In my regular kanji study avoidence sessions, I tend to find many interesting and worthwhile things to occupy my time; funny cat videos, people in pain videos, funny pictures, articals, and internet games, not to mention some too filthy for comfort. However I do occasionally let my mind wander and accidentally find something useful. Spurred by a conversation with Karamoon and Yoitsben after the LJP Hanami party I researched radicals. For those who are unaware (prehaps blissfully) of radicals, they’re the building blocks of kanji. In fact there are more than 200 of them (some kanji are in fact radicals themselves and vica-versa) and many are rarely used, and so even the average Joe (Tanaka-san) walking down the street would be unable to define them all. However there are many that crop up time and time again. And as radicals can give hints to pronouciation and meaning, they might be useful for anyone hoping to make the difficult world of kanji a little bit easier.

Knowing that writing out all this and posting the following links is a great distraction from any actual study on my part I give you a smattering of potentially useful, or at least time consuming links on radicals. Enjoy!

http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa070101a.htm – A good starting page with some basic explaination of the fundimentals of radicals.

http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa070801a.htm – The follow artical to the previous link.

http://japanese.about.com/library/weekly/aa071501a.htm – The follow up artical to the the other follow up artical!

http://www.d.umn.edu/~jbelote/japanradicals.html – A page linking radicals together and showing how they often have similar meanings or can combine to make new meanings.

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/kanjiradical.htm – A more exensive list of radicals (maybe all of them, I didn’t want to count them) with meanings in English.

http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/ – Jisho.org is a great website (jisho means dictionary in Japanese) and here is their search function using radicals.

I would normally post a wikipedia page if only for entertainment value too, but I could only one page on radicals and it was for Chinese. Sure they’re basically the same, but I skimmed through it and didn’t see much of value.

Happy not-quite-studying!

Here is a list of kanji that are related to the environment. In the next installment of this lesson we will be looking at how to use these kanji in context.

[table id=12 /]

While researching this I noticed some interesting ways to describe different kinds of pollution in Japanese. I knew that pollution was 汚染 (osen) in Japanese so I previously assumed that you could say 空気の汚染 which is in fact a little strange. As we can see fromt the table 大気汚染 (taikiosen)pertains to air pollution even though 大気 can also mean atompshere. Also, although it is possible to say 水の汚染　(mizu no osen), it is probably more natural to say 水質汚濁(suishitsu odaku).

I included two other phrases that I could never seem to remember which are 京都議定書 (The Kyoto protocol) and 不都合な真実 (Al Gore’s Incovenient truth). It’s good to know the Japanese as most Japanese people don’t know the English and haven’t katakana-ized them…yet.