What is the difference between chinese characters and japanese characters
Answers
Answer:
Chinese is written entirely in hanzi. Japanese makes use of kanji (mostly similar to hanzi), but also has two syllabaries of its own: hiragana and katakana. ... The Chinese sentence above is written in them entirely, whilst the Japanese sentences only uses two (私 and 鰻).
Explanation:
Hanzi and kanji are the Chinese and Japanese pronunciations of the term 漢字 that is used in both languages. It refers to the Chinese characters that both languages make use of in their writing systems. Chinese is written entirely in hanzi, and Japanese makes heavy use of Chinese characters.
But are hanzi and kanji the same thing? They’re both 漢字 and could be translated as “Chinese characters”, but are the character sets the same?
I wrote about this before, saying that the Chinese and Japanese character sets are the same most of the time. I still stand by that statement, but I’ve been meaning to write a little more on the topic for a while. Note that what I’m interested in here is quite specifically the two character sets of hanzi and kanji, how much they overlap and where they vary. This is intended to be a very simplified, generalised overview of hanzi and kanji today for the casual reader.
This of course glosses over a huge swathes of detail, but it is meant to be easy to follow. The main thing it’s missing is any of the history of how the present situation came about, which is quite an interesting series of developments. What’s below is, hopefully, a casual summary of the obvious differences between hanzi and kanji character sets in the present day.
Hanzi and kanji are of course pronounced differently!
Let’s start with a super-obvious difference between hanzi and kanji. Despite being the same writing system (or at least very similar to each other), hanzi and kanji serve entirely different languages. As such, the Chinese pronunciation of a hanzi is usually very different to the Japanese pronunciation of the equivalent kanji (sometimes the pronunciations may be somewhat similar, though).
This actually extends further than Chinese and Japanese. Korean also uses Chinese characters, calling them hanja (한자), and the pronunciations are somewhat different again (although closer to Chinese than Japanese, as far as I know). Beyond that, China’s huge variety of dialects and language groups can also be written using hanzi, despite having very different pronunciations.
A quick example:
誠
That character is pronounced chéng in Mandarin Chinese but makoto or sei in Japanese. Note that there are multiple possible pronunciations for Japanese kanji, whereas the majority of hanzi in Chinese have only one possible pronunciation. There are some Chinese hanzi with multiple possible pronunciations, but they’re singled out as special in the category 多音字 (duōyīnzì - multiple reading characters).
This difference isn’t really that relevant to distinguishing the writing systems, but it might be helpful to be aware of this point if you’re totally unfamiliar with either language.
I think European languages use of the Latin alphabet makes an acceptable analogy for this. Many words may be written the same way across European languages but pronounced differently. This is similar in some ways to the situation with hanzi / kanji / hanja in East Asia (and very different in other ways).
hope it helps friend.
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