12 articles tagged with "Kanji"
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...
The ROI of your first 100 characters 100 kanji sounds like rounding error against the 2,136character joyohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8Dkanji set. It is not. The frequency distribution...
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...
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...
Kanji Is an Information Technology The character 鬱/kanjis/9b31 depression encodes in one glyph what English spells out in ten letters and 29 strokes. That is not calligraphic trivia. It is an engin...
Kanji are a compression algorithm Unicode's CJK Unified Ideographs block encodes 97,680 characters. The KanjiJumphttps://www.kanjijump.com/browse/atomic decomposition reduces the 3,500 mostused Jap...
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...
