For example. I have always thought of “worry” simply as anxiety. But check this out. This is from today (Wanikani level 10, catching up vocab after finally hitting level 11).
Worry: 心配. 心 – heart 配- distribute.
Oh man oh man. There is so much concise understanding of worry within these two characters. Worries people often over share their deepest thoughts. When I worry, my heart never feels like its in one place, it is shared (distributed) to the things I’m worried about so I lack focus. And yet, in order to ease the burden of worry, I need to distribute the things in my heart to others (just talk about it).
Off the top of my head, psychology/mental state is similar: 心理 – Heart reason.
Its just so lexicographically dense its incredible. What a beautiful language.
This happens to me with vocabulary quite frequently where these concepts get put together and suddenly my life makes more sense than it did before.
4 comments
In glad you’re not one of those people who just go „why do „heart“ and „distribute“ together mean worry??? This makes no sense??“
Glad you found an aspect of the language you like! I like that part of Japanese (and mandarin for that matter) a lot, too!
This is why I like mandarin/Japanese Kanji. After learning some basic characters, majority of new vocabularies/concepts are just combination of two (or more) simple words.
物理 = matter/things + reason = physics
生物 = raw/living + matter/things = creatures
I can’t really figure out physics, psychology, or worry by breaking it down in English unless I know its root.
I have a similar experience with grammar. For instance, I knew that transitive/intransitive verbs were a thing in my native language and in English, but I never truly understood what they were until studying Japanese
>Its just so lexicographically dense its incredible.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, don’t confuse your interpretations with the actual etymology of the compounds. Often the logic behind them is nothing to do with the current meaning of the individual kanji. What you’re doing is a perfectly good way to *remember* compounds, but don’t forget that unless you do serious etymological research, you are probably reading your own associations into them.