![]() This site contains a whole bunch of videos that discuss kanji origins and meanings, generally in the form of PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover.What I’d like to provide is another resource by Noriko Williams that apparently covers 1100 kanji: I’m not translating this verbatim, obviously, but you get the idea.) However, at the very least, Noriko Williams’ explanations are quite detailed and complete, which is a plus. The explanation given in Chinese generally involves looking off into the distance and leading people at the head of a group. one origin story favoured by Japanese sources for 道 involves using a severed head to… ward off spirits on a path, I believe? I haven’t read the theory in a while. I’m honestly never sure whether to trust Noriko Williams precisely because her explanations tend to differ from what I find elsewhere, and just generally speaking, I feel that Japanese sources tend to favour relatively concrete explanations, which are sometimes quite gruesome. If I had a coffee table, I’d put it there, and if I also had social skills I’d invite people over for coffee so that they could go “Oy, what’s this then?” and leaf through it. It isn’t particularly useful for looking stuff up, but it’s a useful introduction to the history of Chinese writing, and beautifully illustrated. She also has an English book called China: Empire of Living Symbols that appears to be very similar, though. There’s also a nice book by Cecilia Lindqvist called Tecknens rike, but it’s in some weird Dutch dialect or something. The explanations often differ from those found in other sources, for example by seeming to focusing on picto- or ideogrammic etymologies in cases where other sources focus on phono-semantic etymologies. ![]() Kanji Portraits - Useful for a second opinion. The latest cached version is only about a month old, so hopefully it’s only temporary. I used to use, but unfortunately it seems to be offline. Chinese Etymology is easier to use, but seems to contain fewer details.įor one thing, the oracle bone symbols (甲骨文) on Sinica have an associated collection number (合xyz) which can be used to look them up. It’s in Chinese, which can make it a bit tricky to use at first, but you learn to recognize the most important terms after a while. Sinica Database - Useful for looking up older versions of hanzi. Yellow Bridge - Consistent, but not very detailed useful as a starting point. ![]() The dropdown for hanzi in the same phonetic series is handy, too, even if does take some work to find the ones used in Japanese. Wiktionary - Inconsistent, but some “glyph origins” are very detailed. I use the e-book version, which is quite handy for Ctrl+F:ing stuff The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji, by Henshall et.al. Most of my go-to resources have already been listed:
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