Impress Your Friends with Little Effort
Wednesday 18th October
One of the most common questions I am asked when people realise I’m into Japanese and Chinese is…
“How do you tell the difference?”
Well, I will answer that for you right now and you will be able to impress your chums and associates. You won’t have to have even an inkling of what the writing means, but you’ll still be able to differentiate.
Both languages use what are known as ‘Han’ characters - pictographs developed during the Han dynasty in China. However, the difference is quite clear once you know what to look for.
The Chinese use the characters directly - one character per syllable, each character expressing a simple concept. Characters can be combined to construct more complex ideas:
你忙吗？ - you/busy/(question)?
“Are you busy?”
我要喝茶 - I/want/drink/tea
“I want to drink tea”
Japanese, however, took the Han characters and integrated them into their already existing language. The existing language had a grammar which was not compatible with the Han characters, so a second set of characters exists, called hiragana. These characters are simpler and spell the spoken grammar phonetically. These characters are the key to telling the difference as seen in a repeat of the above phrases in Japanese (with grammar characters highlighted in green):
忙しい です か - busy is (question)
“Are you busy?”
In this example, we see that the character 忙 (busy) is identical between the two languages. However, in the Japanese, it’s surrounded by many of those less complex ‘grammar’ characters.
And so for the next phrase:
茶 を 飲みたい - tea (object marker) want-to-drink.
“I want to drink tea”
We can again see an identical character - 茶 (tea). But again, the hiragana characters are used to mark the object of the sentence and change the simple 飲 (drink) character into ‘want to drink’.
Note that the Japanese do not put spaces between their words - I have added those to aid understanding.
Side by side, you should be able to spot these grammar characters due to their simple construction. Have a go… with some snippets from today’s news. Answers in the comments.
1. ついに始まる番号ポータビリティ
2. 日本议员集体参拜靖国神社
3. あなたのネットワークを保護するために必要な対策はこちら
4. 中国宣布对台农产品大幅优惠措施
5. 北高市长候选人择吉日登记
6. 謎の電波障害解消へ、米空母周辺
In the next installment, I’ll show you how to read all those Japanese t-shirts which look like this:
デザイナー
and this:
ベスト・ムジック・クラブ
There’s a neat trick involved.
1. Japanese - Did you spot the grammar characters ついに and まる? There are also special characters ポータビリティ which will be covered in the next installment.
2. Chinese - A bit of a trick because the first two characters 日本 mean ‘Japan’. So if you’re a stamp collector you might have been thrown!
3. Japanese - Loads of grammar characters - あなたの/を/するために/な/はこちら and some of those specials again ネットワーク.
4. Chinese - This time, the first two characters 中国 mean ‘China’.
5. Chinese - Once again, none of those give-away Japanese characters.
6. Japanese - Pat yourself on the back if you got this one, long Han character compounds, with only の and へ as giveaways.
The curly の is always a useful giveaway, because it’s used very commonly, being the posessive particle (ie. fred’s car = fredのcar). It doesn’t appear in Chinese.
stu
18 Oct 06 at 9:35 am
About half past four.
JG
18 Oct 06 at 9:38 am
You didn’t even try, JG.
stu
18 Oct 06 at 9:40 am
aww, I got 5 and 6 wrong (thought 人 might’ve been a simple character, but also half-remember it as “man”)
sweavo
18 Oct 06 at 9:42 am
6/6! The poosessive symbol is a help, isnt it?
Lordhutton
18 Oct 06 at 9:43 am
Sweavo: Oh yes! I didn’t spot that in there. And yes, you’re entirely right 人 is man.
Hutters: Good work! Also ‘poo-sessive’ is conjuring up some scary thoughts.
stu
18 Oct 06 at 9:58 am
5/6 here.
Omally
18 Oct 06 at 11:12 am
0/6 here - guess I must try harder
Mr Hedgehog
18 Oct 06 at 1:45 pm
6/6 for me, but then I do work with both Japanese and Chinese native speakers. Incidentally, the other way to work out the difference is to look for the full stops; Chinese uses ones like us ., but Japanese uses open circles. At least that’s my observation anyway.
Carol
18 Oct 06 at 1:52 pm
From what I can find on the net, Chinese sites are using an open circle too. However, I do know that Japanese never use a closed full-stop, so if there was one, it’d be a sure sign of Chinese. But I don’t think an open one guarantees Japanese.
stu
18 Oct 06 at 2:04 pm
I really must find out how to get japanese and chinese characters on my PC.
Lisa
18 Oct 06 at 2:22 pm
Or not if you have no general interest in either
If you’re running XP, you need the East Asian Language Support which comes with it, but you’ll probably have to pop the CD in.
Control Panel - Regional and Language Options - Languages - Install files for East Asian Languages.
stu
18 Oct 06 at 2:26 pm
Yay - it worked without needing the CD. Which I was glad about as Adam has it stashed away somewhere.
I’d always thought that Chinese characters looked more ‘busy’ than Japanese - nice to see I was right!
Lisa
19 Oct 06 at 9:38 pm