In a more broad sense, why do kanji seem to be all across the board in terms of visually describing what they mean in a literal/practical sense? Some characters like 川 make more of an effort, some like 丸 seem completely random.
Ok, so most kanji weren’t designed to be pictographs, and of those that were, the picture has often been morphed and stylized over the thousands of years it was used and doesn’t resemble the original much.
Overall it isn’t a matter of not “making an effort”, since some picture representation wasn’t the objective in the first place.
This is a rabbit-hole that won’t help you that much with Japanese, but you can basically find the reason for these things in most cases.
For instance, in English, most of the letters actually represented *something* at some point in the past. But you don’t learn that in school when you are learning the letters. It won’t help you to know which letters resembled an ancient fence or a scoop or a cow.
Back to the kanji, in many cases, some word in some version of ancient Chinese sounded like some other word, so they bolted some symbol onto another symbol and that hint made sense *at the time*. But now it makes no help for you at all when learning modern Japanese.
Because pictograms are not the only type of character. They’re actually a minority in total.
You can dig into the origins in Chinese sources, but there’s four main types: Straight pictures – 木 is a tree. More abstract meaning, often by adding a line or dot to indicate, e.g. 本 is adding an indicator at the roots of the tree but it means origin, not literally root. Combinations, e.g. 森 is obvious Radical for meaning plus a sound indicator, e.g. 校
Why is the number 10 a cross, and not literally 10 straight lines like the first three? Not sure if such a train of thought would help you with your learning. I think there is a separate linguistic page where you could uncover a lot of the rules of the language, but I’m not sure which is it.
Bruh I’m just happy I could recognize both of those Kanji you put in your post
Kanji for zero is also interesting and complex 零
It’s apparently a shiji ideogram, formed from 仄 laterally flipped.
You might want to see if you can get your hands on a copy of [A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters](https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384/). It explains the **actual** Chinese origins of Japanese characters, not just convenient ways of remembering them, and how they were adapted into the Japanese language.
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Ok, so most kanji weren’t designed to be pictographs, and of those that were, the picture has often been morphed and stylized over the thousands of years it was used and doesn’t resemble the original much.
Overall it isn’t a matter of not “making an effort”, since some picture representation wasn’t the objective in the first place.
This is a rabbit-hole that won’t help you that much with Japanese, but you can basically find the reason for these things in most cases.
For instance, in English, most of the letters actually represented *something* at some point in the past. But you don’t learn that in school when you are learning the letters. It won’t help you to know which letters resembled an ancient fence or a scoop or a cow.
Back to the kanji, in many cases, some word in some version of ancient Chinese sounded like some other word, so they bolted some symbol onto another symbol and that hint made sense *at the time*. But now it makes no help for you at all when learning modern Japanese.
Because pictograms are not the only type of character. They’re actually a minority in total.
You can dig into the origins in Chinese sources, but there’s four main types:
Straight pictures – 木 is a tree.
More abstract meaning, often by adding a line or dot to indicate, e.g. 本 is adding an indicator at the roots of the tree but it means origin, not literally root.
Combinations, e.g. 森 is obvious
Radical for meaning plus a sound indicator, e.g.
校
This last is the most common type.
[This](https://i.imgur.com/d4aC9D9.png) is what’s mentioned in one of Seeley & Henshall’s books if that’s of any interest.
Why is the number 10 a cross, and not literally 10 straight lines like the first three? Not sure if such a train of thought would help you with your learning. I think there is a separate linguistic page where you could uncover a lot of the rules of the language, but I’m not sure which is it.
Bruh I’m just happy I could recognize both of those Kanji you put in your post
Kanji for zero is also interesting and complex 零
It’s apparently a shiji ideogram, formed from 仄 laterally flipped.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/丸#Chinese
You might want to see if you can get your hands on a copy of [A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters](https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Remembering-Japanese-Characters/dp/0804820384/). It explains the **actual** Chinese origins of Japanese characters, not just convenient ways of remembering them, and how they were adapted into the Japanese language.