I just started learning kanji and I’m curious if there’s any sort of pattern or correlation to be found between how complex a kanji looks and how much information it conveys. So far the ones I’ve learned look simple and represent simple things like 一ニ三, 大, etc.
Side question I have is when you’re reading and a kanji appears that’s very complex do you ever need to stop and glance over it twice? I expect it to be hard to quickly interpret complex and similar looking kanji at the same reading rate as katakana or hiragana.
4 comments
There’s not really a direct correlation, no.
Just consider 木 and 森 … ‘forest’ doesn’t really convey any more information than ‘tree’, it’s just that multiple trees is a convenient representation for the idea of a forest.
There is some tendency that more ‘everyday’ words take fewer strokes than more esoteric terms, but not as hard rule or anything, the 曜 for the days of the week or 場 meaning ‘place’ are very everyday characters but not very simple. On the other hand 上告 ‘final appeal to the highest court’ is a pretty esoteric legal term composed of two relatively simple characters.
A lot of that tendency also comes from people choosing to use kana over kanji for everyday terms that have complex kanji in them, while academic writing often prefers kanji (taxonomical names excepted).
> Side question I have is when you’re reading and a kanji appears that’s very complex do you ever need to stop and glance over it twice? I expect it to be hard to quickly interpret complex and similar looking kanji at the same reading rate as katakana or hiragana.
“Ever”, well, yes, it does happen, especially when the characters are not yet very well known. However, 待つ and 持つ will quickly become easily distinguished by most students of Japanese, and similarly for even more complex characters that differ only in the left radical. If anything, it’s simple characters that are easier to confuse – 石 右, 曰 日 – especially in an unusual font or when handwritten, or for the beginner when they don’t even know that one of the characters exists (曰 is a very simple character but not usually taught until late if at all, it’s not even in the joyo kanji).
Generally context will prevent any such confusion though, **if** the character difference is the only barrier to comprehension… but on the way to learning to read smoothly, yeah, there’s going to be some confusion of both types.
No
What would be amount of meaning in any case, is tree less meaning than melancholy?
No
No.
蛾 = moth
司 = er, lots of things