Konnichiwa!!

Recently the Japanese have been inventing their own chinese characters for things like measurements. Is it poossible that one day, in the future, the Japanese will no longer use chinese characters but instead use the ones that they have made up??

From what I see, Today Japanese writing looks kinda different from 50 years ago. I mean, Japanese already dropped much of usage of Kanji. They use more Katakana. For example, during old time, Japanese refers America as 米国, but today they just use アメリカ.

I don't know about Japanese using home-made Kanji than imported Hanzi. Japanese have used Kanji since 5th Century. Now I am still seeing them using Kanji that are completely identified to Chinese. (shrugs)

I heard even the conservative Japanese want to use Kanji more since it is more 'traditional.'

The language just looks better with more Kanji.

and make japaneses shorter and easier for me to read..instead to spell out all those katagana etc...

Hanzi/Kanji owns them all.

No Jamasian thats preposterous, you obviously don't know enough about the japanese language or people.

I think it is highly likely that the Japanese will, eventually, abandon kanji. After all, the Koreans abandoned hanja

Koreans didn't abandon Hanja. At least not South Korea.

actually IMO it makes it looks inconsistent and weird. but that's jsut my opinion.

Not, completely, no. But standard Korean text doesn't contain any except for a few that everybody knows anyway (like 大, 小, 中, etc). The standard Korean greeting annyŏng haseyo is always written simply as 안녕하세요 and never with hanja as 安寧하세요. Most of the Koreans I know can barely read hanja save their names

From how I see it, the Japanese alphabet is too dependent on Kanji. They need a new alphabet.

u are wrong....actually japanese are adding new kanji to their system..


from my opinion, japanese should keep the chinese, because it make japanese look lot shorter.. otherwise they need to put space between the words just like english..

Otherwise we'd be writing konnichiwa (ha) in Hiragana forum which uses 5 symbols rather than kanji - which does it less, if their is a kanji form lol (I wouldn't know, but you get the idea lol)

^
There is a kanji form, it's 今日は but it's almost always used in hiragana, maybe to avoid confusion with kyou ha (きょうは) which is written with same kanji

What are the new characters?

Where is the article?

Will the Taiwanese follow suit?

LMAO.

Japan is said to add another 3000 characters.
Taiwanese already use 50,000 characters.LOL

gg

Why do you have to bring the Taiwanese in?

Because judging by "Observations of a series of events" Taiwan will most likely follow suit.

yeah, convert them all to one. or just use english alphabet would be much easier too, since they use katakana to write foreign words(mostly english) anyway..



i hope so

who gives a fu-k? if they want to abandon kanji, then do it. why do we even care again?

Lets all switch to brail!

You wish

You never wanted to read with your eyes closed?

No.........why would I?

It's the new cool thing.

Pffff...........about as cool as subtitles.........

Is that a deaf joke??

Braile? How much more difficult is it to read?

lol

Hiragana and Katakana


Kanji



Not that I have anything against Chinese characters however. I enjoy learning them

Hiragana and Katakana look like crap

not that I have anything against japanese characters however. I enjoy learning them

depending on who you ask, Hiragana and Katakana are Chinese characters, too

I was shocked at how similar they are to MPS, when a friend showed me
some are exactly the same, and most look very close
it's too bad China doesn't use a phoentic system other than pinyin

whats MPS?

^ Mandarin Phonetic System

Taiwan only, as far as I know, and I don't think it's used anymore, either.


Wikipedia seems to be blocked in China, so I can't load this page, but here you go anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPS2
This page does load, and has pictures: http://www.eslisland.com/life/Transliterat...uyin-Pinyin.htm



Japanese has articles, so spaces are not necessary.

OHHH MPS as in "tzu yin fu hao?" Yes! Now that I think about it...I guess they do kind of look alike! I learned it to help with the pronounciation of Hanzi. Very helpful stuff.

Why did Japanese include Kanji in the first place?

they didnt have a writing system of their own at the time

^ Are you sure?
I have seen old writings from Japan; there are extra characters (more than 46), and they look somewhat different than the current hiragana/katakana.
I was told that when these ancient character sets were used, the Japanese people did not use Kanji.
I'm not sure if that's true or not, though, and I don't know very much about the history of Japan's writing systems.


@ Chyna: I think it's alot easier for sounds like "zh," "q," and "x," as well as the two "e" sounds.
Your avatar just got a Kelly Chan song stuck in my head.
O I O, O O O, O I O O O O O!

I think they tend to look better in combination along with Kanji.

are you talking about this?

Maybe.
I don't know for sure.
I went to Japan on a student exchange about 7 years ago, and was told that there were extra characters (I think only two extra ones) for sounds that are no longer used in modern Japanese.
I don't see the extra characters in your chart.

I saw a few passages written with the old characters, and we also had a class on calligraphy, but I don't really remember much of it.
I suck hard at writing kanji with the brushes, though.
And floral arrangement was definitely not my thing, either.


EDIT: Now that I looked at your chart properly, I see it's just a comparison between hiragana and a few hanzi.
That would explain why it doesn't have the extra characters.

There are two extra letters in the chart. It's Wi and We. They are no longer to use.

EDIT: The chart only shows the evolution of Hiragana out of curved Hanzi/Kanji.

I see. How come they didn't cut all of Hanzi/Kanji out when they made their own system?


Yes! It definitely is. I still wonder about pinyin at times. I like MPS a LOT better.

LOL! This one day after I woke up, I went into the bathroom and saw all these post it notes on my mirror. One of them was this one. I thought they were hilarious so I took some pics.

yeah, I see them now.
I didn't take enough time to read it the first two times.

Me too.
But I've never studied Mandarin (formally), so I've never had any reason to learn MPS.
I'm teaching myself to read/write now, but no one in Chongqing uses these, so if I learn MPS, it'd just be for the hell of it.
MPS isn't hard, I might as well.

haha, good stuff!

Well, if they cut out Hanzi/Kanji, the language maybe would be very confused. For example, "flower" and "nose" would be はな or Hana in Japanese, but how can you tell if it's flower or nose by reading completely Hiragana/Katakana? Japanese use 花 for flower and 鼻 for nose...

because they were so used to it already. all of their vocabulary at the time was spelt using kanji. their own system was invented to spell words that were new like "computer" or "telephone". if you read japanese, the common words like "water" "love" "eat" "sleep" are all in kanji. kanji is still used roughly 40% of the time.

this was different in korea because only the nobility knew hanja. the common people were illiterate. and so when they invented their own system, they decided to abandon hanja altogether since most of the common people never knew it anyway. its only been in the last 50 years or so that common korean people began learning hanja.

Very interesting. So if they were to take the kanji out, it would be very confusing eh? So that won't be happening soon?

Taking kanji out would be ridiculous, itd take way too much time to just write in hiragana and katakana.

^Ya it does save alot of time and is pretty practical.



Actually katakana is mainly used for foreign words. But it's still phoenetic the same as Hiragana. Hiragana is probably the least commonly used and is basically used for particles and at the end of nouns/verbs in alot I believe. Also if there is a word and the Kanji isn't known, it's usually just written out in Hiragana (I'm not sure if this is just for children though or Japanese in general. Probably both).