Ch 4 Kanji Poster 大学校先生

Yes, it probably shouldn’t be 大学の先生down the side, but it reminded me of acrostics and that we had almost made another phrase there, so I stuck the ‘no’ in and joined them together.  

I also changed designs in mid-poster and went back to make the ‘big’ kanji fit the new design… and it is a lot harder to squeeze furigana in than it looks when you see them in print.  I had to move one of my kanji example sets over.

At the time that I started my blog post, I hadn’t read the details for the kanji poster discussion (which is why this lived in draft form on my blog for about a week under the title “Placeholder for Kanji” so I could work on it and add bits as I went along instead of doing everything at the last minute.  However, if you look at the submission dates/times for items due on July 6th, pretty sure that’s where they will be ;)), but the "practice drawing kanji in SAM" assignment# had this phrase in it & I suspect it is important:
‘Before you jump in to practicing, look at the character and its meaning.  Can you think of why it is written this way?’

1. 大き- おおき - ookii - I had a head start on this one as I already knew the person kanji when I learned this, so I figured it was a big person.  Sensei's distinction between BIG and TALL (sounds like a shop ;)), was important here - this figure has its arms spread wide, showing a big space/pretending to be a big person. Note that this isn’t just a mnemonic device like the ones we tried using for the hiragana and katakana, this is actually how the glyph developed, its etymology, from Oracle bone script through to modern day.  Some of the etymologies may not actually help us remember things, because they will be from a culture too removed in time to have resonance in our brains, but many of them will help us understand and remember the glyphs.

2.  学 - がっ - ga' - がく - gaku  - I knew this for ages but had always assumed (thanks to seeing the radical/part that is the top referred to as a crown) that it was a crown of knowledge - most crown radicals seem to have one dash or two dashes, not 3 and this seemed like it was really fancy and important...  I knew the child kanji/radical before learning this one, so the unswaddled/semi-swaddled child (or seed/sprout, both work for the image) in the middle is obviously who is doing the learning and where the knowledge is focused on.  Wikitionary etymology says that the "crown" is the remnants of many hands interlaced to help with the teaching, communal effort, and that the learning happens in a covered space... The covered space to reduce distractions from the elements and unpleasantness is really important and makes sense.  I would not have guessed that the darts/dashes were hands supporting.  Communal effort does make sense - you need a certain level of resources to sustain the costs of a school and the sharing of knowledge and losing the help of the children on the farm/in the mines/industry, etc.  Plus different people have different knowledge to share - teaching may have been a communal role/duty when the kanji symbol had its origins, not a specialized trade/skill like it is today.

3.  校-こう- kou - school (suffix, not that Nakama bothered to label it that) - the component on the left is the one for a tree, on the right, potlid/paperweight over the kanji for father, so I've always read this as "when children shoot up like young trees, cover them* and have their fathers teach them". 

4.  先 - せん - sen - I knew the base was the legs radical, did not know what the top is (jisho kept showing me ichi and ni which were not helpful for parts of the kanji - not all horizontal lines are ichi, nor even the ground).  Wikitionary's nice etymology of the glyph shows it as someone escorting someone on a dangerous path, so going ahead or preceding.  It is interesting the variants - like arms held wide - presumably to look big and threatening like you would against a cougar.  No explanation for why the three-pronged head in the original though.  Maybe they had viking helmets ;) In a more modern version, that could be a small shield raised in one hand (although if it is, what's the exta line around the middle??) Sorry, having fought with two weapons at once, and with buckler and rapier, I tend to get curious about the more martial image origins and try to work out exactly what they represent… It can help with drawing, I finally learned why the 車 kanji was shaped that way the other day, and even after seeing the glyph origin, I had to had draw it myself for a comparison, and I finally realised after trying to draw 4 wheeled carts from above, which is the type of cart I automatically think of, having grown up in the UK - an old farm cart, possibly laden with hay, but if you make it a 2 wheeled vehicle, like ancient Roman chariots or even hand carts, then it makes sense (carriage seen from above with big wheels and the 日 piece marks the loading area).  I had kept thinking it was so like 東 and not understanding why that made vehicle, or why having the sun caught made sense for vehicles when the kanji originated (it’s not going to be solar powered, unless it’s a sailing boat ;)).  Anyway, I’m digressing, but knowing the origin of the kanji, and that there is etymology of the glyph, not just of the word sounds, really does help, and also fills my geeky heart with joy.  I was so happy when I first found the wiktionary site for this resource and realised that I could paste any kanji at the end of the URL (& big secret - you could just put them in the search box instead of messing around editing the URL… Le Sigh. Should have realised that a lot sooner!).

5.  生 - せい - sei - This last one is supposed to be a seed sprouting from the ground... the ko symbol looks more like that (having taught biology and watched and waited for ages for a seed to sprout). To be honest, it would make more sense to me, if the ground were in the middle and we had the root system, below and the green plant parts above ground - stalk and leaves.  https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F clearly shows  its development though and that makes more sense.

I’m very happy that we are going to be using kanji - it makes it so much easier (if you actually know the symbols) to make sense of a sentence and where a word ends and if this は should be a ha or a wa…  Of course, if you don’t know the symbols, you can still go word, topic marker, word, probably kunyomi reading as I see hiragana around it, word, oh, hey I knew that one, particle, verb, no clue, but it’s in the past tense… but even there, you have a sense of the structure of the sentence that a constant stream of hiragana without spaces cannot give you.  I know that a third writing system, and with so many items to learn, seems horrifying, but it makes the previous systems we had available to us easier to use/read.  And we can actually start to read sentences as we build up our vocabulary, instead of just identifying the sentence structure and saying “well, it happened in the past whatever it was…”.

