Chinese languages

I have always been very fascinated by the unversality of the Classical Chinese from as far East as Korea to as far West as Vietnam (though, Cho Nam 字南 has effectively died out in Vietnam since almost two centuries ago), bridging the babel of speeches from all the Oriental educated classes with one common written script.

Is it possible today for a Japanese or Korean to read a Chinese text written in 'wenyan' by relying solely on his/her education in Kanji or Hanja, respectively (I do realise that it may not be so possible with baihuawen, given the many centuries of linguistic divergence)? I am given to understand that by today's standards, the average Japanese graduate would have mastered about 3,500 Kanji characters. A group of my Malaysian Chinese friends were discussing their names to some Japanese friends, and it was interesting to note that in all cases, every Chinese character in my friends' names had exactly the same meaning in contemporary Chinese as in contemporary Kanji.

Japanese study Chinese characters or kanji, but in school they learn only around 2000 of them, at least according to official character lists like the toyou kanji.

As for reading Classical or literary Chinese in Japanese, it is possible, and usually called kanbun (han wen). When reading poetry, they append the lines of text with small kana characters, and numbers which relate to the order the characters in the line are read.

As for Korea, they have 1800 hanja which they are supposed to learn, but increasingly, we hear that more and more Koreans are giving up Chinese characters, as they have a perfectly good system of representing their own spoken language.

Dyl.

Yes, I have heard about the 常用漢字 list as used in the Japanese education system. Though, I was also given the understand that there has been talk about expanding this list a a few hundred more characters in order to accomodate more words for Japanese personal names.

It is interesting how Kanji as used in the Japanese language has retained the meanings of Chinese characters in wenyan, which are now seldom used or obsolete in baihuawen. For instance, if you look at the signs at the Singapore Chiang Airport, 'luggage' is written as 行李 in Chinese and 荷物 in Japanese. 荷, apart from being commonly known as the lotus leaf, also meant "to carry on the shoulder" in Classical Chinese.

Kanji also makes more extensive use of the locative marker 所 which is now seldom used in Chinese (e.g. 所在 for "place/location" is now preserved only in Min dialect speech). My late grandaunt (a Hakka) used to write "home" as 住所 (which I actually prefer) rather than adopting the baihuawen 家. In fact, when writing in general, I tend to gravitate towards using 何處, 為何 and 如何 - rather than 那里, 為甚麽 and 怎樣. Part of the reason is because I am not officially Chinese-educated, and picked up all my written Chinese through my elders (most of whom wrote beautiful Chinese, yet spoke only Hakka and Cantonese) without knowing a word of Mandarin until much later. Hence, my bias towards the Southern dialects and wenyan.

Chu Nom, not Cho Nam

http://218.69.114.37/wf/~CDDBN/Y690481/PDF/INDEX.HTM
http://218.69.114.37/wf/~CDDBN/Y690478/PDF/INDEX.HTM

http://218.69.114.37/wf/~CDDBN/Y690087/PDF/INDEX.HTM
http://218.69.114.37/wf/~CDDBN/Y563019/PDF/INDEX.HTM

As for reading Classical or literary Chinese in Japanese, it is possible, and usually called kanbun (han wen). When reading poetry, they append the lines of text with small kana characters, and numbers which relate to the order the characters in the line are read.

I can recommend Effective Language Learning. It has some information on this: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/