Half baked...

Duolingo is really useful for reminding you to study every day, but it can be rather half baked sometimes, since it barely explains anything.  Ages ago, we met 半 （はん) when we did about time, and it seemed to appear on its own, as half an hour, so you might have a phrase like 四時半 & it would mean 4:30, half past four... 

So in the current lesson in Duolingo, part of Food 3, we got an example item, and it had 半分（はんぶん）and I was left wondering why what looks like, to me, half a minute, is now half & why wasn't the previous half used...

So off to Jisho I went (I love that site), and I searched on both han and hanbun (being lazy and not fighting with keyboards to get hiragana),  and it came back and told me that 半分 means half and is a noun and that 半 has 4 meanings - half, semi; half-past; odd number*; han (unit of land area, archaic).

So at first glance,  they are both half - but the 4 meanings for はん on its own have notes with them - for half or semi- meaning, it is used as a prefix- so I imagine you could use はんまる for a semicircle, to give an example of it as a prefix and that meaning.  For half-past, it says it is used as a suffix, and we did never see it away from じ, so 時半 is our perfect example there for it used as a suffix. 

But if it is used on its own, it would mean odd number, not half; so to say half, you have to use 半分.  Not sure what you would say if you actually meant half a minute (半分分?), or if that is totally an idiomatic English expression and would never get used anywhere else.

But thanks to Jisho and being curious, I have that cleared up in my head, instead of just an odd lump in my brain attached to that vocabulary that says "why are there two halves? this doesn't make sense!" But Duolingo would never have cleared that up, and I would always have been left with that uncertainty about that vocabulary and usage.  Half-baked, like I said.

 

* & gives me the link to the even number one too, did I mention that I love Jisho? ;)  https://jisho.org/search/%E4%B8%81 , linked from https://jisho.org/word/%E5%8D%8A