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)

for example, 工 (depicting a tool) and 巛 (river) look like components of 巠, and they are in a sense, but at a lower level. when you see how 巠 was originally written, courtesy of the outlier dictionary of chinese characters¹, it becomes much more clear what's going on here:

so 巠 actually depicts a loom, and it looks basically the same as the original depiction, but 巛 is standing in for the vertical warp threads. 巛 and 工 are non-functional components of 巠. they make the component easier to write by being familiar building blocks which approximate the original form, but they don't have independent functions within a character.

but wait, if 巛 isn't here because of its meaning, why can 巠 mean 'network of rivers and streams' or 'underground watercourse'? i don't know exactly², but it's important to note it only means that as a standalone character³. as a component it has a more loom-related meaning, if it's used for its meaning at all. in most cases it's used as a sound component:

in fact, that's the case for 轻:

巠 (jing1) is there to represent the sound of 轻 (qing1), and the meaning 'easy, light' is hinted at by 车, completely unrelated to 工. so 轻 used to refer to a kind of light chariot, pronounced qing1, which morphed into a more general meaning.

ime a lot of chinese dictionaries and language learning tools completely ignore sound components, even though most characters have them and they help you pronounce them! or more accurately, they conflate all functional and non-functional components into the single category of 'component', and then only consider the meaning aspect of those components. that makes things simpler at first, but ultimately it makes things harder because it's not how the characters really work. trying to make a semantic connection for a sound component, which might be completely unrelated otherwise, is confusing and counterproductive!

in general, components have 3 possible functions/aspects (form, meaning, sound), but when a component is used in a particular character, only a subset of those functions is used. e.g.

the outlier dictionary distinguishes the components and their functions really well (backed up by historical scholarship), which has given me a lot more confidence understanding how the characters work in a systematic way. every time i try to learn a new component or character, i always look it up there first.

as for the simplification of 巠, i don't know much about that process so i could be completely wrong here, but based purely on pattern matching with other simplications i'd assume it's a fairly direct translation of 巠. ス has the top line, the bend of the rightmost stroke of 巛, and the line cuts across where the other two lines would be. it seems pretty common for multiple strokes to be turned into a single stroke cutting through where they used to be, e.g.

either way, the ス here is just a set of strokes, not a thing to learn in isolation. the useful thing is the whole component, and since it's almost always a sound component, if you ever see it in a character it'll give you a good idea of how it's pronounced!

1. highly, highly recommend. it's a one time purchase you can get with a discount here: https://www.hackingchinese.com/review-the-outlier-linguistics-dictionary-of-chinese-characters-with-discount-code/

2. maybe the 巛 had an influence? no doubt there was some sort of weird historical confluence (ha!)

3. it's also an archaic form of 经, which has loom-derived meanings