How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray. The explication of the Chinese word for crisis as made up of two components signifying danger and opportunity is due partly to wishful thinking, but mainly to a fundamental misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages... Among the most egregious of the radical errors in this statement is the use of the exotic term “Ideogram” to refer to Chinese characters. Linguists and writing theorists avoid “ideogram” as a descriptive referent for hanzi (Mandarin) / kanji (Japanese) / hanja (Korean) because only an exceedingly small proportion of them actually convey ideas directly through their shapes... [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on May 6, 2010 - 83 comments

Japanese Element Symbols is an introduction for non-Japanese to the Japanese language through Kanji symbols, its alphabet, elements of Japan's culture, and what to expect on the culinary front.
posted by netbros on Aug 6, 2009 - 12 comments

Foolyoo is a flash game where you fight masked eyeball monsters, avoid disrobing village idiots, slice vegetables according to the ever-changing edicts of a mad old monk and learn how to count in kanji.
posted by Kattullus on Feb 23, 2007 - 9 comments

A history of computer character sets in Japan JIS X 0208 (originally JIS C 6226) of 1978 was the first JIS character set to include kanji. It specified 6,335 kanji, arranged by frequency into two levels ... Many bizarre mistakes were made in transcribing names, resulting in several new kanji coming into existance.
posted by delmoi on Mar 8, 2006 - 14 comments

Hanzi Smatter ???? Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture... The problem is NOT that people are getting characters tattooed on them; it's that people who don't understand the characters are getting characters tattooed on them by other people who don't understand the characters. It is the equivalent of the “blind leading the blind”.
posted by Ljubljana on Dec 7, 2004 - 24 comments

I've never actually seen this in use (probably because I'm totally amerocentric in my browsing), but apparently you can get some wäĉkŷ characters in your domain name if you want to, assuming you want a dot-nu domain. If your browser speaks Japanese, you can even have a kanji domain. That's pretty neat.
posted by endquote on Jun 27, 2000 - 12 comments