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Most easily mistaken Chinese character


Ian_Lee

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  • 7 years later...
  • 4 weeks later...

I kept misreading 髁 for 踝 the other day when both characters were popping up in a section of a book on skeletal muscles. At first I convinced myself it made sense...and then the more I thought of it, I knew I had made a mistake. I then learned the character 髁 and not to read in moving vehicles without glasses.... :wall

踝 huái​

髁 kē​

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What's up with these old threads popping up? Well they're interesting so...

The most easily mistaken character(s) are definitely 日 and 曰. Why? Because almost everybody who can write Chinese does not know the (being a prescriptivist here but...) real difference between them. And those reading this are most likely going "wtf is he talking about?" It's further confounded by the recent typefaces which describe the newly emerging way(s) of differentiating them, which might have something to do with their shape or the length of the middle horizontal stroke.

The difference between 日 and 曰, in 楷書, is that the first two strokes touch in 日 and do not touch in 曰. That's it. The shape doesn't matter.

In 行書, it is the shape, where 日 is obviously narrow (either that or the first two strokes definitely touch) and 曰 is obviously wide.

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Recently, for me it's been anything with 呂/? [can't type that second part, it's like a vertical stacked 口丨口.]

宮/官 is the absolute worst for me; depending on the font they can look pretty much identical, and they are often used in similar ways.

营/菅is bad for me as well, although I just noticed that 营 doesn't have the dot connecting the two boxes (at least in the font I'm using), unlike 宮. [Note that the traditional form of 营 is 營, which avoids the visual ambiguity; checking, there doesn't seem to be a character with the two 火 on top and 官 on the bottom, although I could have missed it.]

EDIT: 菅 not the character I'm looking for..... What was it again? Right, 管. Oooh, never noticed that 管 and 营 have different radicals on top, now that I (finally!!) noticed that it should be easier to distinguish.

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The most easily mistaken character(s) are definitely 日 and 曰....It's further confounded by the recent typefaces which describe the newly emerging way(s) of differentiating them' date=' which might have something to do with their shape or the length of the middle horizontal stroke.[/quote']The "recent typefaces" you refer to date back at least to the Ming Dynasty. I've got some reproductions of Wanli-era block texts (楷体 naturally), in which the difference between 日 and 曰 is (1) the overall width, and (2) the middle stroke of 曰 ends before the right wall. (I've seen scans of the handwritten Yongle Encyclopedia that show this same distinction). And if you look at scans of the Siku Quanshu, you can find that different scribes observed different distinctions -- some used unattached top strokes, others used a wide trapezoidal shape with a tiny mid-stroke.
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