Talk:Kanji

Clarify meaning - monosyllabic is the most common?

This sentence " This contrasts with on'yomi, which are monosyllabic, and is unusual (my emphasis) in the Chinese family of scripts, which generally use one character per syllable – not only in Chinese, but also in Korean, Vietnamese, and Zhuang; polysyllabic Chinese characters are rare and considered non-standard." seems to me to contradict itself. Shouldn't it rather say the equivalent of "On'yomi is monosyllabic which is the most usual in the Chinese family of scripts... " ? Bj norge (talk) 10:07, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

There is no error. A beginner in the language will rarely come across characters with long readings, but readings of three or even four syllables are not uncommon. This (the fact that polysyllabic kun readings are common) contrasts with on'yomi, which are monosyllabic, and ("this" i.e. the frequency of polysyllabic kun readings) is unusual in the Chinese family of scripts, which generally use one character per syllable—not only in Chinese, but also in Korean, Vietnamese, and Zhuang; (in all these languages) polysyllabic Chinese characters are rare and considered non-standard. — Tonymec (talk) 23:26, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

should AD be replaced with CE

afterall it is just shoving religion down our thoats on a article about a non religious subject shouldn't it be CE not AD for this porpuse Dankpods (talk) 00:21, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Cleaning up the mess

A lot of this article is a mess. In particular:

• Multiple sections completely lack inline citations
• The readings section is overly verbose - in particular the subsection 'When to use which reading', which also cites no sources, presents a massive block of text could certainly be made a little more concise

I would like to clean this up but can't find the time and also probably lack the expertise to do so. Any volunteers? — Jthistle38 (talk) 23:55, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Kanji and Traditional Chinese writing differentiation

Traditional Chinese writing and Kanji are literally the same thing, so why the heck is there a differentiation? Kanji and traditional Chinese writing should all link to the same article because Kanji is just the Japanese pronunciation of traditional Chinese writing. This is like having two articles for English writing, one called American English writing and the other called British English writing. It's the same thing. Correct me if I'm wrong. Alexysun (talk) 01:06, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

"The term kanji in Japanese literally means "Han characters".[4] It is written in Japanese by using the same characters as in traditional Chinese, and both refer to the character writing system known in Chinese as hanzi (traditional Chinese: 漢字; simplified Chinese: 汉字; pinyin: hànzì; lit. 'Han characters')." This is a paragraph from the article that proves my point. Alexysun (talk) 01:09, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi - two things:

1. What action are you actually proposing here? Merging Traditional Chinese characters and Kanji?
2. They're not actually the same thing. Kanji are the set of characters derived from traditional Chinese characters. The sets of characters used in traditional Chinese writing and Japanese writing are not the same - traditional Chinese uses some characters not usually adopted as kanji, and some kanji have been simplified from their traditional Chinese equivalents (as happened post-1945).

— Jumbo T (talk) 13:30, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

To go from the end, Jumbo T's comment: "They're not actually the same thing." is simply wrong. As Alexysun says, kanji is precisely the Japanese word referring to "Chinese characters" (which would therefore obviously be a better English term to use). There really is no "they": there is no "set of characters" identified as "kanji" as opposed to, what, "non-kanji kanji" (非漢字漢字？). Of course there is a list called 常用漢字 recommended for general use in Japanese, and there are all sorts of variant forms, including the Beijing simplifications made in the 1970s. A Japanese speaker might say that these are not used in Japan, but would not claim they are "not kanji". Actually, even this is not as clearcut as you might think. (Sorry, I don't have an easy way of writing Chinese, so bear with my description...) I went to Tokyo on the bus the other day, so got the usual quadrilingual CJKE description of where we were going: "Tokyo sta." (-tion). In J this is 東京駅; in K it's the same rendered with the K readings in hangul; in C it is written with the 1970s simplified form of 東, and also with a different character for station. But when I brought my Triumph Bonneville to Japan in 1978, the Tokyo office arranged to engrave some sort of serial number on it, and lo and behold there was the same simplified form of 東. If I had asked them, do you think they would say it was "not the kanji for East"?

