Grauw’s blog
Distinguishing Japanese from Chinese
Today’s lesson: how to tell apart Japanese and Chinese. A lot of people have trouble with this, so I’ll explain the differences.
You can recognise that a text is Japanese by the amount of simple characters in it. Japanese writing is composed of both Kanji (Chinese) and Kana (Japanese) characters, while Chinese only uses Kanji (in Chinese: 中文字, pronounced ‘zhōng wén zì’). The Kana characters are much simpler than Kanji characters are, although simple Kanji characters do exist (e.g. 一 meaning ‘one’). Also, Kanji characters don’t use round shapes very often, while Hiragana (a subset of Kana) is almost entirely made of round strokes.
E.g. this would be the Japanese word for ‘I’ using Kana: わたし
And this is the same word using Kanji: 私
A trademark character by which you can easily recognise Japanese is the の (pronounce: ‘no’), indicating a posessive relationship between two words (私の車 = ‘My car’) which is used very frequently.
As an example, this is a fragment of Chinese. By the way, the following fragments are fairly randomly taken, and I do not really know what they’re saying :) (well, I used Babelfish to ensure it’s not something extremely weird):
随便选择2种你喜欢的颜色，然后搅拌成新的一组颜色。有时候我们对颜色选择拿不太准的时候,可以试一下这个服务!也很适合色彩感觉不是很好的人使用,生成的颜色也相当不错!当然最主要的是它基于web.
As you can see, the characters are all very complex, and look very ‘pointy’. Now for some Japanese:
イースⅥの楽曲にボーカルをつけてアレンジしたアルバム。様式美ハードロック、フルオーケストラなど・原曲のイメージをそのままに圧倒的クオリティと多彩な魅力で迫る！
If you compare this with the Chinese above, you’ll notice that there is a lot more white visible, it contains simpler characters with round strokes such as の, て, つ, し, etc.. This Japanese also contains a fair amount of Katakana, a subset of Kana used to write foreign words (e.g. イメージ = ‘image’), which is more straight and pointy than Hiragana is. In other texts, you’ll regularly see even more characters with round shapes.
Well, from now on I hope you’ll be able to distinguish the two :).
Grauw
Comments
Not totally right by minghong at 2006-01-10 03:00
Actually “Kanji” (漢字) is a term used in Japan only. For Chinese people, we usually refer them as “Chinese characters” (中文字).
And for the block of chinese paragraph that you quoted, it means:
Randomly choose 2 of your favorite colors, then mix them to form a new color. Sometimes when you are not sure what color to pick, you can try this service! This is also very suitable for people who are not very sensitive to colors, and the generated color is pretty nice! Of course the most important thing is that it is based on the web.
And the corresponding Chinese (Traditional) characters:
隨便選擇2種你喜歡的顏色，然後攪拌成新的一組顏色。有時候我們對顏色選擇拿不太準的時候,可以試一下這個服務!也很適合色彩感覺不是很好的人使用,生成的顏色也相當不錯!當然最主要的是它基於web.
Thanks by Grauw at 2006-01-10 18:02
Thanks!
The Japanese refer to them as ‘Chinese characters’ as well, the ‘漢’ (kan) means Chinese and ‘字’ (ji) means character.
forms of Chinese characters by Dennis Sustare at 2007-01-05 17:15
You should also note that there are two distinct ways that the Chinese make Chinese characters: “traditional” (used in Taiwan) and “simplified” (used in mainland China). They can appear very different from each other. Also, when viewing artwork (both Chinese and Japanese) the characters may take artistic or ancient forms. So, for example, Chinese characters may not look “blocky” at all, such as in the grass style of writing. Very old forms of characters are sometimes more hieroglyphic in nature, looking more like pictures of what they represent. Finally, on signs and in comic books (manga/manhua) the characters may be very stylized and modified.
Korean by Grauw at 2006-01-09 16:22
As a bonus, some Korean:
Korean has an alphabet containing 24 shapes, and each Korean character is comprised of up to three of these basic shapes. Among these shapes are circles and straight lines, and by them it is easy to recognise Korean. Occasionally, Kanji (‘Hanja’ in Korean) are also used in South Korea, but not frequently.