Know Your Picture Characters Entry #8
Congratulations to Shirley for taking a risk and sticking her neck out. “Know Your Picture Characters” is not a game for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, she would have been better off fishing just a few feet to the left, because the correct answer was not “F” but “A.” I’m not totally sure how she was counting “elements;” kanji are generally classified by the number of strokes used to write them, which, with the exception of the numbers one, two, and three, typically has nothing to do with their meaning. In this case, F is a 9-stroke character, and A and B are both 10. In fact, none of the characters that appeared in this week’s challenge contain 7 strokes.
A consolation prize goes to A Fan, who completely failed to pick the right character but correctly identified that the Japanese love puns. And special thanks to Dragon, for reminding us that, “there were a lot of wars in ancient times.”
The seven characters mean, in order: week, hour, month, year, day, second, and minute. Many of these also have other meanings; longtime KYPC participants may recognize a kanji or two from our “Days of the Week” edition.
週 時 月 年 日 秒 分
But enough about time. Let’s move on to someplace else. Specifically, “place.” Having taken care of the “when,” now we’re going to practice a bit with the “where.” These characters all represent geographical features and should, theoretically, be easier to identify by how they look than things like colors or intervals of time. So take a crack at picking out the one that represents the thing that there are 10,000 of in the state in which I live (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not mountains).
A. 川 B. 島 C. 原 D. 湖 E. 森 F. 山
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3 Comments »
June 7th, 2010 at 6:50 am
If we’re assuming that this character is based entirely on the lakes in the state in which you live (and why wouldn’t it be?), I would have to say C. The rectangular thing in the middle is one of those tiny lakes they put in by the highways, and all the lines surrounding it are the highway itself and the exit ramps and stuff.
June 7th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Got to be E. It’s one of those water skiiing shows where the third person rides on the other two people’s shoulders.
(Unfortunately, the creators of Kanji did not realize that the Wisconsin Dells are not in Minnesota.)
June 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Surely you jest! Those kanji don’t look like geographical features with the possible exception of F which could be a mountain. E does have 3 little things swimming in it. People possibly but if it is, they have tails. B could be a boat, a square rigger, I guess. But neither of those describe the lake as such. I’ll go with A where you could call the horizontal lines incoming waves at a ninety degree angle.
Now about my answer to the previous puzzle. I believe I said something about it depending on how you count. I could make out a case for seven.