Finally, romaji—the familiar Latin script you are used to from English and other Western languages—can be found everywhere, from product packaging to company names.Below is the description of colour orange, employing katakana, hiragana, and kanji, all in the same sentence:As you can see, due to its use of hiragana & katakana, Japanese is slightly more airy and spacious than Chinese.As a general rule of thumb, unlike Chinese and Korean, Japanese also doesn’t use any form of question or exclamation marks, but you may still meet them in some situations.The Korean language, in mid-15th century, transitioned to hangul—the only script in the world made by an individual, for which the theory and motives behind its creation have been fully set out and explained.Hangul is known as one of the most scientific writing systems in the world, and is neither based on ancient written languages, nor an imitation of another set of characters.In South Korea, you can still meet hanja—Chinese characters—every once in a while, but the script is quickly becoming obsolete.Notice the many circular shapes used in hangul—these are almost non-existent in the other two languages and so make the script easy to recognize.Also, unlike Chinese and Japanese, Korean has completely adopted European punctuation marks, from commas to question marks, and space-delimits words and sentences.A good strategy when it comes to distinguishing the written form of South-East-Asian languages is:As you can see, you don’t really need to learn the individual languages to distinguish between them.

To tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing, look out for ovals and circles for a sign that it’s Korean, since these shapes are not usually used in Chinese or Japanese. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws.

See here for a … While Chinese characters can appear in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese writing, you can tell Chinese and Japanese writing apart. We know ads can be annoying, but they’re what allow us to make all of wikiHow available for free. However, the 3 scripts used for these 3 different languages are quite different. By using our site, you agree to our Even if you look at some of the Japanese culture, there are some adoption of cultural and religious materials from China too.

You could potentially learn to speak fluent Japanese and be able to communicate perfectly with other people in Japanese without ever learning to read or write kanji. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws. In most other languages that use the Chinese family of scripts, notably Korean, Vietnamese, and Zhuang, Chinese characters are typically monosyllabic, but in Japanese a single character is generally used to represent a borrowed monosyllabic Chinese morpheme (the on'yomi), a polysyllabic native Japanese morpheme (the kun'yomi), or even (in rare cases) a foreign loanword. This image is not<\/b> licensed under the Creative Commons license applied to text content and some other images posted to the wikiHow website. It allows you to point your phone at a text and get an automatic translation. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws. wikiHow, Inc. is the copyright holder of this image under U.S. and international copyright laws. But, kanji also has 2 additional syllables called hiragana and katakana, which don't appear in hanzi.

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After all, kanji are Chinese characters, right? Can I use this as a first step to translate a text? So, are they DIFFERENT?

If you see other characters that look different, such as Japanese hiragana, you're more likely reading Japanese. But if you want a full understanding of the Japanese language, you need to be able to read it, so it's a good idea to learn kanji. This image is not<\/b> licensed under the Creative Commons license applied to text content and some other images posted to the wikiHow website. If you see loose, wavy lines that aren’t limited to a small box, you’re probably looking at Japanese writing.

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\u00a9 2020 wikiHow, Inc. All rights reserved. If your first step is to determine which language the text is written in, then this may be helpful. Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered.All tip submissions are carefully reviewed before being published

Japanese makes use of kanji (mostly similar to hanzi), but also has two syllabaries of its own: hiragana and katakana. Even though Japanese uses some of the same kanji that appear in Chinese, they may be pronounced differently or even have a different meaning. Moving on to Japanese, the language has the highest number of official scripts in the world.