| Jianshuo, this is a very interesting post. Thank you for letting people from all over the world learn more about our language and culture. It is really true that "...the written language of the whole China is the same. No matter how different people pronounce, when they write it down, it is the same language!". Even in our neighboring countries, their characters were borrowed from or influenced by the Chinese characters. Especially in Japanese, their Kanji means Chinese character in Japanese language. Though pronounced in totally different ways, the character itself has almost the same or similar meaning in Chinese. Therefore, when I was travelling in Japan, I didn't find it too difficult to walk around because I can read and guess a lot from their characters. It is also very useful to communicate with the Japanese by writing down Chinese characters. One day, it was raining and my friend wanted to walk out of the hotel to buy some stuff. He saw an umbrella at the door. He then wrote to the Japanese front-desk girl using just two characters "伞用?" (umbrella use?). The girl, who could not speak English, smiled and replied with three characters "他人物" (other people's stuff). So my friend could understand it belonged to others not the hotel. Isn't this amazing? Therefore, I still cannot understand why the Koreans abandoned the Chinese characters Hanja. Sorry for the long comment. :) |
Chinese Characters