Kanji vs Chinese Characters: What Is the Difference?

Same origin: kanji literally means Han characters

The word kanji is written 漢字, the same two characters as the Mandarin word hànzì. Both mean Han characters, that is, Chinese characters. Japan adopted the Chinese writing system well over a thousand years ago, at a time when Japanese had no script of its own. Our history of kanji in Japan traces how that happened.

Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, though, with different grammar and verb endings. To handle those, Japanese writers developed hiragana and katakana from cursive and abbreviated forms of kanji. Today a Japanese sentence mixes kanji with kana, while Chinese is written in characters alone. Our guide to hiragana, katakana and kanji explains how the three scripts work together.

Different simplifications: shinjitai vs simplified Chinese

In the twentieth century, both Japan and mainland China simplified many complex characters, but they did it separately. Japan introduced its simplified forms, called shinjitai (new character forms), with the tōyō kanji list in 1946. The People's Republic of China began publishing its own simplified characters in 1956. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau still use traditional characters, which are close to Japan's old forms (kyūjitai).

The result is three patterns. Some characters were simplified the same way in both countries. Some were simplified differently. And many were simplified only in China, so Japanese kept the traditional shape.

So 国 and 学 look identical in Tokyo and Beijing, 気 does not, and 車 in Japan matches the traditional form used in Taiwan. If you study Japanese, learn the Japanese forms. A Chinese font or dictionary can show you a slightly different character than the one you will see in Japan.

Readings are completely different

The biggest practical difference is pronunciation. In Mandarin, a character usually has one syllable reading, with a tone. In Japanese, most kanji have at least two kinds of reading:

• Onyomi (sound reading), adapted from the Chinese pronunciation at the time the character was borrowed. These often sound distantly related to modern Mandarin.
• Kunyomi (native reading), a Japanese word that was attached to the character because it had the same meaning.

For example, 山 (mountain) is shān in Mandarin. In Japanese its onyomi is さん, as in 富士山 (ふじさん, Mount Fuji), and its kunyomi is やま. 学 is xué in Mandarin, がく in Japanese words like 大学 (だいがく, university), and まな(ぶ) in the verb to study. Some kanji even have several onyomi, because they were borrowed more than once from different periods and regions of China: 行 is read こう in 銀行 (ぎんこう, bank) and ぎょう in 行列 (ぎょうれつ, line, queue). The onyomi vs kunyomi guide covers the patterns.

Kokuji: kanji made in Japan

Not every kanji came from China. Japan also created characters of its own, called kokuji (national characters), usually by combining existing parts. Most are rare, but a few are everyday words, and the jōyō list includes around nine of them:

• 働 (はたら(く), to work): a person (亻) plus 動 (move). Unusually for a kokuji, it also has an onyomi, どう, taken from 動, as in 労働 (ろうどう, labor).
• 畑 (はたけ, field for crops): fire (火) plus rice field (田), a dry field as opposed to a flooded rice paddy.
• 峠 (とうげ, mountain pass): mountain (山) plus up (上) and down (下).
• 込 (こ(む), to be crowded, to go into), as in 申し込む (もうしこむ, to apply).
• 枠 (わく, frame), as in 枠組み (わくぐみ, framework).

Shared characters can also mean different things. 手紙 means letter in Japanese, while 手纸 in Chinese means toilet paper. 勉強 means study in Japanese, while 勉强 in Chinese means reluctantly or to force oneself. These false friends trip up Chinese speakers learning Japanese, and the reverse.

How kanji fit into Japanese grammar

Chinese verbs and adjectives do not change their endings, so Chinese text can be written in characters alone. Japanese words do change, and kanji cannot show those changes by themselves. The solution is okurigana, the hiragana that follow a kanji stem. In 食べる (たべる, to eat), 食べた (ate) and 食べない (do not eat), the kanji 食 stays the same while the hiragana ending carries the grammar.

Japanese also writes particles such as は, を and に in hiragana. So even when a Japanese sentence uses many kanji that a Chinese reader recognizes, the parts that explain who did what to whom are written in a script Chinese does not use, and in a word order that differs from Chinese.

Borrowing has also run in both directions. In the 19th century, Japanese scholars coined many kanji compounds for Western concepts, such as 哲学 (てつがく, philosophy), and a number of these were later adopted into Chinese. That is one reason modern Japanese and Chinese share so much academic and technical vocabulary.

What this means for learners

If you already read Chinese, you have a real head start in Japanese: you can often guess the meaning of kanji-heavy text and recognize many compound words. You will still need to learn kana, grammar, Japanese readings, the Japanese character forms and the false friends.

If you are starting from zero, study kanji through Japanese materials only, so you learn the Japanese shapes and readings from the start. A few characters even use different stroke orders in Japan and mainland China, so use a Japanese reference such as the kanji stroke order lookup. Our guide on how to learn kanji lays out a step-by-step method.

When a kanji looks slightly off, check whether you are looking at a Chinese font. Japanese and Chinese fonts can draw the same code point in slightly different ways.