Going back to the OP: you are basically right, but this is WP, where being right is not even considered particularly relevant. But I do not think there is a problem with having an article on "Use of Chinese characters in Japanese". Imaginatorium (talk) 14:07, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium: I must partially disagree with you here -- @Alexysun's initial comment was that "Traditional Chinese writing and Kanji are literally the same thing". This is demonstrably untrue. I think @Jumbo T's qualifying comments must be taken into account, pointing out that the set of kanji as used in Japanese is disjunctive enough from the set of traditional (non-simplified) hanzi used in Chinese to produce a Venn diagram with significant non-overlapping sections.

Consider the Japanese Kanji / Traditional Chinese Hanzi non-matching pairs compiled in wikt:Category:CJKV characters simplified differently in Japan and China, which currently includes 494 entries. Some of these glyph forms are only used in Japanese, some only in Traditional Chinese, some only in Simplified Chinese, and some are used for both Traditional and Simplified Chinese but not for Japanese.

Take, for instance, 検. This glyph form is only used in Japanese. Traditional Chinese uses 檢, and Simplified uses 检. A reader of Chinese would probably recognize the Japanese character enough to understand the meaning, but it is not really correct to say that the Japanese form is "Chinese", strictly speaking.

Some of the glyph differences are more divergent, such as JA 伝, Trad 傳, and Simplified 传, or JA 択, Trad 擇, and Simplified 择, or JA 円, Trad 圓, and Simplified 圆.

Note too that there is a divergence of meaning between the English word "kanji" and the Japanese word 漢字 (kanji) -- the English word is specific to Japanese contexts, whereas the Japanese word does mean closer to what you and Alexysun contend, something more like "Chinese characters" as a generalized category. For purposes of the English-language Wikipedia, the English sense is more pertinent.

HTH, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:18, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jumbo T @Eirikr The reason why there are differing "glyphs" is because, as the article states, the Japanese simplified the characters after 1945 around the same time as Simplified Hanzi. Before 1945, it was identical. Kanji is literally just the pronunciation of Hanzi--漢字/汉字--in Japanese. Same thing with the Hanja (Korean). It's not a thing, it's just a different pronunciation of two characters-漢字. It's just Hanzi at the end of the day.

My purpose for pointing this out was because I wish there to be a clearer description that they are indeed the same thing.

I know that you'll say that they're still different because of the post-1945 simplification. There's a reason why there's a separate article from Hanzi called Simplified Chinese characters. A proposal to solve this would be: combine this article with Hanzi and then create an article called Simplified Kanji.

Alexysun (talk) 01:27, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Kanji (as the term is used in English) are CJK characters as used in Japan. The same ideograph pair, with the same "CJK characters" meaning in Japanese and Chinese, is read hanzi in English in China-related contexts. Some kanji been simplified by respect to their Chinese equivalents, usually in a similar fashion but often not as extremely as in Simplified Chinese. Others have been invented in Japan, and of these, a few have been borrowed back into Chinese, others (most of them IIUC) haven't. Conversely, many Traditional Chinese characters are unused in Japan: not only they aren't taught in schools, AFAIK they have neither an on nor a kun reading. I believe it would be fair to say that kanji (as used in Japan) and hanzi (as used in China) have a common origin, but that with the flow of history they diverged from each other and nowadays refer to two different though related writing systems. Similarly in the domain of speech, French, Italian, Spanish, etc. all have a common origin in common Romance and in Vulgar Latin, but nowadays they aren't a single language anymore.

Additionally, IIUC the syntax of hanzi OT1H and of kanji (usually interspersed with kana) OTOH is not the same anymore, because rather than write the characters in the order they would be in in Classical Chinese, the Japanese kanji are now written in the order corresponding with modern Japanese syntax, and hiragana are added for "empty words" (flexions, particles, etc.) and katakana for "foreign words" (words borrowed from languages other than Chinese and possibly some other East-Asian languages). — Tonymec (talk) 01:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Question about Japanese text

There’s nothing wrong with this, but what’s the font the Japanese Wikipedia usually uses when addressing an article? 火佐木 (talk) 22:16, 10 May 2024 (UTC)