Learning Chinese involves remembering and getting used to a lot of chinese characters. This is something i thouroughly enjoy. One key to remembering them is actually remembering chinese radicals. Those are the "parts" that can make up a character.

Characters can also be made up through combination of other characters and more radicals. This gives a pretty cool progression in terms of learning the language, since you'll recognize some if not all the indidual parts of a new character, making it easier to memorize. Nice Level design, chinese!

But then you have characters like

轻 (easy, light)

Alright, let's look at the components. On the left we have a squished 车 (car, vehicle, machine, wheel) and on the bottom right we have 工 (work). Hmm, that's ... a bit weird. I guess something like "easy work" is nice enough to remember. But i've not seen the character or radical in the top right on it's own before.

Let's look it up...

uh...

Oh, it's not a character on it's own, and also, it's not in the list of all the base radicals!
It's.. it's the japanese katakana syllable ス (su)
WHAT?

Turns out the original character looks like this:

輕

and in simplified chinese they simply replaced a few things. now 車 is just just the non-simplified form of 车 and still means the same, and we also find 工, but what's that? this 巛 looks like arrows, or bends of a river.. oooohhh, and indeed! 巠 means river or a flowing stream of water.

But how did they end up with a non-native radical in the simplified version??

Turns out, japanese had this character as a kanji as well, but in their 1947 language reform simplified it to

軽

and when chinese had it's language reform in 1956 they must have looked at that right part of the japanese character and thought "that's a great idea". One problem though,

圣

means "to dig" in classical chinese and i might be very wrong, but my only guess is that they must have thought this would be too confusing, and so just chopped of a bit from that, keeping the pure 工 part and shortening the ㇏ of 又 to ス, which is insane.

又 - (0.5 * ㇏) = ス ???

In any case, whatever lead them to this decision, using radicals that are non-native to the language is just incredibly cursed and makes learning the language just a tiny bit harder and more importantly leads me down rabbit holes that make me spend time not learning the language

I still enjoy it a lot though

i also enjoy the compositional nature of chinese characters. it's made learning the language feel a lot more doable, but i've learned it's important not to jump to conclusions. components can compose in different ways for different reasons.

(read more at your peril, i may have gone too far in a few places)

also, shoutout to pleco (arguably the best dictionary app) and the outlier addon, which i didn't know about! (thanks!)

it's really interesting to piece together this information. i'm very aware that some of this might be really obvious to people more familiar with the language or especially chinese native speakers and experts in the language, but approaching things from the perspective of an outsider, it's not obvious how to acquire the "correct" information or how to best interpret certain things about the language.

i.e. standard pleco decomposes 轻 into 车 and ... some extra strokes, when 工 clearly is not just "some arbitrary strokes". but how do you then even begin to look up ス ? I tried other dictionaries, like the hanping app, which also didn't decompose differently and eventually i just resorted to looking at the list of base radicals when my confusion hit it's maximum.

at that point i resorted to wiktionary because that's usually a very verbose, albeit dry but pretty accurate and complete enough source of information, but it didn't give me much either. it does point out (like the above post also mentions) that the word composes out of semantic 車 (“carriage”) + phonetic 巠 , but that still didn't give me any good information about how ス fits into the chinese language, which at this point, i was desparate for.

So in the end, accepting it as extra strokes is what it boils down to, but i can't help but feel like that is unsatisfactory when trying to "get" what you're looking at. That being said, this too is something you have to get used to and accept as part of the language. And while it might feel "cursed" to someone learning the language, like me, i don't want to give the impression that there is anything "wrong" with chinese. The language is how it is, and while a caveat for non-native speakers, it's also a fun fact about chinese, and a skill-issue on my part, at least for now