The Kanji Appreciation Thread

Toritoribe · 26 May 2021

It's more likely "kanji/Chinese characters changed their forms from the original/ancient forms, not only in Japanese but also in Chinese." 繁体字 Traditional Chinese characters, which are mainly used in Taiwan or Hong Kong, are very close to Japanese kanji, especially traditional kanji. On the other hand, 簡体字 simplified Chinese characters, which are mostly used in Mainland China or Singapore, are very different. It's started to be used by the government of the People's Republic of China in 1950s.

日本語 Class · 16 Jun 2021

Me finding out Emoji (絵文字) origin is not related to emotion but to Japan

笑笑笑笑笑

I couldnt feel better when I learnt it

dozo · 8 Feb 2024

undrentide said:
As epigene san showed the good website explaining about どどいつ, I'm introducing another website which has a nice collection of どどいつ, some are very old and traditional, others are quite new.

たちはな亭
http://park17.wakwak.com/%7Etatihana/

Not really scientific but here are two nice sites.
漢字のなりたち
Short animation showing how the kanji was made from a picture(?).

篆書でGO!
Introducing some interesting 篆書 an ancient style of kanji which is now mainly used for 印鑑 (seal).
Some of them really look like picture than letters!

There should still be a difference between Japanese fonts and Chinese fonts. There are special Japanese fonts, but one thing is whether the Japanese font library should contain all Chinese characters.

dozo · 9 Feb 2024

dozo said:
There should still be a difference between Japanese fonts and Chinese fonts. There are special Japanese fonts, but one thing is whether the Japanese font library should contain all Chinese characters.

Japanese fonts Vs Chinese fonts

Majestic · 9 Feb 2024

Feeling rather spammy.

nice gaijin · 9 Feb 2024

I doubt @dozo is affiliated with freefonts, but their response to a comment from 2006 does seem pretty off-topic.

I don't think Chinese fonts contain hiragana and katakana by default, and there are differences between the character sets so of course there are different fonts for each language, but undrentide didn't mention anything about that.

Would you care to elaborate why you decided to quote that post and reply to it in this way?

nice gaijin · 23 Jun 2026

Well I wasn't expecting to double post years apart like this, but here we are.

I was thinking about posting this to the "should Japan abolish kanji" thread, but I think it's better placed here.

Context is crucial for figuring out which homonym you are using in a spoken sentence, but I feel like knowing the kanji helps me visualize the difference between the words, and separate them in my mind.

https://www.facebook.com/

Ukigumo · 23 Jun 2026

I regularly find myself thinking, 'if I knew what the kanji is for that word, I might have a better idea what it means"!

Kulern · 24 Jun 2026

Even though its hard to master. I do like the culture around symbols being a language. Almost like drawing and memorizing it (Though likely through pattern recognizing the stroke order)

Ukigumo · 24 Jun 2026

Kulern said:
Even though its hard to master. I do like the culture around symbols being a language. Almost like drawing and memorizing it (Though likely through pattern recognizing the stroke order)

You can't have dyslexia in languages such as Chinese (and some aspects of Japanese) that require the memorisation and recall of pictographs. I say 'some' Japanese because this doesn't apply to kana, which are abstract representation of sounds, like an alphabet and requires a sort of transliteration from the abstract (kana) into a sound.

mdchachi · 1 Jul 2026

Ukigumo said:
You can't have dyslexia in languages such as Chinese (and some aspects of Japanese) that require the memorisation and recall of pictographs. I say 'some' Japanese because this doesn't apply to kana, which are abstract representation of sounds, like an alphabet and requires a sort of transliteration from the abstract (kana) into a sound.

It depends on how you define dyslexia.

Client Challenge

There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts.

The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone.

People with dyslexia often find it difficult to recognize and understand words. Speakers of alphabetic languages, such as English or Russian, can have a problem converting letters into sounds. Dyslexics in these languages have reduced activity in a brain region called the left temporoparietal cortex.

But Chinese readers must learn the meanings of around 5,000 different characters, each corresponding to a word. Instead of letter-to-sound conversion problems, Chinese dyslexics have difficulties extrapolating from a symbol's shape to its sound and meaning.

Ukigumo · 1 Jul 2026

I was using a definition as elucidated by the originators of the 'cerebellar deficient hypothesis of dyslexia'; I used to work with Prof Rod Nicholson and the lovely Prof Angela Fawcett.

The Kanji Appreciation Thread

Toritoribe

松葉解禁

日本語 Class

後輩

dozo

後輩

dozo

後輩

Majestic

先輩

nice gaijin

Resident Realist

nice gaijin

Resident Realist

Ukigumo

後輩

Kulern

Sempai

Ukigumo

後輩

mdchachi

Moderator

Ukigumo

後輩

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