It would be a great idea to make a primitive for that. But beware that there are a handful of the opposite also such as 満 漢. I currently just use story situations and visuals to keep things straight, such as for 満, "Add water THEN the flowers. With both the vase will be full," or for 簿, "I had to register for the *acupunture* course in a leaky *bamboo* shack with *water* dripping all over the register blurring the names inked there."

I use "lemonade" for this primitive.

Yes, similar to how you could use Bird Nest for the primitive in Seaweed and Parched.

I think Watering Can makes for a good visual primitive which in turn help you distinguish it from the variant used in Full and Sino-.

*grumble* need to get that IME installed on this work computer.

vosmiura wrote:

Actually Seaweed may be a good keyword for flower + water.

Definitely -- it makes sense as far as its' containing primitives are concerned, and goes well with the kanji that it appears in.

I didn't go for that keyword because there already is a separate Kanji for seaweed (藻　-- it's one of the later ones).  While Heisig doesn't seem to mind using the same keyword to describe both a primitive and a full Kanji, it has caused me problems in the past (drum caused me a minor headache for a little while) and I decided to avoid that as much as possible.

Cheers,
Misha

I like this idea too; I've gone for 'seaweed' as the primitive here (since the flower radical is in the stronger position here it makes sense to me to choose a kind of flower rather than a kind of water as the primitive image). I've published my stories for 'dilute' and 'fall', not because I think they're particularly good but because it gives other people something they can riff off of for their own seaweed-based images.

[I suppose you could use 'seaweed' for the flower-strongest kanji (落 薄 藩 藻) and 'watering can' for the water-strongest ones (満 漢). Have to think about that idea.]

pazustep wrote:

pm215 wrote:

I like this idea too; I've gone for 'seaweed' as the primitive here (since the flower radical is in the stronger position here it makes sense to me to choose a kind of flower rather than a kind of water as the primitive image).

Hmm, seaweeds are actually underwater. Maybe something like a waterlilly would work better, since it's a flower that's always above water?

Water lily is used for "half" as a primitive. Besides, seaweed goes to the shore, is made into food, covers holes on the beach, etc. Perhaps think of a Seaweed muck monster like swamp thing.