[Multilingual Monday] Kanji confusion

[aadroma]

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

Comments

入and人 have always bothered me.

[caestus]

...Especially in some fonts they are completely interchangeable and it is frustrating. Although I've never had problems confusing them in calligraphy.

I can't think of specific examples of other confusions, but I'll have to add that Japanese characters and simplified characters have muddied the waters considerably. (Ignoring of course that the waters were already lower Yangzi opaque: regional and historical variants. Suddenly switching to complete romanization--in pinyin--seems albeit briefly less abhorrent.)

[bluebear2]

I still get さ and ち mixed up.

[philbutrin]

when studying, i occasionally make lists of kanji that i get confused with each other. at one point i put together a long chain of characters that have small or subtle or confusing differences from each other -- like the examples you give (士 and 土, or 末 and 未).

i'll have to see if i can dig up that list.

[muckefuck]

I should have lots of these, but it's been so long since I did much with Chinese that I have trouble thinking of any.

One mistake I used to make all the time in writing, however, was 治 "manage" for 沒 "not have". I don't know how I got it in my head that the latter character had the mouth radical in it. It was never a problem with reading since the two are used in such different contexts, but I was forever getting marked off for this in Chinese class.