批評
ひひょう · hihyou · JLPT N3 · noun
criticism
📝 批 judge + 評 appraise = criticism; the critic goes hee-hyoh!
評 (hyou) also appears in 評価 hyouka, evaluation, and 評判 hyouban, reputation. Its 言 radical means speech. 批 has the hand radical 扌, as in marking a paper. A judgment written by hand and spoken aloud is a review.
批 — hand radical 扌 + 比 (compare, phonetic)
批 is a semantic-phonetic compound: the hand radical 扌 signals an action done with the hand, while 比 supplies the sound (bǐ → pī). Its original sense was to strike or slap with the hand, which extended to 'push aside,' then to 'judge' or 'comment on' (as in 批评), and finally to 'a batch' of things handled together.