I'm sort of interested to know how far the use and meaning from the Japanese has drifted from their Chinese counterparts. Does anyone know for instance which Chinese dialect is the one that gave most of the on readings to the Japanese Kanji? I sometimes look at Chinese characters at Chinese shops or restaurants and wonder if I can get an inkling of what it says.

Anyway, I recently had a nice example, when I dug up an old Mah Jong PC game out of my closet named Shanghai. I suddenly noticed it had the kanji 上海 all over it, probably meaning Shanghai in Chinese. In Japanese on that would be joukai or something like that?

Anyone knows how many kanji a Chinese language student is supposed to know before he's considered literate (as opposed to the 2042 in Japanese)? Are there many kanji in Chinese that were never exported to Japan?

I posted some stuff about Chinese in the How has RTK helped you thread, take a look.

I'm sure that other people studying Japanese have been frustrated with English words imported into Japanese using katakana. It's almost like having to learn your own language again. Well, kanji and the words you make with kanji are just an enormous collection of words imported from China. Original Japanese words are surprisingly few in number. Have pity on my poor Chinese classmates who encounter words like 手紙, which in Chinese means toilet paper.

Chinese people recognise almost all kanji used in Japan but Japanese people can only read some of the kanji used in China. Another factor to take into account is the simplified Chinese system where traditional kanji are broken down to versions that are easier to write. My previous Japanese teacher is fluent in Chinese (mandarin) and she says that after learning the simplified chinese characters, she forgets the original traditional ones. Maybe she should try Heisig.

上海 is actually pronounced シャンハイ in Japanese.

I have a chinese friend at work (from Taiwan) and I show her all my kanji's she understands over 90% of them and they mostly have the same meanings. Some like dog 犬 she said was and old way of writing it. The Chinese dog IIRC is "A *pack of wild dogs* trying to learn the *phrase* roll over". Also 吾 is an old character for I akin to saying thee or thy or thou; they use 我 for I. One of the things I consider interesting is that that only have their hanzi so their sentances are only characters, no alphabets ('cept one for pronunciation) like hiragana. Basic literacy is 2000 characters.

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[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji]