Wholegrain
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I have a project to understand Chinese Culture and before that i studied japanese Culture. Their traditional dances+traditional houses r just same??
Well if u can write then atleast u can read it
Or atleast partially understand what is written in lets say in sign board?
Chinese-Dragon has been very misleading in regards to the things he has been telling indians and pakistanis about Chinese characters.
Chinese characters are not a language. They are a writing system.
From what I've looked at Chinese-Dragons old posts, hes been boasting falsely that Chinese characters mean all Chinese dialects have the same written language. Pure bullshit.
The reason we can read Chinese texts which are thousands of years old is because we used the literary language, Classical Chinese (wenyan in Chinese) to write official texts and literature while the vernacular language (Baihua, the chinese dialects we speak) were only used to write vulgar plays and novels. Classical Chinese was the official written language of China for thousands of years until the 1920s when vernacular Chinese replaced it.
Its like if you only wrote in Urdu in Pakistan while speaking Sindhi and Punjabi. And continue to use Urdu to write for thousands of years even as the spoken language changes.
Different dialects will use different characters for different vocabulary. The same characters are used for cognates. For example "north" is "bak" in Cantomese is cognate to Mandarin "bei" so they are both written 北. For words which are not cognates, like "to be" is hai 係 in Cantonese but shi 是 in Mandarin.
Since Cantonese, Mandarin, and all Chinese dialects belong to the same Sinitic language family and are all descended from the Old Chinese language, they share alot of cognates and this is why alot of characters are the same, but there are alot of different vocabulary and different pronouns written with different characters and differeng grammar too, so they do NOT share the same written language.
Chinese characters are a writing system like the latin alphabet and perso arabic alphabet, not a language in itself. Chinese characters are used to represent different dialects like Classical Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, or other languages like Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. And when Chinese characters are used for Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese they cannot represent native Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese words or grammatical particles. Thats why Korean and Vietnamese had to add their own characters in Chu Nom and Koreans use their own characters in Idu or Hyangchal, and Japanese use Kana to represent native Japanese words and grammatical particles.
A Mandarin speaker who reads and writes with Chinese characters will have to learn Classical Chinese in school and can't just read Classical Chinese texts with no education. Its easier though since classical Chinese and Mandarin are related unlike foreign languages.
@Lux de Veritas will be able to explain this. He explains the differenes well on another thread here.
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