Well, the answer to this question is yes and no. Japanese writing consists of three kinds of scripts used in conjunction. One of these scripts is the kanji, which consists of Chinese characters. These characters are the same as the Chinese. However, the story does not end here, because the Japanese also use two other kinds of scripts, the hiragana and katakana. These two together are called the kana. The kana are phonetic scripts and each character is used to write a syllable. These two syllabaries are different from Chinese writing and Chinese people cannot read them. The Japanese, on the other hand, are able to get the meaning out of a Chinese newspaper because it uses only characters that are also in Japanese. Sometimes there are minor differences between the meanings of kanji. The same kanji means "to run" in Japanese and "to go" in Chinese, for example. Or the same word means "hot water" in Japanese and "soup" in Chinese, this is why Chinese people find it amusing to see that the hot water tap in Japan has "soup" written on it.

It is also important to keep in mind, that while both the Japanese and Chinese writing systems use kanji as their basic constituent, the languages of these two nations have nothing to do with each other linguistically. This is similar to how the English, Polish, and Hungarians are all using the same Latin alphabet (with some minor modifications), even though the languages themselves are completely unrelated to each other. Japanese newspaper with three kinds of scripts on it © 2002 Logoi.com. All Rights Reserved