Japanese Kanji Part 2

Hello there everyone! I hope your winter break has been going very well. As we tie in the very end of the year, and as things begin to slow down, I thought it would be a good idea to have a two part back to back lesson about more kanji!

For this lesson, we will be going over the kanji 山, and 田.

The first kanji, 山 (yama), is one that can be placed in many kanjis, to create a combination of words or meaning. This kanji on a basic level, means mountain. Learning this kanji and seeing when it can be used is very helpful for finding the context of certain kanji! An example of this is the kanji 出, which is two of the 山 character. From closer inspection, seeing two means to go out, or to leave an area, like going to see the mountains!

The next kanji, 田 (ta), is one that just like 山, means rice field, or rice patty, and when used in joint circumstances, can create new words! 男, which has the 田 kanji at the top, also has the power kanji, 力, at the bottom. Put together, this is the kanji for the word man, and in futile Japan, men's main role would've been taking care of rice fields for agriculture/survival.

Here are the stroke order for both kanjis.

Unit 1 within the book, "Read and Write Japanese Scripts," goes over many basic and natural kanji that tend to be placed either in complex kanji or directly next to other kanji, to give natural or unnatural meanings, leaning more towards feelings or assumptions of how the natural kanji can impact the contextual meaning.

With knowing these two kanji, we can now use them to see when they come up in other kanji, and decipher what they mean! In the next blogpost, I will use a kanji that uses 山 and 田 to explain a further meaning.