Name: Anonymous 2009-02-18 5:41
hello,
i am studying japanese and just out of curiosity i have a couple of questions about chinese. oh of course i could just read it on teh wikipedia i guess but that would be too simple.
in my opinion the hardest part about the japanese writing system isnt even the kanji on their own but rather the thousands of compounds that you need to memorize. i heard every day chinese uses more hanzi than japanese, so how does that work? do they also combine more or less arbitrary characters to form new words as is done in japanese? i know that chinese characters usually only have 1 pronounciation so that should make it alot easier in that regard, but can you also guess the meaning of a compound word in chinese just by looking and combining the meaning of each individual character making up the compound or do you have to memorize pretty much every compound just as you have in japanese?
i am studying japanese and just out of curiosity i have a couple of questions about chinese. oh of course i could just read it on teh wikipedia i guess but that would be too simple.
in my opinion the hardest part about the japanese writing system isnt even the kanji on their own but rather the thousands of compounds that you need to memorize. i heard every day chinese uses more hanzi than japanese, so how does that work? do they also combine more or less arbitrary characters to form new words as is done in japanese? i know that chinese characters usually only have 1 pronounciation so that should make it alot easier in that regard, but can you also guess the meaning of a compound word in chinese just by looking and combining the meaning of each individual character making up the compound or do you have to memorize pretty much every compound just as you have in japanese?