[Multilingual Monday] Kanji confusion
So on the Sunday before Memorial Day I met up with muckefuck and a few other friends. We drank sake on the balcony and talked, and one of the men asked, "Can you read these characters?", referring to the characters on the bottle. It was dark and I was tired, and managed to misinterpret BOTH characters. The label read 入魂 and I managed to read it as 人鬼 (the former meaning "entering the soul" and the latter being sort of a "human demon"). I can see the screwup on the first character - in brush writing the only difference between "enter" and "person" is stroke order -- but yeah, I managed to completely ignore the second character's radical.
And as much as I love characters -- and I do -- many are easily confusable for one another, leading at least one dictionary I own to list in it's index characters that are often used incorrectly for other characters. Lord knows I have to be careful as misssing a radical can lead to a completely different character -- 登 means "climb" whereas 澄 can mean "to be clear". There are worse offenders -- try to differentiate by sight the characters 士 and 土, or 末 and 未. As I study for the JLPT keeping things from becoming muddled is a huge challenge!!
Are you studying Chinese or Japanese? I'd love to hear your tales of confusion. And even if you don't study either of these languages, orthographic confusion can happen to any language so I'd love to hear YOUR tales of "I thought it said x but it was y!"
And as much as I love characters -- and I do -- many are easily confusable for one another, leading at least one dictionary I own to list in it's index characters that are often used incorrectly for other characters. Lord knows I have to be careful as misssing a radical can lead to a completely different character -- 登 means "climb" whereas 澄 can mean "to be clear". There are worse offenders -- try to differentiate by sight the characters 士 and 土, or 末 and 未. As I study for the JLPT keeping things from becoming muddled is a huge challenge!!
Are you studying Chinese or Japanese? I'd love to hear your tales of confusion. And even if you don't study either of these languages, orthographic confusion can happen to any language so I'd love to hear YOUR tales of "I thought it said x but it was y!"