Learn about the water radical 氵
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| Hi everyone. |
| Welcome to the Japanese Kanji video series. |
| In this lesson, you'll learn the "water" radical. |
| Take a look at these kanji characters. Can you guess what they mean? |
| By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to grasp the meaning behind these kanji characters. |
| 水, 汁, 汗, 泣 |
| First off, can you spot the radical in all of these kanji characters? |
| It's this part here. |
| 水 |
| This particular radical is called... |
| みず meaning "water." |
| When it's used on the left side as in the other three examples, it's specifically called さんずい. |
| 氵 |
| The "water" radical is used in some of the most common kanji characters. Let's take a look at it in more detail. |
| Meaning |
| As you can see, the "water" radical is also a kanji character on its own. |
| 水 |
| When this radical appears as a part of another kanji, like in these examples, the appearance changes slightly. |
| 氵 |
| When it's a component like this, it adds the meaning of "water" to the entire kanji character. |
| 汁, 汗, 泣 |
| From left to right, the first kanji means "soup, juice, broth," the second character means "sweat, to perspire," and the third character means "to cry, to weep, to moan." |
| 1. 汁 |
| Here’s an easy way to remember the first kanji: imagine that you're squeezing the juice from lemons or any type of fruit. If you squeezed out ten lemons, you would have enough juice. So this kanji character means "soup, juice, broth." |
| 2. 汗 |
| The second kanji has the "water" radical means "sweat, to perspire." |
| 3. 泣 |
| The last kanji has the "water" radical and 立, which means "to stand." |
| You could think of this in this way: imagine you're seeing a loved one off and you're crying so much that you're standing in water. So, this kanji means "to cry, to weep, to moan." |
| For more ways to remember these characters and many more kanji examples that include the "water" radical, go to JapanesePod101.com and check the Lesson Notes PDF. OK. Let's move on! |
| Common positions |
| The "water" radical will usually sit in the left-position and connect with another radical next to it. |
| As seen in the original examples for "soup, juice, broth," "to sweat or perspire," and "to cry, to weep, to moan." |
| When the "water" radical is part of another kanji character, it's appearance is distorted a little. |
| Okay. Now let's learn how to write this radical. |
| Stroke Order |
| Now let's take a look at the stroke order of the "water'" radical. The "water" radical is very simple, there are only four strokes. |
| When the radical is on its own, it looks like this: |
| 水 |
| Start with a long vertical stroke and ends with a little upwards tick to the left. |
| Our second stroke is to the left of the vertical stroke and isn't attached. |
| We start with a horizontal stroke going from left to right and then continue the stroke down into a diagonal swoop to the left. |
| Our third stroke is a diagonal stroke from right to left and down and touching our vertical stroke. |
| Then our final stroke starts at the intersection of our first and third stroke and goes diagonally down from left to right. |
| When the "water" radical is part of another kanji character, it's appearance changes from the original and just looks like three drops of water. |
| 氵 |
| Our first stroke is short and diagonally, from left to right. Our second is similar and just below our first stroke. Then, we make a diagonal stroke, going from left to right and up. It's a little longer than our first two strokes. |
| And that's it! You're done! |
| Common Readings |
| When the "water" radical is on its own, the kanji can be read as... |
| 水 |
| スイ、みず |
| In the case of the original examples, common readings are... |
| ジュウ、しる |
| 汁 |
| for the kanji meaning "soup, juice, broth." |
| カン、あせ |
| 汗 |
| for the "sweat, to perspire" kanji. And... |
| キュウ、な(く) |
| 泣 |
| for the "to cry, to weep, to moan" kanji. |
| Lesson Review |
| In this lesson, you learned about the "water" radical. |
| You also learned the kanji characters for "soup, juice, broth," "sweat, to perspire," and "to cry, to weep, to moan" in which this radical appears. |
| It's most commonly found in the left-position, making it appear like this. |
| And it's written with four strokes, starting from a long vertical stroke, a second stroke that begins horizontally and then swoops down. Then we have a diagonal stroke down, and one final diagonal stroke. |
| In the next lesson, you'll learn about another common radical used in some of the most common and basic kanji characters, the "land" radical. |
| See you in the next lesson. Bye! |
| Bye~! |
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