Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Today I have a mix of news: the good, the bad, and the ugly.   The Good I was on the radio again this week, talking about some unusual Japanese terms. Ever since Patrick Cox interviewed me on "The World in Words" in the fall of 2008, I've been sending him amusingly specific Japanese expressions. He likes things like that; in a segment called "Eating Sideways," he presents expressions from other languages for which there's no English equivalent. Anyway, he recently gathered five of the terms I'd sent him, and much to my surprise we did a brief Skype interview on Monday. The podcast ran on Tuesday. My part starts at 19:05 and goes till the end, lasting nearly nine... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Today we'll do things backward. Try your hand at a bevy of quizzes, all involving 刺 (SHI, sa(su), sa(saru), sa(shi), sashi, toge: to stab, pierce, prick, sting; thorn; business card), a kanji we've examined over the past few weeks. In the answer notes, you'll find sample sentences. In other words, dessert first and salad later.  Quiz 1: Homophonic Murder Mystery This murder mystery has two steps. Let's start with Step 1. (We can't do everything backward today!) The following words all have the same yomi: shikaku. One word means "assassin." Can you locate the assassin by matching the kanji compounds to the meanings? If I supplied the breakdowns, it would be too... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary As we saw last week, 刺 (SHI, sa(su), sa(saru), sa(shi), sashi, toge: to stab, pierce, prick, sting; thorn; business card) primarily means "to stab," so it plays a role in many brutal words. Examining this kanji, you can quickly have your fill of stabbings, puncture wounds, and the like: 刺し傷 (sashikizu: a stab; puncture wound)     to stab + wound Sample Sentence with 刺し傷 ... 刺し通す (sashitōsu: to stab, pierce, run (a sword) through)     stabbing + to run through This uses the same kanji as a term we saw last time: 刺を通じる (shi o tsūjiru: to present one’s business card, business card + to transmit). But the meanings couldn't be... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Let's start with a quiz. The kanji 刺 primarily means "to stab." Given that, what do you think the following words might mean? 刺身     The second kanji means "body." 刺青     The second kanji means "blue." 名刺     The first kanji means "name." I'll block the answers with Alberto's haiku calendar for April. Alberto will post an explanation of this haiku in the comments section. Give up? Here are the definitions: 刺身 (sashimi: sliced, raw fish)     sashimi + meat, flesh 刺青 (irezumi: tattoo)     to pierce + blue 名刺 (meishi: business... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Take a look at the following sentence to see if you recognize anything: 政府は過激派グループの活動を注意深く監視した。 Whenever I confront unknown kanji, I try to identify components and patterns. In this case, one thing jumps out at me—this sentence is soggy! Five of the 12 kanji contain the "water" radical, ! In both 過激派 and 注意深く, two out of three characters are sopping wet. Surely this sentence is about fishing, scuba diving, or water conservation. While you ponder the issue, I'll block the translation with two watery pictures.   Here's the sentence again with its romanization and translation: 政府は過激派グループの活動を注意深く監視した。 Seifu wa kagekiha gurūpu no katsudō o chūibukaku... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary It's always exciting when a foreign language teaches you about your own, and that's the case with the following word: 激賞 (gekishō: enthusiastic praise)     intense + praise Sample Sentence with 激賞 ... I've long known 賞 (SHŌ) as "award" or "prize," as in アカデミー賞, "Academy Award." When I saw "praise" in the definition of 激賞, I was startled. It couldn't really be a typo, I figured, because there's no such thing as an enthusiastic prize (though there are plenty of prizes for enthusiasm). Then it hit me that "praise" and "prize" could be connected in Japanese—and perhaps in English, too! Yes on both accounts! Well, to be perfectly accurate, the... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary We start with Alberto's haiku calendar for March. It's lovely, as always, but there's one difference this time; he's the one who wrote the haiku! お疲れさまでした! (Otsukaresamadeshita! Good job!)   See the comments section for his explanation of this haiku. Now we'll return from the ethereal haiku world and come back down to earth with a thud! In an ongoing investigation of 激 (GEKI, hage(shii): violent, intense, agitated, sudden), I've come across a sample sentence with the following translation: When the flight crew has the aircraft under control, everything is working normally, and yet it still crashes into the ground, that's CFIT. Really? You call that CFIT?... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary If you had to draw "violent," what images would you use? Maybe you'd think back to the board game Clue: Colonel Mustard committed the murder in the billiard room with a rope, whereas Mrs. Peacock used a lead pipe in the conservatory. Or maybe your mind would turn to machine guns, bombs, and other tools of warfare. Here's something you may not have considered: water. Water! It's all around us, but I've long neglected to use it as a weapon! And yet, as I've learned from one kanji, water leads to violence. So much for washing away one's sins! I've overlooked not only the violence inherent in water but also the water () inherent in violence: 激 (GEKI, hage(shii):... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary As you may know, 知恵 (chie: to know + wisdom) is "wisdom" or "intelligence." And we've seen that 袋 (TAI, fukuro) can mean "bag." Given that, what do you think the following represents? 知恵袋 (chiebukuro)     wisdom (1st 2 kanji) + bag My cynical side takes over and imagines a wind bag who won't shut up about everything he claims to know. Not at all. The first definition of "wisdom bag" is literally "bag full of wisdom," and another meaning is "someone who devises a solution when others have no idea what to do": 知恵袋 (chiebukuro: (1) bag full of wisdom; bag containing all the world's wisdom; (2) person who is a fountain of wisdom; brains (of a... Show more

Quick LinksWelcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary We start with Alberto's haiku calendar for February, another beauty: Wow, this haiku features some complex kanji! Alberto will tell us about the poem in the comments section. Meanwhile, here's the scoop on the least familiar characters: 嶺 (RYŌ, REI, ne, mine: peak, summit) 且 (SHO, SHŌ, SO, ka(tsu): also, furthermore, moreover) 褐 (KATSU: brown) 蔽 (FUTSU, HEI, HETSU, ō(i), ō(u): to cover) In this list, the first and last characters are non-Jōyō. Let's return to a kanji you've seen before. As you know from last week, 袋 (TAI, DAI, fukuro) often means "bag, pouch." With that in mind, try to figure out what the following might represent: 1. 買い物袋... Show more