this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Japanese Language

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I'm lerning kanji using WaniKani and a set of cards for Ankidroid for offline use. They are giving these weird names to kanji and radicals and I was wondering if those were correct? I feel like I'm learning the wrong names for these characters or their meaning... This is just one example. I came across another one called "mohawk". That doesn't make sense to me. Or am I missing something? Is it a learning technique?

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[–] Eagle0110@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Others have already pointed out how silly this is, but to give OP something more concrete to help studying this radical, I looked up the kanji itself in my academic classical Chinese dictionary designed for research use, and the way it's supposed to make sense is that 兼 means "concurrent" in contrast to 秉, as in 兼 is essentially a "duplex" version of 秉, with two vertical bars in the center and with two dots on the top, instead of one, thus have two "concurrent" parts in one kanji.

You can further check out some of the earlier historical versions of how it was written (or cast on bronze vessels) in this screenshot of the dictionary: