Lesson 13 of 28
Kanji Unit 13 — the person standing beside
about 9 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Spot にんべん inside a character you have never seen, and guess what it is about.
- Read the ten characters in this unit in ordinary words.
Words this lesson teaches
- 仕
- serve; official duty — as in 仕事, a job
- 代
- substitute; a generation; a charge
- 住
- dwell, live somewhere
- 体
- body
- 作
- make, produce
- 使
- use; send on an errand
- 借
- borrow, rent
- 以
- from … onward; and above — as in 以上, 以下
- 主
- main, principal; an owner
- 者
- a person of some kind — a scholar, a worker, a reader
What it explains
Where the radical sits, and why it is squashed
A character is written in one square, however many parts it has. So a part that shares the square gives up width: 人 becomes 亻 on the left, 水 becomes 氵, 手 becomes 扌. The squashed form is a position, not a different meaning — and once you know three or four of them, most compound characters stop being a wall of strokes and become two things side by side.
仕 and 事 make work
Most of these characters do their real work in pairs. 仕 barely appears alone; it appears in 仕事, the word for a job, which the courses have been writing in kana since Foundations. 使 gives 使う, to use, and also 大使館, an embassy — a great envoy's building. Learning the character is how a word you already say in kana becomes a word you can read.
The scene itself is in the app.
Lesson one of this track is free to read in full. From lesson two on, the story, the audio and the review are part of a free account.