Stroke

by Nao

kaku, kaku-suru, ga

The main meaning of this character is “image.” I chose a minor meaning. As you can see, we use the word “stroke” every day. The number of strokes is important when you look up a kanji dictionary.

In the tag section of the Japanese blog, we frequently use this character, kaku, to mean strokes. When we count strokes, use the unit “kaku” like ikkaku (one stroke), nikaku (two strokes), sankaku (three strokes), etc.

For those who study Japanese, I should stress that the main meaning of this character is “image.” The related words are “kaiga,” “yōga,” and “ni honga.” They mean paintings, Western style paintings, and Japanese style paintings, respectively. Yōga and nihonga only distinguish painting materials. The former means oil painting. In nihonga, painters use special ink or pigment called iwaenogu.

Kaku-su or kaku-suru is a relatively difficult verb. “To draw a line” is “issen wo kakusu.” Issen means “a line” and it is an object of the verb. In this sense, it might be useful to imagine a line drawn in front of something. The particle wo indicates that the preceding word is an object of the verb. So in this idiom, the verb kaku-su means, “to draw.” In a slightly different expression, you can put an object that itself is distinguished. “To characterize” might be more appropriate meaning in this case. You can put an object before the particle wo, but this time the object is something characterized by the subject. If you say, “the subject wa shinjidai wo kakusu,” it means that the subject characterizes the new era.

Another meaning of kaku-su is to plan. A related compound is keikaku (a plan).

1. Draw the horizontal line.
2. Draw the left side of the rectangle.
3. Draw the upper and right side of the rectangle.
4. Draw the vertical line in the middle.
5. Draw the horizontal stroke in the rectangle.
6. Draw the lower side of the rectangle.
7. Draw the hook consisting of vertical line on the left and the horizontal line at the bottom.
8. Draw the vertical line on the right.