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A few that I love are: - 森 (forest) not only looks like a forest, but is a bunch of 木 (tree/wood). - 众 is a crowd of people, and 人 is person. - 火 is fire, an
by mholt 6y ago
A few that I love are:
- 森 (forest) not only looks like a forest, but is a bunch of 木 (tree/wood).
- 众 is a crowd of people, and 人 is person.
- 火 is fire, and 焱 is flame or extremely hot.
- 石 is stone, and 磊 is many stones or great pile of rock.
- 水 is water, 淼 describes a larger body of water.
- 4cao 6y agoAlso check out 女 and 姦 for a slightly different story.
- nullsense 6y ago姦 always cracked me up.
- reustle 6y agoFor the curious: https://jisho.org/search/%E5%A7%A6 https://jisho.org/search/%E5%A7%A6
- tasogare 6y agoIt means rape.
- howlgarnish 6y agoNot necessarily, eg the famous Japanese saying 女三人寄れば姦しい (three women will be noisy). Most Chinese characters are not limited to a single meaning.
- tasogare 6y agoI know, I have a master degree in Japanese and I work with dictionaries daily. The thing is 姦 is first and foremost associate with sex, in particular bad kind of sex. It’s obvious from the compounds listed by Weblio: adultery 姦通, rape 強姦, incest 血族姦通. Now in Pleco (Chinese dictionary): to fornicate, adultery, rape. So do your homeworks and stop spreading bullshit on the web: if the average Japanese or Chinese people stumble upon this character out of the very very restricted contexts it can mean something else, his first idea will be very bad. And in this case, in absence of okurigana, it’s clearly not one of those contexts. Edit: I queried the BCCWJ Corpus with Shonagon, and there is not. a. single. use of 姦 as 姦しい over 673 results. Everything there is is compounds like 姦通、強姦罪、視姦者、姦淫、姦婦.
- howlgarnish 6y agoMy friend, you're the one who asserted "it means rape", and all I'm saying that it's more complicated than that. For example, 姦通 may be morally "bad sex", but it's consensual. But I will readily grant that none of these meanings will be obvious from just seeing a character composed of three women.
- tasogare 6y agoNo, I’m asserting that the first meaning people will associate with that kanji is far away from the "cute" example the internet loves to speak about since it have mainly very negative connotations (adultery is a crime in Japan). Dick also has a lot of meanings, yet the science fiction author will likely rank quite low if people were asked what they think about when reading this word. PS: we are not friend.
- dawidw 6y ago> PS: we are not friend. For sure you're rude, arrogant and you don't have good manners.
- hnick 6y agoI also like 大 (big) which is a person holding their arms out wide. As a non-reader and non-speaker of any Asian language, some sounded examples of the last category might've helped. Or not. I have no idea.
- dwohnitmok 6y agoHere's an example of a series of phono-semantic characters that's fairly easy to pronounce for English speakers. 成, 誠, 城 all are pronounced cheng, so we say that 成 is the phonetic compound that the other two characters use to denote their own pronunciation. 言 and 土 on the other two characters then are semantic compounds that hint at the meaning of the character. 言 indicates speech/language and 誠 can be interpreted as "true to one's word," i.e. honest/straightforward/earnest/sincere. 土 indicates earth and by extension that which is built and 城 is in fact a kind of structure, namely "city walls" (later also just "city"). There's some subtlety here where the pronunciation rule doesn't always hold exactly, e.g. 盛 is pronounced sheng, and sometimes not at all, e.g. 兌, 說, and 悅 are all pronounced very differently from one another. This is due to a variety of hysterical raisins.
- hnick 6y agoThanks, though I had to zoom in like an old man to see all those details :) If the spoken sound is the same, I assume the meaning comes from context. Are the written adornments therefore redundant? Is it much like English how we now have knight and night?
- 4cao 6y agoIn spoken Mandarin Chinese you can normally derive the meaning from context but in Classical Chinese (or in fact anything written more formally) it's not necessarily so straightforward. There is a poem that illustrates it, where each syllable is pronounced exactly the same, /shi/ just with different tones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... (施氏食獅史). It goes like that: « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ » Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. [...] Good luck trying to figure out the meaning without the "written adornments."
- franklampard 6y ago龘 lots dragons
- leemailll 6y agoFor a short fun movie about pictographs for learning Chinese, watch this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqyh1nTCf9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqyh1nTCf9M)
- greggman3 6y agoI like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYBl5rjjtKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYBl5rjjtKU
- greggman3 6y ago- 凸 convex - 凹 concave - 凸凹 bumpy - 串 skewer, 心 heart、患 ill/disease - 王 king, 玉 ball, 宝 treasure. The King's balls are his treasure - 男 man, 女 woman, 嬲 ridicule/tease - 敬 respect, 馬 horse, 驚 surprise (it's surprising to respect a horse)
- coolgod 6y agoMany of the explanation you listed are incorrect like 宝 and 驚.
- tanjtanjtanj 6y agoThey are correct for Japanese, probably not so much for Chinese.
- coolgod 6y agoPlease provide some sources for your claim. I don't follow your logic on how 宝 means treasure in Japanese because "The King's balls are his treasure", and not because the character and its meaning was adopted from Chinese.
- greggman3 6y agoSorry, I didn't mean to suggest that "ball under roof" means "the king's balls are his treasure". Rather it's just an easy way to remember the characters. I have no idea of the history of those characters but it is funny that 王 means king and 玉 means ball and just happens to look like king with a mark on the lower half suggesting the kings balls and that "ball under roof" 宝 means treasure.
- pezezin 6y agoAlso interesting is that 男 (man) is a combination of 田 (rice field) and 力 (power or strength)
- jradd 6y agoI love how elephant means 'resemble' uses symbol for 'family' （家） upper radical 'knife' (刀) Elephant in the (里的大象) 亻人 (r)en 氵水 shui 手扌 shou (of hands) 忄心 xin 犭犬 quan 豬 zhu 刀刂 dao 到 until 象 elephant 不客气 bu ke qi [you are] welcome。
- mytailorisrich 6y agoIn addition to that, Chinese does not like single characters as the pronunciation is not unique enough so words are usually made up of 2 characters. So for 'forest' you get 森林, just to be clear that this is a place of many trees...