I’m learning some kanji and I realised some features for example fox,cat,wolf and monkey have the same overdrawn 3 and how there is the constant use of existing symbols like “hi” in deer,bear and purple. Is there a reason for this? If so, this would make memorising things a lot easier.
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They’re called radicals. That one is the one usually called ‘animal’ and dictates that the kanji is an animal or related to animals
言 you see this kanji/radical on many of the words having to do with language for instance. 話語読 are all used in words that have to do with language
Kanji are composed of smaller parts called radicals that make up the kanji. Sometimes complex kanji will only differ in a single radical so learning to recognize these is crucial. Additionally sometimes some radicals will help hint at the meaning and sometimes certain radicals will tell you what the reading is.
Elements are broadly divided into phonetic indicators and meaning indicators, although in many cases as characters have evolved into simpler forms elements have converted into other elements. For example, you can no longer tell immediately whether or not a small 月 in a character was originally 肉 or 月… although you can learn that in body parts it was 肉 while in ‘bright’ it was 月.
Phonetic elements also may or may not express meaningful commonality anymore — these characters were originally created for classical Chinese, so not only the elements might have changed, but the pronunciation may have shifted over the centuries, before or after adoption, or because they were taken from different dialects or different periods of classical Chinese.
So there *are* trends and patterns, but they are not easily codified into a short, simple set of rules.
The one you noticed is often used in kanji related to animals. The “key” element of a kanji is called the Radical, and has a semantic meaning. There *is* rhyme and reason to it – *to an extent*. But you’ll find there are probably more kanji than not that are entirely arbitrary.
“Inner” parts of the symbols like the ヒ you noticed in 鹿, 熊, 紫, don’t really count for this, they are essentially arbitrary. But as you learn more kanji you’ll find that there aren’t actually that many different types of strokes. This helps you learn the system, I think.
Anyway, in this case, the radical for bear is the four “legs”^(which actually originally derive from 火 because it’s an angry beast or something), and the radical for むらさき is the 糸, which means thread (the name of the colour comes from the name of a dye derived from the root of a plant). 鹿 is labelled in the dictionary as having the radical … 鹿, which isn’t really helpful – sort of shows you how arbitrary the system can be. ^(This character seems to be entirely pictorial in origin, though even then the writing system likes to reuse shapes, as this makes it easier to remember how to write them. in this case the ヒ shapes are the deer’s legs, go figure.)
(There’s a phonetic/rebus element to it – the remaining part that isn’t the radical sort-of indicates the pronunciation of the character by reference to another one, but only if you speak Middle Chinese. Only a few of the phonetic correspondences survive to modern Japanese or even Mandarin, and in Japanese it would only apply to ‘onyomi’ readings. So this isn’t really helpful to you as a learner.)
Many of the Chinese character are the result of gradually simplifying the design.
In addition, there are several types of patterns in the simplification of the pattern.
Of course, if the nuances of the shape to be simplified in the original picture are close, it will be easy to understand that the simplification results will be consolidated into the same shape.
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On the other hand, there are many cases where you add a number of symbolic meanings.
For example, ‘***犭***’ when the target is an animal, ‘***月***’ when the object is offal, “**grass crown**” when the target is the plants, etc.
猪 熊、草 花、胃 腸、
~80% of characters are picto-phonetic characters. What this means is you take a character indicating, vaguely, the sort of meaning, and another for the sound (but this was done for Chinese thousands of years ago so there is some drift in modern Japanese) — generally, the ideographic characters, or “picture” ones, which are way less common. So for instance, imagine if we had a ideogram for “eye” and one for “person.” If we wanted to represent the English word “I,” we might smush them together in one new character to indicate “word that is pronounced eye and stands for a person,” or “I.”
I mean, there is a reason for radicals, but given that they follow patterns, they’d make memorizing things a lot easier regardless.
If they were not there, it would be too hard for people to learn. The repetition makes is manageable. To some degree it serves as hints to meaning–it’s not consistent, but can be helpful when there is a pattern.
People here are calling them “radicals” but this is a bit misleading. Yes, the shape in question happens to be a radical, but that’s not what makes it significant. Characters are composed of components, some of which are radicals, many are not. Components can be phonetic or semantic, and the latter can be further divided into form and meaning components.
A radical is just a dictionary’s section header.
Ask the ancient Chinese.