Need recommendation on a book that explains what the origin of the kanji is for japanese like how wanikani explains it. Correct me if im wrong but I think that wanikani uses makes more western approach in trying to explain the origin of the kanji. I want something similar to that but from the japanese mind.
how does native japanese people guess the meaning of the kanji that is not yet known to them without looking at the dictionary?
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Mostly they don’t because their task is more like associating readings of words they already know to characters.
Well, at a push, the radical can give a hint. Otherwise, it’s hard to tell the meaning of an individual kanji.
This is like saying ‘how can I guess the meaning of the “flam” from “inflammable” if I’ve never seen it before’. You can guess ‘inflammable’ if you know its constituent parts, but the constituent parts cannot be 100% inferred with zero prior experience. Same with compounds vs. individual kanji.
Kanji just help you read vocab words. You don’t need to know that 東 was a picture of a bundle in ancient times, because the word “north” sounded like the word “bundle” in some ancient version of Chinese.
I’m not sure why you think you need this to learn Japanese but I’m thinking you don’t.
…Wanikani doesn’t really explain etymology though? Struggling to understand what you want here.
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how does native japanese people guess the meaning of the kanji that is not yet known to them without looking at the dictionary?
They know all the ones that people normally know. They don’t know weird ones. They just learned them at school.
Guessing kanji from radicals is like guessing words from morphemes. E.g. television is made from tele (distant) and vision (vision). You cannot accurately guess that a television is an long distance, electronic video broadcasting box solely from the morphemes it is made from. The only way to know what television means is to see the word used in context enough times or to look it up in a dictionary.
Knowing radicals can help cement knowledge, like 男 being ride field power, because it’s a nice and memorable euphemism. But don’t try to guess. You will be wrong 90% of the time.