I have been thinking about the primitive卜and the kanji it appears in. In RTK 1 the primitive appears only about 7 or 8 times. For a few of those I had a hard time fitting the meaning "majic wand" in a story that was easy to associate with the key words (eminent, outside, crude, proceed). For me these keywords just don't immediatly shout "magic".

If we look at most of the kanji the primitive卜 appears in they have to do with pointing the way. I picked the key word 'pointing finger' to avoid crossing meanings with other primitives such as 'direct' and 'direction'. Here are some possible stories using this primitive.

占 - fortune telling: The fortune teller's mouth points towards the future.
上 - above: The finger points up above from the floor.
下 - below: The finger points down below from the ceiling.
卓 - eminent: The eminent conductor stands above the orchestra like a tall sunflower, directing the orchestra with his pointed fingers.
外 - outside: Someone pointing towards the evening moon from their window is clearly pointing outside.
朴 - crude: Crude as in lacking in sophistication, such as pointing with one's finger. Perhaps unsophisticated people act like they grew up in the woods.
赴 - proceed: This keyword reminds me of my car's navigation. "Proceed for 2 miles, then turn right onto freeway XXX". How about a handy portable GPS that points the way to proceed to marathon runners?

Vic

I love your replacement stories factoring in "pointing finger" for 卜, but I worry that I already use fingers, often pointing, for 扌(手 when it's squished into the left side of a kanji) like those in Lesson 23: 646 搭 board, 647 抄 extract, 648 抗 confront, and so on. 扌 is a very common primitive, I fear it will overpower 卜 in my feeble memory.

I already have some difficulty with hand/people elements sneaking into stories when I don't clearly define the subject of the story: without a clear picture of the *thing performing an action*, I find woman, person, or hand, occasionally creeping into the story, and it takes some effort to push Wilbur out of the story for 569 許 Permit (Building #permit,# posted in the stall of Mister Ed the *talking horse*).

vosmiura, excuse me for asking, for it is unrelated to your post, but I must ask: How did you reproduce the radical 卜? It is within unicode but only if you know its reading. You happened to know, say, that it is read uranai? (But another reading boku does not pull up the graphic symbol, at least in Word.)

KANJI Wrote:vosmiura, excuse me for asking, for it is unrelated to your post, but I must ask: How did you reproduce the radical 卜? It is within unicode but only if you know its reading. You happened to know, say, that it is read uranai? (But another reading boku does not pull up the graphic symbol, at least in Word.)

I would use JWPce for this. Go to the radical lookup chart and there it is. Search kanji with this radical, copy to clipboard and paste.

Or go to WWW JDIC and copy straight from the Multi-radical lookup page, which is more or less the same thing in web format (no need to search in this case because the radical characters are right there on the page):

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?1R

Pangolin, for copy/paste operations with radicals the Yellowbridge site is also really nice (thank you ファブリス for the alert): http://www.yellowbridge.com/language/radicals.html

But Pangolin your finest deed may have been your telling us about the Radical Map at WWW JDIC. Let's cite it again:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi- ? dic.cgi?1R

By this map you can easily isolate the kanji that use a particular radical. What a fantastic tool! Way to go Pangolin! (I have been a long time, long time user of WWW JDIC but overlooked that map; all the more to applaud you.)

Oops, here is that RADICAL MAP address again,

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi- ? dic.cgi?1R

何で！可笑しいですね。　 Sorry, I don't why the webpage address I pasted previously got mangled. Scroll to Pangolin's post for it.

I have to say the way I found it was I followed the pointer from RTK1 that卜is a kanji meaning fortune telling and I searched for "fortune" in the online dictionary at YesJapan. I've been a member there since forever...

It came up with these:

bokusha ( 卜者 : ぼくしゃ ) - fortuneteller
baiboku ( 売卜 : ばいぼく ) - fortunetelling (as an occupation)
bokuzei ( 卜筮 : ぼくぜい ) - fortunetelling

Interesting. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity.

I'm so using your mnemonic for 外, much better than Heisig's story, the rest work too but I dont even remember them by stories anymore, they're pretty much stuck in my head.

I think of it as wizard's magic wand. Maybe cos I'm a bit of an RPG nerd, but I made

占 - fortune telling: Wizard (or Seer) waves his wand and tells you the future.
上 - above: Too common/pictograph to need a story
下 - below: Also too common/pictograph
卓 - eminent: The eminent wizard balances on a sunflower and practices his magic. Not sure why this stuck it just did.
外 - outside: Best to practice your magic outside in the evening in the starry night.
朴 - crude: Wizards wands/staffs are usually fashioned crudely from wood, gnarled oak staffs and suchlike.
赴 - proceed: Wizard waves his wand and disables the traps and proceeds through the dungeon at a run before they turn back on.