A Hidden Story of the Character “Snow”
What a Kanji Character tells us
In Japanese, we use three different types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
Both Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic, and each has only 46 characters.
Kanji, on the other hand, is ideogramic. Just like English words, there are thousands of Kanji characters, and each Kanji character has a certain meaning.
How was the Kanji character developed? What is the original meaning?
Each character has its own story to tell and learning its story is one of the fun for learning Kanji characters.
Snow is written as 雪 in Kanji.
My dear friend Shizu Usami is a professional calligrapher and has deep knowledge of Kanji’s history. Recently she created a Youtube video explaining how the character “雪” was developed over time.
When I found out about this week’s prompt in Dr. Preeti Singh’s article on Reciprocal, I thought it is a great opportunity to introduce Shizu’s video.
Not only will you learn about this Kanji’s story, but you will also get to learn how the Kanji character is written in calligraphy.
Shizu’s beautiful brush strokes, her straight posture, her focus, and her serenity while she moves the brush on the paper… When she writes the character, maybe she feels as if she becomes part of snow herself?
Here is Shizu’s video. I hope you will enjoy it!
Thank you, Dr. Preeti Singh, for your wonderful prompt!
Aarti Tailor writes about her experience of snow. I agree, the snow in Canada looks freestyle!
The mandarin duck in the story by Josephine Crispin looks so cute!
Originally published at https://akemisagawa.com on January 10, 2023.
