Kanji Mix-Up’s – Matsu, Mi & Otto/Husband
These three were giving me trouble for a little bit on Wani-Kani so I’m going to do a quick exposé of the characters and maybe some ways to help you remember them.
The Secrets of Japan - 101
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This is the character for husband. Now it’s a fairly simple character but for me at least once the two other characters came in, I started to not notice why I kept getting all these wrong and at times calling the other characters this and this character the other words.
Now here is the culprits that caused me to keep mixing things up. On the left is ‘Not Yet‘ and the right is ‘End‘ in Japanese Kanji. So when you compare husband to this, you’ll notice that the difference is not having the tail stroke coming down the middle like it is on ‘End’ and ‘Not Yet’.
Another thing I noticed that makes ‘Not Yet’ and ‘Husband’ different is the length of the top horizontal stroke. But the biggest give away is still not having the middle tail stroke coming down the middle. So noticing that will obviously help solve that mystery of ‘Husband’ and ‘Not Yet’. But when going through flash cards or Wani-Kani, you may at times in the beginning figuring out these two.
Now in Wani-Kani they first teach ‘Not Yet’ as the radical ‘Jet’, like a plane. After getting these wrong for a while, I decided to give it a better story. So I took the radical ‘Jet’ and the story goes:
“You get on a jet-plane and when you first step on the plane you notice your seat is in the way back, so you’re ‘Not Yet’ to your seat, but by the time you get to your seat you’re at the ‘End’ of the plane.”
So you can see the tiny stroke as an indicator of where you are on the plane.
Silly and possibly a tad stupid, yes. But, that’s what helps you remember the kanji!
-Nihonscope
I haven’t gotten to these characters yet aside from knowing them as “jet” however I found I had the same issue back when I was learning 石 and 右. It took me the longest time to realize the difference was the placement of the cross stroke on top.
Ah yeah I noticed my wife making this mistake a little while back. Right and Stone… The longer wani kani rolls out the more kanji like this keeps popping up.