sashimi wrote:
I think japanese kanji is derived from traditional chinese and there is no chinese kanji..just japanese kanji. Chinese is mandarin.
I haven't learn any kanji yet but whenever i stumble onto kanji, i pronounce them as chinese words :sweat: eg. ’j—(dan jo) in kanji is male and female. But that word in chinese hanyu pinyin is nan (2) nu (sorry the particular u just won't appear here so I substituted u) (3)..which also has the same meaning. :beaten:
Well, kind of.
There IS Chinese kanji. The word 'kanji' comes from the Mandarin pronunciation - 'hanzi'. Not only that, Chinese consists of way more dialects than just Mandarin. There's Cantonese, Taiwanese, Hakka, and many others.
You're right about it being derived from traditional Chinese, though.
many of the words that Japanese used, such as –Ú(me) for "eye," are classical words in Chinese. The characters for "eye" in Mandarin are ŠááË(yanjing). This is because Chinese characters were imported from China beginning in (don't quote me on this date) around 700AD.
Obviously, when a language borrows a writing system, and then the language and writing systems of both develop separately, they are going to evolve in different ways. This not only changes in what used to be the same characters, but also differences in meanings.
All that aside, the fact is is that many Japanese can look at Chinese and get the gist of what the sentence says, and Chinese can do the same with Japanese. Something like English and Spanish; we use (basically) the same alphabet, but that doesn't mean that an English speaker can read Spanish perfectly or the other way around.
HTH,
‘‰¤š