I think a lot of us are interested in finding out what these unrecognizable characters are.  Please indulge us, Javier.

paddy71 wrote:

Anyone, who is in the know please reply with instructions and I will attach the file.

I think currently there is no way to attach a file to this message board, but  you can host the files on MediaFire or Rapidshare, for example, and post the links here.

Since there is a lot of people who want to know about the kanji I could not deal with, I will try my best to identify them, so we can discuss how each of them differs from the ones that are in the RTK book. But first I must ask you a big favor!  Please give me a couple of days to do this. At the moment I am preparing for two Japanese tests and have a load of work at the office. Once I become free I will be happy to explain the difficulties I have reading kanji spelled in a different way.

Since Paddy will give out the image of the poster, it will easy for each of you to compare the kanjis and decide by yourselves.

I downloaded the files paddy71 linked to.

Unfortunately I don't have the font specified, so I can't examine the .doc file.

The jpeg file is rather blurred. But I can make out some differences between the poster and more common fonts/characters.

Some examples:
18. risk 冒; the 3rd and 4th strokes are short and don't reach the edges (I haven't seen this before).
165. ashes 灰; "cliff" is replace with "by one's side".
175. black ink 墨, uses the older form where "rice field" is replaced by "mouth + small" (as in strokes 3 to 8 of this character: 曾)
452-4. audience, brown, hoarse, 謁褐喝; replace "spoon" with "person on ledge" (eg. as in strokes 13 to 15 of this character: 蠍 sasori, scorpion)
459-6. cleverness, plum, sea, 敏梅海; all use the full version of "mama" 母.
503. presents 贈; same variation as in no. 175.
626. hate 憎; same variation as in no. 175.
1065. stratum 層; same variation as in no. 175.
1246-7. bestow, copy, 与写; final long horizontal stroke does not cut vertical stroke (I haven't seen this before)
1402-6 The common handwritten version of "orders" is used.
1511-12. lowly, tombstone 卑碑; both use the alternate version of "lowly" where two strokes combine. (As in Heisig 2196, "handmaiden" 婢)
2033. barracks 屯; the first stoke is horizontal and drawn left to right.

pm215 wrote:

Google suggests that Simsun is a Chinese font...

Yes, thank you. I haven't previously investigated what happens when you use a Chinese font for Japanese documents. So I tried out paddy71's .doc file in a few different ones. The changes I mentioned above seem to be fairly consistent whichever Chinese font is used.

In case anyone is interested, here are a few more transformations that happen:

In dozens of characters "human legs" is replaced by "animal legs".
84. blade 刃; "drop" is now to the left.
439. make a deal 商; "human legs" become "animal legs".
530-3. 包胞砲泡; replace "snake" with "sign of the snake".
715. stalk 茎; "spool" is replaced by "katakana ス on top of craft 工".
731. leader 将; "vulture" is replaced by "evening".
771. charcoal 炭; uses the above-mentioned version of "ashes".
882. diameter; uses the same variation as in "stalk" (715).
1044. dissolve 融: "human legs" replaced by "animal horns".
1288-93. skeleton etc 骨; top part is a mirror-image.
1312. isolate; same as "dissolve" above.
1333. thread; as primitive the last three strokes are written as three drops.
1877-9. melon etc 瓜; 3rd & 4th strokes of "melon" are combined.
1899. mistake 誤; right side becomes "mouth + heaven".
1902. bin 函; "snare" becomes "child".
1990. tiger 虎; "human legs" become "wind".

Last edited by Katsuo (2008 March 21, 2:05 am)

Yes, as has been mentioned this has to do with the difference between Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji.  This has nothing to do with the JIS2004 specification and I believe it would be accurate, in fact, to say the poster is "wrong" if the assumption is that it's supposed to be Japanese characters.

In any case, the maker has offered to issue replacements, so all is well.

I'm just puzzled why he didn't host the .jpg and .doc on the kanjiposter.com domain.  Surely there's 1 MB to spare?

Well Folks,

I guess the moral of the story is, never send a Canadian Irishman in to try and sell a Japanese poster that he can't even read (yet)...

The mistake was made when I switched to the RTK format and switched fonts.
The original poster that I first made up and the one that is plastered all over my house was in a similar looking (but correct) font.

So if you've received your poster and are not trying to learn Chinese email me through the website and I will ship you out a freshy.  Because the poster is actually "incorrect" I will even eat the shipping portion.

Apologies for the confusion and the extra wait time.

Also since, I have everyones attention, I should mention to check back to the website in the next week as there are two new fun Kanji study items being posted...

And, as a special bonus to RTKer's I will even include the correct Japanese fonts to all who order within the first 48hours... ha ha ha he he he... (just a little kanji humor to try and smooth things over...)

Apologetically yours,
paddy

I just now sent out this email to all who ordered the funky poster, so there is no need to contact me through the site to get your replacement... If you ordered a poster and didn't get this email it means either
1.You got an old version that is ok
2. You ordered in the last few days and all this drama will mean nothing to you.



Hi Folks,
   First off thanks for ordering the mighty Kanji Poster!  It has recently come to my attention that on the last batch of posters (RTK order)
The font used was a Chinese font and does not represent all the characters correctly if you are studying Japanese.
   I am in the process now of creating and sending out a new poster with the correct fonts intact...
   I have a record of all that ordered this version and if you are on this mailing list it means you either received or will receive the incorrect poster.

A few of you ordered recently, I just ask that you please allow a couple of extra days for your poster to be delivered.    Just so we can be sure everyone gets the poster they were hoping to get.

For those of you studying Chinese and Japanese, rejoice in your good fortune.
     Apologies for any inconvenience...
   Please email me with any questions or comments.
     Cheers,
      Paddy

I guess maybe the thread title should be reverted back to "Beware!  Kanji Poster was actually Hanzi Poster, but hopefully fixed now!"  Just kidding,   But, honestly, I am a bit surprised by how many people were actually engaged in this discussion, many of whom seemed positive this was no error, when apparently only Javier had actually seen the poster!

I've been using a font like that for months on RevTK, only to find out in this thread that it's Chinese and not Japanese variants that I've been learning. Oh well, I guess I'll have a little head stard whenever I will start studying Chinese!

I'm pretty sure those aren't simplified Chinese. The giveaway is the 'say' radical in 誤 -- the Simplified version of this radical is only two strokes; see for instance
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese_simplified.htm.

NB that the Han unification process does not unify the simplified and original versions of characters where the radical has been simplified in this way; so they are distinct Unicode codepoints and you might be looking at the traditional version of the character even in a font labelled as intended for simplified Chinese. http://rishida.net/scripts/chinese/ has a nice explanation. The Japanese characters probably are unified with the traditional versions except where the Japanese simplification process created a significantly different character.

(I've just spent a couple of months in Beijing, and looking at signs and so on I occasionally had a "hang on, they've done *what* to that character?" reaction :-))

You could say that Japanese is somewhere in between simplified and traditional Chinese but closer to traditional. For example, 学 is the same in simplified Chinese but it's 學 in traditional. (I think most people should be able to see the two characters as I see them without fonts problems since they are considered two different unicode characters).

First of all I'd like to thank everyone for all of the informative posts so far.  A lot of the changes struck me as not looking "Japanese" so I was pretty relieved to see that it was just due to a Chinese font.

Now, fast forward to tonight when I'm reading a Japanese book and see a character form that looked just like one of the Chinese variants.  It seems like the increase primitive varies across Japanese fonts as well.  I'm posting this mostly as a heads up, so people realize some of these changes are still possible within the realm of Japanese.