Cool Kanji – 訛
Just a quick cool kanji for today. Can you figure it out what it means based on the radicals alone? Check after the break to see if you are right.
言 means speak, and 化 means change. Together they are read as – have you figured it out yet? – なまり: accent or dialect. Very cool – speaking changes; voilà, accent. This can also be used as a verb – most oftenly, 訛っている. Your goal as a non-native student of the Japanese language should be to achieve ちょっとだけ訛っている status.
August 12th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
The kanji with 言 on the left are the ones I find hardest to remember. I’m not sure why, although I remember after being thwarted by 請 enough times, I came up with the mnemonic “At 5PM at Friday, all your coworkers requests(請) come out of the blue (青)”Not exact to the meaning, but it worked well enough.
Here’s a cool one for you I found recently, while looking up another character with the 舟 radical:
艝
My first thought was “What does a boat have to do with snow?” Then I looked it up in my word processor dictionary, and discovered it meant “sled”. I laughed at not figuring it out earlier, but thought the character was pretty awesome.
August 13th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Whoa, cool kanji!
August 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Another cool kanji is 滝 (taki, “waterfall”). Left: water, right: dragon. Indeed, a waterfall resembles a “liquid dragon”.