Q&A for How to Tell Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Writing Apart

Kanji are Chinese characters. If the writing you're looking at is made up solely of kanji without any other types of characters, it is most likely Chinese. If you see other characters that look different, such as Japanese hiragana, you're more likely reading Japanese. Even though Japanese uses some of the same kanji that appear in Chinese, they may be pronounced differently or even have a different meaning. If you see kanji alongside Korean script, it typically represents a word borrowed from Chinese.

It depends on the language. Filipino/Tagalog or Spanish to English is more accurate, since Filipino/Tagalog and Spanish have the same/similar sentence structure to English. As Korean and/or Chinese has a drastically different sentence structure, translating it to English is really hard and the translator might get confused.

If you have a smartphone, download the Google Translate app. It allows you to point your phone at a text and get an automatic translation. If you know someone who knows Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you can also ask them.

You should be able to tell the difference by looking at the size and how heavy the stroke is.

If you expose yourself to the different languages, you'll learn the difference.

If your first step is to determine which language the text is written in, then this may be helpful. However, this article is not going to help you do anything but potentially identify the language.

You can try using your track pad to write the characters.

Being able to tell the languages apart will not help with pronunciation unless you know what the symbols actually mean.

While Chinese characters can appear in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese writing, you can tell Chinese and Japanese writing apart. The written Japanese language also has its own characters, so if the writing only has Chinese characters, then it's Chinese. Also, if the writing consists of complex square characters, then it's Chinese. Chinese characters are extremely detailed and strokes don't cross outside the square perimeter of any character, which gives a line of script a consistent, uniform appearance. Japanese has a more open and airy style of script.

No, kanji is actually used in Japanese writing. However, kanji is similar to Chinese writing, which is known as hanzi, and uses many of the same letters. But, kanji also has 2 additional syllables called hiragana and katakana, which don't appear in hanzi. Many hanzi letters appear in other languages such as Korean and Japanese, but there are differences between the way other languages use them, such as punctuation and the way the letters are represented.

Kanji is the written form of the Japanese language. 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. 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.

Koreans use Hangul, which is different Hangul letters representing sounds placed together to make a character. The Chinese character system has pinyin, which is basically the word romanized, but you need to memorize each characters to read Chinese. Usually, it is not the same system but you may see a few Chinese characters in old Korean text.

Both, since Japanese doesn’t use spaces, Kanji is used to differentiate between words. Without Kanji, Japanesewouldlooklikethis.