+- kanji koohii FORUM (http://forum.koohii.com)
+-- Forum: Learning Chinese (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-17.html)
+--- Forum: Chinese and Hanzi (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-20.html)
+--- Thread: Phonetic 'radicals' and pronunciations over different languages (/thread-13209.html)
Phonetic 'radicals' and pronunciations over different languages - Tycho - 2010-07-04
After learning that most hanzi/kanji were composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic element (形声字・形聲字), I felt it was weird that, while the semantic radicals had been clearly documented (Kangxi, etc.), little attention had been paid to the phonetic components or 'phonetics'.
Recently I found a few lists of these (Soothill for Chinese, Van Dijk for Japanese, and some I didn't check), but at the time I failed to, and instead tried myself. I combined chise and unihan using mysql to obtain this raw db, from which I made my own list of 1,028 phonetics. Haven't compared it to the existing ones yet though; too much of a hassle to do manually.
I then used that to make this chart to summarize cross-language pronunciation of CJKV vocab and this summary of phonetics most frequent in Japanese (been too lazy to do that for Mandarin/Korean).
TL;DR: check the last three links.
To me, the little acknowledgement of these phonetics is quite a deficiency in traditional hanzi education; I know it's quite different from RTK/RTH (though they seem complementary since this only helps for the later hanzi dominated by 形声字), but how do you guys feel about this? Could stuff like the linked summary for Japanese (but less clunky) help mainstream audiences in understanding/learning hanzi better?
Phonetic 'radicals' and pronunciations over different languages - yudantaiteki - 2010-07-04
Take a look at RTK 2.
Phonetic 'radicals' and pronunciations over different languages - Tycho - 2010-07-04
Thanks, sorry for the ignorance, that looks quite good. Grouping them that way makes so much more sense than the order used in Kanji & Kana, which school had me get. ~_~
Phonetic 'radicals' and pronunciations over different languages - pm215 - 2010-07-04
Michael Pye's _The Study Of Kanji_ (which predates RTK2 by about 15 years) takes a similar approach, and provides slightly more information about each kanji in its tables.
Overall I tend to feel that there are enough exceptions to the rules that it's easiest just to learn words, though.