First Kanji of the Week ever: 金

What is kanji of the week? Well, as the title implies, I will try to post about a kanji every week, discuss a little bit about it, say some facts that I find interesting, and just ramble a little bit about these funny characters. I will say that I am not an expert of any kind, so you will have to take whatever you read hear with a grain of salt: after all, I'm doing this mostly to amuse myself.

For the first kanji of the week (which will probably last more than a week due to me still preparing the website), I'm going to go with one of my favourites, 金. The kanji for money. For metal. For gold. And a very common radical in many many MANY other kanji (which are all related with metal in some way). If you are interested in reading about the radical, there's this an article in Joy o' kanji, a website I frequent and also has helped me a lot when gathering information about radicals.

Anyways, why do I like this kanji? It is one of the first and easiest ones to learn, so it's easy to point at it and say "Oh that's my friend who has been with me since the beginning". I also I like to exaggerate my love for money and gold. And finally, as The Cure song goes, it is 金曜日 which I'm in love.

There are some funny words that I also like, like, uhh...

金持ち

Yeah! That one. Kanemochi. I find very funny that the word for wealthy person is very literally "has money". There's also a funny story about me hearing the word for the first time. I was talking to my friends Mi-san and Se-san about words from spanish that have different meanings in japanese, like how Bien (good) is the same as 鼻炎 (runny nose). We ended up talking about Rico (both as in tasty and in money rich), and the word came up. Following that, the next word I learned was 貧乏 (binbou, poor), which immediately drew comparisons with the mascot for the Bimbo brand of baked goods.

Not unlike listening it as an english speaker and having a very, very different image come up. Ah well.

金星

Venus! I believe they used to have a different word for it back then, based on the ancient chinese words. Nowadays it stands pretty much the same as the western names (namely, planets named after gods then days named after visible planets in the sky or whatever). I just like the names of the planets and their relationship with the names of the days. It happens with Friday and Fredag, too, both related with the goddess Frigg, which I understand there's a parallel between her and Venus. I mean, in spanish it is Viernes, which comes from latin, and it is indeed named after her. I would have expected Freyja to be the equivalent of Aphrodite, but eh.

And for the last word, we have.

金玉

Actually, let's stop there.