Do Kanji mean the same things as Chinese characters?

26 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Most of the time yes, at least vaguely

3. i once met a girl at a party that had 安 tattooed on the back of her neck

   i asked her what it meant

   she said “it means PEACE”

   so i put away my $5

4. In a general sense, yes. If you can look at things more broadly then they cross over a lot. But if you’re more specific about it, no

5. It stays mostly similar, a Chinese could understand the basic idea of Japanese text, but not details.

6. As a native Chinese speaker, I always found the very common “大丈夫” mildly amusing. It literally means “macho man” in Chinese.

7. Many kanjis seem to have the same or similar meanings. But I think, there are often more meanings for one Kanji in Chinese than in Japanese.
   That would make sense as most Chinese I met claimed, they were able to understand written Japanese up to a certain point by just reading Kanji and guessing the context. Whereas Japanese people weren’t that confident about their ability to read Chinese.

8. One of my Japanese friends could understand tourist information and things like that when she took a trip to Beijing. I lived in China then moved to Japan and I could get around subways and bus stations using what I’d learnt in China.

9. One of my Japanese friends could understand tourist information and things like that when she took a trip to Beijing. I lived in China then moved to Japan and I could get around subways and bus stations using what I’d learnt in China – 出口 is the same in a Japanese and Chinese subway.

   Chinese characters only have one syllable attached to them, but the Japanese can have multiple syllables – chē vs ku-ru-ma in 車 for example. You probably wouldn’t be able to read Tale of Genji using just the Chinese readings tho.

   Apologies to any kanji purists out there for any vast over generalisations 😛

10. Here is an answer for you.

    https://eastasiastudent.net/regional/hanzi-and-kanji/

11. As a native Chinese speaker, I’d say around 70-80% of the time, you can either guess the meaning of the kanji, or the kanji means the same thing.

    There’s a good 20-30% that don’t mean the same thing in Chinese, or are uncommon/ out of usage characters that you are unfamiliar with.

    Also bear in mind that characters change their meaning when placed next to other characters.

12. My girlfriend has only taken 1 semester of Japanese but they don’t really teach kanji beyond a couple things besides watashi and kurumi or something. It has been a while since we’ve been in class. She plays a lot Japanese gacha games and somewhat cruises through those using vague understandings since she’s already fluent in Chinese.

    My other friend is in the process of studying Japanese and he uses his fluency in chinese to get through a lot of the kanji. Interestingly enough he struggles with hiragana and katakana somewhat because the “random” characters next to kanji confuse him sometimes.

13. Came from chinese, kanji stands for chinese “Han(the dynasty) Characters”, which is where they adopted it into japanese and applied their own use to it in japanese.

14. No actually. But sometimes you’d find it the same for some words

15. Problem is, China switched to simplified characters, so while similar, they may not look the same anymore.

16. [deleted]

17. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. A few conditions below:

    1. Kanji originated from Chinese and both Chinese and Japanese kept the original meaning. It can be everywhere, such as 人、雨 and a lot more.
    2. Kanji originated from Chinese but either Chinese or Japanese changed the meaning afterwards. 湯 means hot water in classic Chinese (not used any more) and in modern Chinese it now means soup. Japanese kept the original meaning. 謝る used to mean apologizing is classic Chinese too, but in modern Chinese it only means appreciation.
    3. Vocabs created from Japan and introduced into Chinese starting from the early 20th century. These include words such as 経済、銀行、課金, which (although made by Kanji) created by Japanese and introduced to Chinese. To the English language, the whole process would be similar to having 和製英語 introduced back into English.
    4. Words that do not have the same meaning, or have no equivalent in another language.

    These are just some observations that I have noticed when I was learning classical Chinese and Japanese. Modification to the character itself is not included because it would be too complicated. I also did not include all the conditions above because I don’t research in languages or whatsoever (LOL). Feel free to correct / add more to my comment! 🙂

18. Despite my earlier comment pointing out characters with meanings that only exist in China (and there are plenty more examples), I found once I’d gotten around 1,000 kanji under my belt, and a fair bit of vocabulary, that I could understand around 35% of the Chinese I’d encounter, which whet my appetite to study Chinese more directly – it was frustrating to look at a block of Chinese and have a solid sense of enough of a word smattering to give me a sense of the topic, but not understand much of what’s actually being said. So if the question *behind the question* is, “Will what I learn about kanji help me automatically learn some things towards Chinese,” then I think the answer is “Yes—somewhat!”

    That being said, Chinese use hanzi for denoting their grammar, too, which are uses Japanese mostly doesn’t put them toward (Japanese uses okurigana and particles mostly). And, too, as someone elsewhere pointed out, many of the “same” characters don’t look the same—sometimes *very* different!—in Chinese, so you may wind up learning the same character twice.

    It’s not true of the more commonly used (in mainland China, Singapore, and elsewhere) simplified characters, but if you take the effort to learn the traditional character forms that are used primarily in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then I’ve found that actually applies in Japanese more than I would have thought. Older Japanese text – and even some modern things I’ve seen around that wanted to “look” old – do use the traditional Chinese forms sometimes, and it has come in handy.

19. 手紙 is a letter/mail in japanese but it means toilet paper in chinese

20. yes

21. Dont know much Chinese but I’ve noticed a few things from observations and talking to friends. Chinese have simplified characters of course but on top of that some of them are used differently.

    The character 好 in Chinese means good and you’ll notice it most in the Mandarin greeting
    你好 (Ni hao). For Japanese 好 means good but it’s also frequently used in the word “to like” 好き

    Another example is the kanji character for “I” 私. I looked 私 in a Chinese dictionary and it lists the meaning as “private”. So it’s not used to mean “I” like it does in Japanese. Instead I’ve seen that Chinese people tend to use the character 我 which I’ve only seen used in Japanese once. It was in a historical anime where a king would refer to himself as 我々 for the “royal we” .

    If anyone has more information to elaborate on these words, I’d be really curious to know. Especially since these are only observations I’ve made and can’t be sure on all of it.

22. 好 is “like” (e.g. I like this) but “good” in Chinese. Close, but not quite it. Almost all Kanji have at least a slight discrepancy in meaning from their Chinese counterpart, but they do usually carry the same general idea/vibe.

23. No, they’re not always the same meaning

24. As many people here have commented, Kanji can have the same meaning as Chinese characters. However, most of the time, these two languages do not match. This is because although kanji characters were formed form the Chinese language, Japan already had the ability to read and speak their own language, Japanese. So Japanese people matched together kanji and Chinese characters regarding is they sounded similar, not if their meanings match. This is the origin of Hiragana as well!

25. In ancient times Japan ripped the alphabet system from China so used to be extremely similar however after a while they eventually made up their own alphabet system

26. こんにちは、私は基本的にこれを Google 翻訳を通して書いたので、日本語か Google 翻訳も使用した場合はこれを読むことができます