And there is the other big advantage of kanji over hiragana or even katakana.  Kanji just have one meaning set  And they tend to be related meanings - like the kanji of はいる - 入る on my kotatsu power switch - I knew the hairu kanji, it’s one of the NLPT5 ones I have been studying, but I knew it as “to enter, to go in” (like our class vocab of taking a bath - you get into the bath, it’s a process, it needs hairu).  So it seemed likely to me that Enter would be On.  But I flipped the switch to see the other symbol - this one had the kanji for seven combined with the kanji for power (ちから - 力).  Now I was stumped as jisho kept never showing me the seven radical… but jisho has a kanji drawing pad, google translate has photo import, lots of options here to move forwards.  But if you want to know more, you will have to read my separate kotatsu decoding post! :D But either way, those were a related set of meanings - power on an on/off switch is a sensible label and meaning, and if the “enter” symbol meant on, then that too was a semantic flow that made sense for the meaning/symbol.

But although we can sometimes be bedeviled with homonyms in English (& they allow quite nicely for puns for those of us with that character defect), there are so many more in Japanese, because the language has less unique sounds than English does (even with the add-ones to the katakana system - and that wouldn’t explain/change original language, just support new sounds in new loan words).  My wife asked me ages ago why the Japanese use kanji when they have hiragana and katakana & I gave her the same answer as here.  I went to jisho & I looked up ‘かわ‘ - and there were six very different words, before we even got to ones that had additional characters on to be adjectives or verbs.  But 川 only gives results related to an actual river - the main river itself, but also riverside, upstream, river breeze, just like an English dictionary would give the expansion and related words below the main entry, and none of the totally unrelated word.  川 is 川 is 川, but かわ might not be かわ… https://jisho.org/search/%E5%B7%9D 

And some of the kanji are just plain poetic that I can’t help liking them - for example, the kanji for older brother, is 兄 (あに).  If you know the radicals, you know that that is a mouth on legs… and so for centuries, worldwide, people have known across time and cultures that a growing boy is an appetite on legs - and usually loud too.  How can you not like that?  やすみ - 休み is poetic.  It has the side radical for human/person next to the tree radical.  When you need a break, or a rest, go into nature, and be with the trees, and that will be a perfect rest.  Long before we had studies saying that being in nature is good for your stress levels and health*, a kanji already knew it.  The society knew it enough to build it into the very concept of a break/holiday/rest in their writing system.

ひがし - 東 - is poetic to me.  It’s the kanji for East & it’s the sun caught in the branches of a tree as it is rising <3 <3<3.  Or at least I assume it is - it seemed so evident, and I learned it before I found the wiktionary site that I haven’t looked at the evolution of it. If that’s not it, I don’t want to know, as I like this version of the story & it helps me remember how to draw it.

I’ve digressed enough but I will add that I was very happy to learn a rule of thumb recently for which reading of the kanji you need to use - if there are more than one kanji stuck together and there is no joining hiragana around it, it will be the onyomi reading.  There may be some exceptions to this, but it certainly helps when you are learning to have a simple rule like that to use.  Consider 先生 - that was a word I had always associated with Japan.  I had no idea that it was the onyomi reading and originated therefore in China.  Note also that some kanji have more than one onyomi reading, and more than one kunyomi reading (& there’s a third reading type too that crops up), so it doesn’t guarantee that you know how to pronounce it, but this rule of thumb does greatly increase the odds in your favour.

My main issue is with the stroke order, or if I cannot work out what something is supposed to be, so it doesn’t have meaning to me.  Learning that some of them are semantic and phonetic combinations helps.  I can just shrug and think of the phonetic part & know there is a reason that it doesn’t make sense to me.  But stroke order is my main problem with them.  Certainly, that’s the issue I have in my kanji app.  I can see the kanji perfectly in my mind’s eye and then we have a disagreement about whether — goes before | or whether you can draw the whole box in one go, etc, etc, and I have to start over.

I know that culturally, most of us in the class have no basis for comparison for learning a writing system like this one, but I think that the Nakama writers, either deliberately, or inadvertently, may have done something clever here by having the city and geography maps right before the kanji section, and having the keys to the meanings of the symbols on the maps.  I imagine that all of us have worked with maps, and with keys/legends for symbols on them, or with various road sign meanings or the stupid international laundry symbols on clothes labels*** - we are actually used to seeing ideograms for words, or even whole phrases, we just aren’t used to thinking of it in this context, because the map symbols and road signs, etc, are ones that we grew up with (those of us that haven’t shifted countries like I and some other class members have) or are relevant to our culture and built on the same shared assumptions, so they are familiar to us and don’t feel strange.  I think being aware that we have already learned a lot of word symbols could make this a less daunting task for many people.

# And by a strange coincidence, those are the 5 kanji on my poster… *spooky music plays*

* Admittedly, the cover could be a potlid and a pressure cooker for teenage hormones rather than a nice enclosed space like it probably meant, given the origin of part 2.

** And follow on studies saying that the nature of that nature made a difference - its quality and how easy your access to it is, and it is yet another structural blocker to health equity in the US.

*** Of course, some of us still screw up the laundry symbols and have to google them…  I can often be heard muttering “do not triangle, do not square, ah, here it is!”