in the US right now, and I couldn't find the answer quickly on the web.)

2) When writing kanji that have 吉 or 古 in them, I often have trouble remembering which one it is. Any tips? I also have the same problem with しめすへん and　ころもへん. (I know I just asked this with あしへん, but how do get Kotoeri to actually display the radical?)

Posted By: tamatama

[p]2) When writing kanji that have 吉 or 古 in them, I often have trouble remembering which one it is. Any tips? I also have the same problem with しめすへん and　ころもへん. (I know I just asked this with あしへん, but how do get Kotoeri to actually display the radical?)[/p]

Well, it's quite easy to remember if you've learned all the separate radicals, similar to how kanji are taught in Remembering the Kanji. 古 looks like a gravestone and means old, fitting. 吉 is a Samurai/Gentleman over a mouth and means good luck, however way you want to connect that. What's important with kanji is IMO to make every small part so important that it becomes impossible to mix them up, and do so in a logical way.

It's the same with shimesuhen and koromohen, you can't just think of it as the same thing with one extra stroke, you have to differentiate them and make that stroke matter to the differentiation and to the kanji it's used in. In RtK, one learns that shimesuhen is an altar while the koromohen is a cloak. This makes sense since koromohen is used in tons of kanji for clothes and shimesuhen is used in a lot of religious kanji.

Differentiating based on meaning of radicals (or your impression of what they look like) is going to work best in most cases, though this isn't the only way of differentiating. I fairly recently nailed the difference between 徴 and 微 by noting that 徴 has an 王 (ou) in which sounds a bit like 'chou'. This helped me remember which was which when writing. Working in the other direction, when reading it was helpful for remembering the pronunciation primarily, but I often find that if I can remember the pronunciation, then that helps me to remember the meaning.

Thanks, fellas. I forgot that 示 was an altar. Indeed I do like understanding kanji by their parts and etymology (though I don't like using made up mneumonics), I just don't spend enough time studying it (plus I have a horrible memory). (Sorry I didn't have any specific examples for part 2---I just remembered trying to write some kanji and second guessing myself as to whether there was a 吉 or 古 in there, but I can't remember what kanji this came up in.)