Explaining Kanji like a Japanese Native
あぁ、「消火」の「消」だね！なんだ、もっと早く言ってくれれば良かったのに！
Ahoy, Heisig graduates and kanji/hanzi nerds everywhere! I bet you’re feeling pretty good about your kanji abilities, being able to write things like 鬱蒼 and 怪訝 and other rarely-used 熟語. After finishing those books, I also thought my kanji was pretty awesome, and that, even if lacking pen and paper, I would easily be able to explain what kanji I was talking about to a native speaker. After all, Heisig laid that stuff out for us, right? 怪 is just “state of mind” + “crotch” + “soil”, or whatever.
But it turns out that, at least in my experience, when explaining a particular kanji character to a Japanese native, breaking it down RtK-style gets you stone-cold (creamery?) nowhere. I even tried learning the proper words for those pieces, like さんずい and 草冠, and still I would get looks of bewilderment, followed by frantic scrambles for writing utensils.
Then, when I would finally write the blasted character down, inevitably the exchange would be something like this:
Japanese dude: “Ahhh, you mean {kanji compound word}’s {kanji’s onyomi}, right? Why didn’t you just say that?”
Eric: *smashes head on desk and bleeds out*
So the trick, it seemed to me, was not to explain a character by its itty-bitty pieces, but simply bust out a common word that contained the kanji, essentially thrusting my verbal index finger at it and say “That kanji, THAT one, RIGHT THERE!”.
Problem was, while my reading ability was decent and my vocabulary was passable, I seemingly lacked the connections necessary to pluck a kanji compound word (熟語) out of midair on command.
So, like any good SRS drone, I’ve been working on a deck to do exactly that, as well as solve some other problems that I’ve been having with my old Heisig deck recently. Further posts to come!
On this topic, however, has anyone else run into similar situations, or is it just my friends who do this?
