LLearn Japanese

Japanese characters and their Chinese variants

Seeing if anyone ever came across this….

For those who know some Japanese/Chinese, was wondering if there is a list available somewhere which shows all the Japanese characters which have a Chinese variant (ie. not exactly the same character, but slight differences).

(ie. 従 in Japanese vs 從 or 从 in Chinese)

Or something that shows a word in Japanese and its close equivalent in Chinese.
Simply trying to add the Chinese word equivalent to my Japanese Core deck.

9 comments

  2. 1) Technically it may be more accurate to word it the other way around, “Chinese Characters with a Japanese variant”; “Chinese Characters and their Japanese variants”. What with the whole Shinjitai forms being derived from their Kyujitai forms thing.

    2) It sounds like for the most part you are asking for a list that shows the Shinjitai form of a Japanese Kanji and their corresponding Kyujitai/Traditional Chinese/Simplified Chinese Character forms

    3) Most relevant Shinjitai are included in the Jōyo Kanji List (there are of course exceptions)

    4) Maybe these lists will help?

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jōyō_kanji

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Shinjitai_and_Simplified_characters

    Individually Wiktionary is pretty handy on a Character by Character basis.

  4. Thanks all,

    Now wondering if there is a JLPT word list (ie. words with two kanjis together) and the Chinese/HSK equivalent. Its actually harder than I thought to lookup individual kanjis in a word, especially if there could be 3 variants of each.

    I’m trying to do a bulk match of 6000 Core words in excel.

  5. >(ie. 従 in Japanese vs 從 or 从 in Chinese)

    Have never seen this before, but I am continually amazed by just how ridiculously pointless Shinjitai is. I hate simplified Chinese even more, but at least it arguably has *some* benefits.

    What is the point in deleting one single stroke from 德/徳? Or 單->単? To save 10 milliseconds while writing it?

  6. The Unicode guys probably have the best list. Look up the Han Unification.

    It’s still not perfect because although many characters might have had the same origin, they get changed over time. There’s no perfect list and unicode’s version is somewhat controversial, but it’s the best that exists.

  8. Yes, there are. There are plenty of lists containing the “old form(s)” of characters. Lots of characters contain the “old form” of other characters (e.g. 聳, 嗅), which leads to a mess of old and new forms co-existing. You can even find old versions of some characters in Japanese IMEs (e.g. you can get 数 and 數 from typing かず).

    As for why characters change automatically after pasting and getting the characters to show right, it’s all got to do with Unicode. Some characters have their own codepoints (i.e. “slots”) per language and will always appear the same regardless of the font. In other cases, the variants share the same codepoint and the particular glyph displayed is locale-dependent (i.e. several glyphs share a codepoint and the one that’s used to represent a character depends on the language declared in the “text block” and the current font). As for why things are organized that way, I think political pressures had a lot to do with it.

    For Anki cards, I recommend wrapping text within HTML `<div>` or `<span>` tags with language attributes where appropriate to force the relevant sections to respect the language you want to use (e.g. `<div lang=”ja-JP”>{{SomeTagHere}}</div>`). You can make it fancier using CSS styling but I don’t want to make things too complex. For Chinese I believe the values are `zh-han` for traditional and `zh-hans` for simplified, but I could be wrong (I’ve seen people add country names, e.g. `zh-hans-CN`, `zh-han-TW`).

    If the stuff in the above paragraph doesn’t do the trick, you may also need to set fonts for each section. There’s another comment that covers that already so you can check that.

  9. So are you studying the language or only kanjis?

    Most of japanese kanjis are the traditional chinese writings. Chinese has simplified kanji which just take off some strokes from the radicals. If you’re only learning japanese don’t waste your time learning the differences between simplified kanji and japanese traditional kanji because that only will make more difficult your JAPANESE learning process.

    You can try to learn them once you’re more familiar with kanji, otherwise, good luck remembering useless info

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