Hello! Normally I find that when I come across a word that has a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated translations, it usually means there’s a kind of underlying feeling which ties them together under the surface. Not a single word or translation, but a kind of concept that exists in native speakers that doesn’t translate easily.
So I was a little confused when I looked up “振”. I came to it through “振り返る”, which translated as “look back”. This came from “振る” as “wave”. So I could see it being “to return a wave”… ok… fine. Not the same meaning really, but I could make it work.
But I looked up the Kanji and it’s got some “weird” uses:
1. **Swing, shake, wave.** Makes sense, it’s some sort of rhythmic movement
2. **Appearance or behaviour.** Doesn’t seem related to me
3. **Going to a restaurant without a reservation.** Hmm…
4. **Lead up to a joke.** Hmm…
5. **To cast an actor.** I guess this could be to wave someone over?
6. **To give up something.** I guess this could be to wave something away?
7. 振る舞う – **to make tea for someone.** I don’t really have any guess for this one
8. 振込 – **a payment made through the bank**. Nope, no idea
9. 振り仮名 – **furigana, the little letters over kanji indicating its reading.** This is the one that made me want to ask this question, because that surprised me the most
So, there was a bunch more, but I could see most of them being some version of the above “definitions”. So my question is if it’s possible for someone who is either a native speaker or has gained the feeling to explain what 振 “feels like”, that allows it to show up in these places which seem pretty different to my English brain.
2 comments
words are not always the sum of their kanji’s vague meanings, there are tons of words that have letters in them that just plain have nothing to do with the usage, or utilize a very old reading that was last used thousands of years ago
also, you’re digging too deeply into dictionaries without consulting sentence examples. 振る舞う means “to conduct or behave”. there’s a tertiary definition of entertaining or serving tea, but that’s not how it’s used. you need to look up modern sentence examples, not just select things from a dictionary – dictionaries are descriptive not proscriptive
it is frequently not helpful at all to try to memorize every single weird usage that a kanji character has – kanji aren’t words, they aren’t used independently in the language. they can sometimes be helpful in remembering a word that they’re part of when they follow a pattern, but that’s it
On top of what has already been said, it should be noted that some words that have a ton of different meanings, such as 掛ける, used to be many different words written with different kanji. But since most of them were rarely used, they were unified to use a single kanji instead. The result is that the meanings of the word are quite diverse.