Radical 人

2 strokes

“Person” is one of the few characters where we will not simply use the bare meaning, but a particular interpretation of it. In order to make our stories more vivid, it is best to think of a particular person, real or fictional, who you can easily imagine in various situations. We will call this person “harry” — you can think of harry Truman, harry houdini, harry potter, or any other person (called harry or not — it could be James Bond for example) who you can easily imagine in various situations. When we mention harry in a story, always picture this same person. at the moment all the stories have pictures with them, but later on we’ll be getting you to visualize the stories yourself, and if you make objects and people specific and particular it will help to make the images you create as memorable as possible.

/ Harry was chasing the tractor wheel, as fast as he could before it flattened the children. Luckily the fairy saw what was happening, and wrote a message “Run!” in the sky with her wand, so that the children scattered just in time.

The second stroke starts just below the top of the first stroke, although in some typefaces the character looks symmetrical. There is a very similar character, “enter” (see 219a), which we’ll meet much later in the book. When “person” is used as the left-hand side of a character it is compressed into the form 亻 (see 13a below).