chapotraphouse

Its genuinely a good look at what goes on in a language learner's mind, it's almost identical to what happens when I try to make sense of Kanji but read it in the Hanzi meaning but in reverse.

Oh and the characters in 人民 mean "person-people" and the characters in 自由 mean "self-reason" I guess pointing to the freedom to act according to one's own conscience.

民 to me always evoked a parade banner, so it was easy for me to relate that to a general idea of "the people", "a nation", "folk" or "citizenry". Apparently the actual meaning of the character is an eye getting stabbed with a dagger, possibly because of an ancient practice of blinding slaves, so. I kinda prefer my own interpretation.

自 was a character I'd always remembered for its resemblance to 目 eye, just with a little tick at the top to distinguish it: if 日 sun with a tick at the top became 白 white, the sun's color, then 目 eye with a tick at the top could become 自 self, as in "in someone's eyes".

However it turns out that 自 is actually a pictogram of a nose because that's where East Asians point to when they go "Who, me?" — and for that matter 白 white is not actually derived from 日 sun.

A last thing I thought was kind of interesting, about that character 私 I mentioned: the swirly thing in the right half of the character is supposed to evoke the idea of "revolving around oneself", that was the original form of the character. Later a stalk of grain was added to the left-hand side, to evoke the idea of a privately-owned field. So it was from this original sense of "private" that in Japanese the character came to take on the meaning of "me", whereas this character never acquired this meaning in Chinese.