飞 | fēi

In Mandarin Chinese, 飞 (Pinyin: fēi 🔊) is a word of many meanings. As a verb, it means “to fly”, “to flutter”, or “to evaporate”. It also could be an adjective for “fast”, “unexpected”, “unfounded”, or an adverb “very” or “extremely”.

飞 is a simplified form of the traditional hanzi 飛. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the traditional character contains two 飞 bits, one on top of the other. Uncle Hanzi writes “a flying bird with long neck and big wings” without specifying explicitly whether he refers to 飛 or 飞. I see a long neck (and a long beak) and not-so-big wings in the simplified character.

Some compounds of 飞 include

• 飞 + 天 = 飞天 (fēitiān): to fly in the sky; to travel into space
• 飞 + 星 = 飞星 (fēixīng): meteor; shooting star
• 飞 + 鸟 = 飞鸟 (fēiniǎo): flying bird
• 飞 + 鱼 = 飞鱼 (fēiyú): flying fish
• 飞 + 鼠 = 飞鼠 (fēishǔ): flying squirrel; bat
• 飞 + 虫 = 飞虫 (fēichóng): flying insect

In Japanese, 飛 is an affix that confers the meaning of flight or speed. We’ve already seen 飛 in that famous haiku:

古池や 蛙飛こむ 水の音 芭蕉 Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto The old pond; A frog jumps in, — The sound of the water. Bashō (Translated by R.H. Blyth)

Here, the frog 蛙 (kawazu) not just enters こむ (komu) the water: it leaps in 飛こむ (tobikomu).

More photos related to flight, calligraphy and sea glass @ Shutterstock.

蛙 | wā

In Mandarin Chinese, 蛙 (Pinyin: wā 🔊) is a word for frog.

According to Wiktionary, 蛙 is a phono-semantic compound of semantic 虫 (“insect; creature”) and phonetic 圭 which, in turn, is a duplication of our old friend 土. Now, English speakers think the frog goes “ribbit” (🔊). But this is only because of Baja California chorus frog who happen to live near Hollywood. For Dutch, frogs go “kwaak kwaak”, for Russians — “ква-ква” and for Chinese — 呱呱 (wā wā). If you remember “wā wā”, you’ll remember “wā” too.

Does 蛙 look like a frog? Not really, not to me. Look, here’s a frog:

And here’s a sailboat pursuing, er, two smaller boats:

In Japanese, 蛙 is pronounced kaeru (🔊) or, in poetry, kawazu. Here’s probably the most famous haiku ever:

古池や 蛙飛こむ 水の音 芭蕉 Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto The old pond; A frog jumps in, — The sound of the water. Bashō

I used the classic translation by R.H. Blyth; if you don’t like it, there are at least thirty-one others.

More photos related to frogs, calligraphy and sea glass @ Shutterstock.