Hey!

I'm new to Kanji, and ordered RTKI, waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Ever since then, I've been studying the Japanese Writing System. I'm sorry if this a kind of newbie question, but...

Could somebody please identify the meaning of Phonetic-Ideographic Characters? They are also called radicals, right?

Thanks

I wasn't sure what you meant, so I dug up this article (section 1.2): http://www.kanji.org/kanji/japanese/writing/outline.htm

Seems like they are characters with an ideographic component (representing the meaning, this is usually the radical) and a phonetic component (giving the reading). Of course, it looks like the phonetic component also contributes some of the meaning, but the idea is that for a phonetic-ideographic character, one part of the character is also an independent kanji with the same reading. This is as opposed to pure or compount ideographic characters, which show the meaning of the kanji without defining the reading at all.

This is all relatively new to me as well, though, so it would be great to hear from someone who knows more.

To give a few concrete examples:

The character 永 (eternity) is pronounced /yong/ in Chinese. When the ancient Chinese wanted to create a character for the word "swim" (also pronounced /yong/), they took 氵(water) and combined it with 永 to get 泳.
So 泳 consists of one part to give it a broad category (water), and one part to give it a certain pronunciation. It also stands to mention that 永 is itself based on water, so in this way the phonetic part often contributes to the overall meaning as well, though its primary purpose is to indicate the pronunciation.

A few more examples:
球　/qiu/　(sphere) = 玉 (jewel) + 求 /qiu/
認 /ren/ (acknowledge) = 言 (words) + 忍 /ren/

In all of the above examples, the phonetic-ideographic characters are pronounced the same as their phonetic component in Japanese as well.

I know that the above isn't completely historically accurate, but it's close enough.

Ah, okay! So, eternity and swim are both pronounced /yong/, and water isn't. So, in the symbol for swim, water is the meaning and category, while eternity is the phonetic part. Is this all correct?