Simplified Chinese Character Writing for learners of Chinese with a Japanese language proficiency: Precautions from a Contrastive Study การเขียนอักษรจีนประยุกต์สำหรับผู้เรียนภาษาจีนที่มีพื้นความรู้ภาษาญี่ปุ่น: ข้อพึงระวังจากการศึกษาเปรียบต่าง

Abstract

This article presents differences between Simplified Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji characters that may cause problems of Simplified Chinese character writing for learners of Chinese with a Japanese language proficiency. This research aims to: (1) analyze differences between the appearance of Simplified Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji characters; (2) study the statistical proportion of differences between aforementioned character sets; and (3) synthesize precautions of Simplified Chinese character writing for learners of Chinese with a Japanese language proficiency. The data studied in this research are from 3,500 commonly used Chinese characters and 2,136 commonly used Japanese Kanji characters. The analysis of differences between the appearance of the characters relies on the Chinese and Japanese character dictionaries with the character writing concept of Wang Xiurong (2013).

The finding of the research was that there are 2 types of differences between the appearance of Simplified Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji characters. The first type is the differences that do not affect the interpretation but different from the writing tradition. Most of the differences are caused by the stroke style of the character. The second type is the differences that affect the interpretation which are caused by the change of character simplification of Simplified Chinese character and Japanese Kanji character. Most of the differences are due to the independently different form of the character’s counterpart between two languages.