彼女 means either she or girlfriend depending on how it's used

So far, all the grammar guides online are retarded. Except for Cure Dolly who actually explains logically and doesn't leave out important information.

Kanji for bike actually makes sense

@matrix you're not supposed to. That's all of etymological interest after "tenderness", the part you're supposed to remember. Just like when faced some random medical word that you don't recognize, you can intuit the meaning from remembering bits of Latin, you can get a sense of an unknown character, but that's not what you're supposed to do. What you're supposed to do is recognize the character.

@apropos but that's often not possible as often the kanji are build from completely unrelated parts with different pronunciations

@matrix kanji's worse massively overloading the characters, but if you're just reading you don't need the pronunciation at all. "A sense of what the character refers to" is enough for you to gloss over it and still get something out of the text. The spell that was just cast must be some kind of ice thing because it's covered in ice radicals, idk

@apropos yes, but to be able to do that you need already need to know a lot

@matrix the important point is that there isn't an alternative path (and definitely not a shortcut) that goes through you first learning all of these detailed etymological breakdowns of character meanings.

@apropos oh yep, i know that. i'm just lazy.

@matrix it's not hard at all, just learn them one by one. then when you actually need to write a character you'll remember 'oh right, this is just human plus melancholy' and it pretty much writes itself.

@lain Since I'm crippled, I'm not learning the strokes, because I would be going at max speed at about 0.5 kanji per day.
But yep, once you learn enough you will start seeing the similarities.

@matrix are you doing wanikani or KD? or just rawdogging?

@lain basically yeah, I'm learning words with kanji, not kanji by themselves.
I'm using https://sottaku.app for the flashcards since it has nicely organized presets. Once I get grade 1 kanji down, maybe N5 if grade 1 isn't enough, I'm gonna do just reading and sentence mining. I never did contextless memorizing in anything.

@matrix you do you but i don't think 'words with kanji' works. if you have 30 mins a day rather do KanjiDamage or wanikani and you'll know 2000 kanji in a year.

@lain Why do you think so? Basically my reasoning is: since pronunciation of words has barely any correlation with kanji and the meanings of radicals don't give much hints towards meaning of the kanji either, there isn't much reason to learn them (and radicals) first instead of learning them naturally through noticing pattern in learned words or looking them up when reading.
(also words with grade 1 kanji are mostly just the lone kanji anyway)