11 articles tagged with "History"
Spelling, not arithmetic Some kanji compounds aren't compounds at all — they're spelling. 大人/words/otona reads otona, not daijin or oohito. 今日/words/kyou reads kyō, not konnichi well, sometimes — s...
Six boxes, every compound in exactly one Every Japanese compound noun falls into one of six buckets — and which bucket it sits in is the single most useful fact about it. 漢語https://en.wikipedia.org...
The API contract between your hand, the dictionary, and the OCR engine Stroke order is taught as etiquette. Draw the strokes out of order and sensei frowns. That framing is wrong. Stroke order is t...
Most kanji are not pictures. They are spellings. The single most useful fact about kanji: roughly four in five are phonosemantic compoundshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinesecharacterclassificatio...
What an honorific actually is An honorific is not vocabulary about politeness. It is politeness as morphosyntax — the social variable fused into the verb stem, the pronoun paradigm, the noun, the s...
A hash function from 1716 The 214 Kangxi radicalshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxiradical are not a learning aid. They are an indexing system — a piece of premodern infrastructure for the proble...
The scheduler is the whole game A card appears. You answer. The app picks the next interval — tomorrow, next week, three months from now. That single decision is the product. Get it right and you k...
Not one Chinese — four On'yomi is "the Chinese reading." Kun'yomi is "the Japanese reading." Technically true, and it papers over the interesting bit: on'yomi is not one layer. It's four. Four borr...
The oldest classification for any writing system — and what two thousand years have done to it In 100 CE, the Han scholar Xu Shenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XuShen 許慎 finished the Shuowen Jieziht...
An indexing algorithm that has survived 310 years Pick a character — say 漢. Open a paper dictionary. How do you find it? There is no alphabet. There are tens of thousands of glyphs. You need a key....
3,200 years of continuous deployment The kanji you study tonight were carved into turtle shells under the late Shang dynastyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdynasty. Anyang divination pits on one...
