Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary I find 意 (I: will, heart, mind, thought, meaning, sense) to be one of the cutest kanji around. It reminds me of an upright animal with the following assets:          A head beneath a beret            A blocky torso      Two legs, a long tail that curls around, and ... well, just             pretend we've got a male animal in our midst Put it all together, and you get something like this: Long-Tailed WeaselPhoto credit: Anne Elliott   No beret, but the tapering of the... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary After seeing Wordplay (a documentary about crossword puzzle fanaticism), I couldn't resist the challenge of creating a kanji crossword for you. Well, that's what I started doing, but it morphed into a word find, which you'll find below. You'll probably want to print out the puzzle so you can write on it. Using "Print-Friendly View" will yield the cleanest copy. Reading from left to right or from top to bottom (but not diagonally), circle all viable compounds. Many circles will overlap, as in this example: 質　問　題 Here, you'd circle the first and second characters, which form shitsumon (question). Then you'd circle the second and third characters, which say mondai... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary One of my favorite compounds is 月食 (gesshoku: lunar eclipse), which breaks down as moon + to eat. During a lunar eclipse, it looks as if something is eating the moon! Given that, what do you think to eat + words means? Here's the answer: 食言 (shokugen: to eat one's words, break one's promise)     to eat + words Cute, isn't it?! There's a playful quality to many words with 言. So ... let's play!   Word Play What sort of person "makes words"? A writer? A compiler of dictionaries? 作り言 (tsukurigoto: fabrication, lie, fiction)     to make + words Making words makes you a liar! The definition includes... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary English speakers say "Silence is golden," but we don't mean it. After all, would chat rooms have become so popular if we didn't feel the constant need to voice our opinions? For What's Golden in Japanese ... I imagine that our cultural attachment to the idea of silence has Puritan roots. But silence also serves the most un-Puritan of motives. For instance, lawbreakers are notorious for saying "No comment." Of course, silence doesn't always indicate evasiveness. The following expressions give a sense of the possibilities inherent in silence: 言い落とす (iiotosu: to leave unsaid, neglect to mention)     to say + to fail (to do something) With... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing a Japanese architect (in English!) for an article about architecture. Again and again, he returned to a core fact of Japanese existence: nonverbal communication. He noted that, being Japanese, he conveys thoughts and feelings without words, a habit that ultimately caused an impasse in his marriage to a chatty American. He nevertheless spoke to me for hours about his inner life. Out came a waterfall of words about insecurities and humiliations, wartime suffering, learning disabilities, divorces, tragic deaths, anger at a parent, and much more, all of it deeply moving. Unless I missed something, he didn't employ nuance or... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Today we're going to start with a quiz. • What is fragment + writing? • What is word + fragment? While considering this conundrum, you can read quotations about fragments. I'm hoping these quotes will block the answers from view as you ponder the issue .... " firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of Life." —Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), British author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Need a hint? OK, here you go: • Fragment + writing: 葉書 • Word + fragment: 言葉 "Every woman is like a time zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary In the last blog, we saw how poetic leaf-related words can be. But don't let these words lull you into thinking that Japanese is always abstract and dreamy! Far from it. Many leaf-related words have astounding and even crazy degrees of specificity. For instance, we already saw two words about fallen leaves in the last blog. Here's yet another term in that vein, this one emphasizing that the fallen leaves have become wet: 濡れ落葉 (nureochiba: wet fallen leaves)     to get wet + to fall + leaf With the water radical making a double appearance in the compound, these leaves certainly look wet! The appears inside 落 because 洛 originally meant... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary With autumn in the air, the "leaf" kanji 葉 beckons, just asking to be explored. Its shape might look rather daunting, but if you break 葉 into three pieces, it's much less intimidating. Let's put that leaf under a microscope:   葉   At the top, we find the grass radical . Under that, we see 世, which means "world" (as in 世界, sekai: world, world + world). And at the bottom lies 木 (ki: tree). A leafy world consists of grass and trees! Under ordinary circumstances, the tree would be above the grass, but never mind. Autumn Passage, Wasatch Mountains, UtahPhoto credit: Elizabeth Carmel   Yomi, Yomi, Yomi, I Got Leaves in My Tummy Huh? ... The yomi for... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary How much space lies between human beings? Are we naturally gregarious or solitary? Perhaps we're not unlike wolves, who nestle tightly in a cave at night, drawing on each other's warmth, then stumbling out in the morning when there's no more oxygen. If so, then those jammed together in an Indian tenement slum would seem to have achieved the most natural form of life. Kanji and Ria, two “wolves” huddling for warmth and safetyas they brave the wild. Or are we most naturally ourselves when acres lie between us? Maybe Thoreau knew most about what suits humans—peaceful solitude in which to think deep thoughts. I recently learned of fourteen families in Ohio who... Show more

Quick Links Welcome to Kanji Curiosity | The Basics | Glossary Tim Page's recent New Yorker essay "Parallel Play" contained this wonderful passage: Falling in love surprised me; I had never imagined sustained contentment, and certainly not in the company of another person. Yet here it was: even making the bed together in the morning ... took on meaning, as the prelude to another gloriously ordinary day, to be followed by tea, the newspapers, a couple hours of work, and then lunch in the neighborhood. "Another gloriously ordinary day"! Life offers many more gloriously ordinary days than heightened moments. And yet we tend to focus on the big events, the mountaintops, somehow overlooking the valleys in between, the hours that make... Show more