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Chinese characters in jpns and chns | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 1 of 70 17 March 2010 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
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To use some very rough numbers, the average well-educated Japanese person knows ca. 3000 characters and the average well-educated Chinese person knows ca. 5000 characters. The accuracy of those numbers aside, I think it's clear that Chinese requires knowledge of significantly more characters than Japanese. What accounts for this discrepancy? Is there a certain part of the language such as place names or grammatical terms in which Chinese uses a far higher diversity of characters than Japanese?
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| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5736 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 70 17 March 2010 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Your profile says you speak Japanese, shouldn't you know it then?
A good part of Japanese is kana, whereas EVERYTHING, including transliterations of names, grammar, and loanwords are in characters in Chinese. It seems rather obvious to me that you need more characters then, don't you think? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 3 of 70 17 March 2010 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
It's not clear to me what requires something in the magnitude of 2000 more characters. Most of the kana words I've seen written in Chinese are composed not of completely strange characters, but of ones I already know from Japanese. For example 西班牙,越南,法国,如果 are written in kana in Japanese but with characters in Chinese. However all of those characters are also common in Japanese so it doesn't help me to explain the 2000 "missing" characters that are present in common Chinese but not in common Japanese. Edited by lichtrausch on 17 March 2010 at 1:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5766 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 4 of 70 17 March 2010 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Post-war Japanese policy to reduce Kanji use may have helped to weed out the Classically-derived expressions that made pre-war Japanese so easy to read for the Chinese.
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| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5736 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 70 17 March 2010 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose minus273 is onto something. In 成语s (classical expressions) there are an awful lot of infrequent characters. I think if you hadn't those in Chinese, you'd easily get by with 1000-2000 characters less.
Also, don't underestimate the characters you need for transliterations and onomatopoeia. That's easily a couple hundred characters too. PS: onomatopoeia in Chinese: 象声. "Likeness sounds". Sometimes, just sometimes, Chinese is good to its slaves. Edited by Pyx on 17 March 2010 at 5:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6295 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 6 of 70 17 March 2010 at 3:23am | IP Logged | ||
I suspect the average well-educated Japanese knows 10,000 different ways to pronounce those 3000 characters. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6769 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 7 of 70 17 March 2010 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd go with Jimbo's explanation. Most common kanji are used to write 1-3 Sino-Japanese word roots, borrowed
from China during different periods, as well as 1 or more native Japanese words, so Japanese gets more out of each individual character. However, a highly educated Japanese speaker probably knows a similar number of characters as an educated Chinese speaker. The fact that Japanese has been condensed into a list of 'common use' characters for school use doesn't eliminate the enormous preexisting body of Japanese literature and poetry that uses the rich variety of classical Chinese characters to its full potential. Edited by Captain Haddock on 17 March 2010 at 5:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6295 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 8 of 70 17 March 2010 at 6:53am | IP Logged | ||
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For some color on how many Kanji an educated Japanese person should know:
Kanji kentei http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei 1 person has voted this message useful |
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