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> Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could i

> Each of those characters can be broken down further into their radicals. And, those radicals tell you a lot about the meaning. When I lived in Japan I could identify anything botanical by the tree radical even if I didn't know the character. This is only partially true and only for some words. In some words characters were chosen almost at random to match a loan word's sound from some other language than chinese (before katakana began to be used extensively). In other words the meaning has heavily drifted from the originally chosen characters and the current meaning bears little resemblence to it's original meaning. In other cases yes you can determine the origin of the word but it's not helpful to determine it's modern uses (for example the over use of the 女 (woman) radical in many words that were thought to be "related to women" with a sexist meaning). Also in some words the kanji were dropped and replaced with other kanji of a similar sound so as to simplify the number of kanji down to the current "2000" core kanji used in all official documents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform

xrd 5y ago
These are all great points and I appreciate you adding these details. I do still think a Japanese speaker would see "sen" at the end of that word and notice the connection to a military root word. When you say partially true about the radicals, I'm a bit surprised. Is it really the case that this is only for some words? I believed it to be true for most words; that the radicals almost always influenced a thought, usually a thought that was true at the very least when the character was introduced. The thought might be archaic and sexist (that's a good point) but that it would be understood and noted by the reader. You are saying that's not the case with most radicals, or in the rare case more often?

xrd 5y ago

These are all great points and I appreciate you adding these details. I do still think a Japanese speaker would see "sen" at the end of that word and notice the connection to a military root word. When you say partially true about the radicals, I'm a bit surprised. Is it really the case that this is only for some words? I believed it to be true for most words; that the radicals almost always influenced a thought, usually a thought that was true at the very least when the character was introduced. The thought might be archaic and sexist (that's a good point) but that it would be understood and noted by the reader. You are saying that's not the case with most radicals, or in the rare case more often?