Talk:List of kanji radicals by frequency

June 2015

ywja from reddit brought some concerns

"By just browsing through the table on this page, I found many 'errors', especially in the Examples column. These errors comes from the liberal use of the term 'radical.' This topic comes up often in this subreddit and I understand that there are two camps on the issue. Personally, I don't mind if people used the English term 'radicals' liberally to refer to all 'components' that appear in kanji. However, people should be aware that Japanese speakers don't think like that. There's only one 部首 in each kanji. This page can be especially misleading because it mentions the Kangxi radicals, the Chinese system which the Japanese one is based on. It seems to me that the figures are taken from kanjidamage[1] linked in the References section. I'm not familiar with this site but it's one of those that use the term 'radical' loosely and classify kanji based on non-standard schemes. As an example, 舞[2] is listed under the 'radical' 無, when its 部首 is 舛 (example[3] ). Actually, 無 is in fact a 部首 but is only used in the form 无[4] in kanji such as 既. To add to the confusion, the 部首 of the kanji 無[5] is 火, which corresponds to the four legs at the bottom of 無. Now I know why some people feel like ignoring this traditional system. Nonetheless, all of this makes the breakdown look suspicious, if not completely worthless. 大修館書店's official site has a page for the same topic[6] . Classification of kanji based on 部首 can differ from dictionary to dictionary and they state that this result is based on their 『新漢語林』. According to this list, the top six 部首 are, in order of frequency, 氵, 人, 手, 木, 糸, and 言. 477 kanji in total, which comprises 24.5% of joyo kanji." TranquilHope (talk) 21:38, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

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Personal reflection

With no citations for the claims about "doing away with archaic forms," "not always etymologically correct," etc., this entire article seems to be just one unidentified person's opinion of how the kanji table ought to be changed to make more sense to him or her personally. That doesn't belong in Wikipedia. 2607:FEA8:129F:EA51:0:0:0:AD04 (talk) 23:16, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

I agree that there are no citations justifying the removal of one or more archic kanji, but I still think this article has notable usefulness by means of educating on what are the most important radicals, by frequency. The article could be cleaned up to satisfy Wikipedia's rules by only keeping the sections with citations. Kryzon (talk) 10:50, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Dire need of some rephrasing IMO, poorly phrased to the point of being misinformation

Hey, I don't really know what Wikipedia editing standards are like, so I didn't change this myself, because I don't want to accidentally break something.

The article states we're using the word "radical" to mean "component", but the statistics use the word radical to actually mean radical. So there's a huge mismatch between the statistics and the article's description of them. The article states this:

"The six radicals that occur the most frequently[2] (in order of frequency)[3] and make up 25% of the 2136 Jōyō kanji:"

The word "make up" implies that the entire kanji is made up of just these components. That is not the article's intention at all, because (obviously) the statistic isn't intending to say that 25% of kanji are made of just these six components, it means to say "25% of kanji feature these radicals", right? I think many readers are misinterpreting this as meaning that 25% of kanji look like 休, when in reality that 25% includes kanji like 懐, which has 忄 as a radical, but also a bunch of other components that are totally unrelated to these six. When you open the article by saying we'll treat radicals as components that make up kanji, and then say "25% of jouyou kanji are made up of these radicals", virtually every attentive reader will interpret this as meaning "with just these six puzzle pieces, I can create 500 of the Jouyou kanji", which is very far from the truth. The article really only means "this is the main puzzle piece for 25% of Jouyou kanji, which can then feature any other puzzle piece they wish."

I propose changing the phrasing to: "The six radicals that occur the most frequently[2] (in order of frequency)[3] and serve as radicals for 25% of the 2136 Jōyō kanji:"

This is still not as good as it could be, because readers who don't know that "radical" ≠ "component" will still easily misunderstand this... In fact, with the opening statement of the article as it is, I struggle to even think of a way to explain the statistic to the readers, because you've already asked them to ignore the definition of "radical" that the statistic is using. Sorry for the wall of text, but the more I write, the more I realize I don't even know how to fix this article. Hopefully someone who understands these topic (and Wikipedia's standards) better than me can do something about it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:A040:189:EC67:F0BE:3A7D:DD14:BE5A (talk) 17:58, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

衣 / clothing

The hiragana of 衣 (clothing/garment) is い (i) not ころも (koromo). Phillipm0703 (talk) 15:52, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

"Table of kanji radicals" - Does this belong on this page?

I'm confused why this table, which claims (uncredited) to be ordered "in the same basic order that the Kangxi radicals are listed except for the two and three-stroke radicals which are in a more visual order," is on a page titled "list of kanji radicals by frequency"? The table isn't ordered by frequency at all, and doesn't claim to be. And that fact can be very easily missed, since it's buried in the "Notes" about the table.

To be frank, I think this table is useful and should exist somewhere, especially if it's possible to credit it, but not on this page. I'm not at all familiar with the wikipedia guidelines. I don't know how to resolve this myself, so I'm hoping someone who's more active can possibly take a look and see if they agree? --Floopadoop (talk) 07:20, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Explanation?

I comment on the 3 top entries of the table.

• 口 (くち): in brackets Hiragana kuchi
  Kun: くち : What does Kun mean?
  On: コウ、 ク : Katakana kou, ku. What does On mean?
• 言 (こと): in brackets Hiragana koto
  Kun: い.う、 こと : Hiragana iiu, koto??
  •On: ゲン、 ゴン : Why is there a dot before On? Katakana geso, goso?
• 一 (イチ/いち): in brackets now Katakana and Hiragana ichi / ichi
  Kun: ひと-、 ひと.つ : Hiragana hito, hitoou?
  On: イチ、 イツ : Katakana ichi, itsu?

Madyno (talk) 16:34, 28 February 2023 (UTC)