To Hit

u-tsu, da

Before writing about today’s kanji, I’m going to answer a question.

Dear Dizi, to answer your question, I’ll give you some advice about how to remember kanji.

It’s hard to remember kanji. It’s hard to remember English words. We learned kanji by writing each character many times. Every elementary school kid does so. I memorized English words by writing sentences that include them. When you study kanji, I think you should use both methods. Handwriting is very effective to remember each kanji. Even the native Japanese forget how to write kanji because we don’t write but type and convert. Use your hand. That’s my first suggestion. I don’t think you need to write each character dozens of times as we did when we were kids. Use the kana-kanji conversion system to have it convert from kana to kanji. This is the second. As you get used to it, you can choose which kanji is appropriate easily. If you know somebody who is not native but uses Japanese very well, ask them how they studied. I asked non-natives who use English very well the way they studied English. So find somebody who knows how to study Japanese as a foreign language. I once read that a Japanese learner had learned Japanese by making kanji cards by himself and sticking them on the walls to remember. Hope it helps you.

Let’s learn today’s kanji. What I have been doing these days on this blog is to divide words using the day’s character into some groups. Some characters are used for verbs and compounds. Some are used only for compounds.

Today’s character means to hit. We use this for verbs and compounds.

Verbs

Utsu means to hit or to strike. You might hit a ball (tama wo utsu). You might strike somebody’s heart (kokoro wo utsu).

When we use utsu and other verbs, it becomes uchi. Uchiageru (to school), uchiakeru (to confess), uchiawaseru (to make arrangements), and uchimakasu (to defeat) are some examples.

Compounds

From vocabulary used in baseball, dasha means a batter; daryoku means batting power; and kyōda means a strong hit.

1. Draw the short horizontal stroke.
2. Draw the vertical stroke with an upward turn.
3. Draw the quasi-horizontal stroke sweeping toward the upper right.
4. Draw the horizontal stroke on the top.
5. Draw the vertical stroke with an upward turn.