Similar Kanji: Noon vs Cow
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
In today’s Similar Kanji series we look at – 午 (noon) versus 牛 (cow).
- 午 – Noon, seventh sign of Chinese zodiac, sign of the horse
- 牛 – Cow
I have no special memory ideas for 午 (noon), it’s just one of the kanji I learnt early on as part of JLPT4 and found quite easy to lock away somewhere in my brain.
Some suggest remembering the head of a horse as the kanji relates to the sign of the horse in the zodiac but that never worked for me – you may get more mileage perhaps.
However, it was 牛 (cow) that always had me confused and I constantly got it wrong as the only real difference between the two is the slight vertical line at the top of the kanji (牛).
My advice to separate the two in your mind is to imagine that the line at the top of 牛 (cow) is the horn of a bull, which is similar enough to a cow to trigger the memory.
As soon as I used that idea it was very easy to separate the two in my head and I moved on to the next 1943 kanji to memorise!
I'd be that guy to get those confused very often. I wish they were the other way around, then I could think of noon as in a clock striking 12 (the long and short hands are extended up).
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LikeCool. I know that there is a lot of kanji that can very easily be mistaken for one another, and this helps a lot. I'm gonna look through for one to remember the difference between Ou [King] (王), Sei [Life] (生) and Gyoku [Ball] (玉). All are really similar and I can completly understand how one would mix these three up. I've even mixed them up myself on multiple occasions.
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LikeCripes, that's similar. When quizzing myself, I pretend it's okay to just add on a little tick I missed and call it fair. It isn't :(
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