A Comparative Study Of The Common Meanings Of Chinese And Japanese Common Characters

As one of the countries of the Chinese characteristic culture circle,Japan had only language but no written language,Japanese characters was created and developed under the influence of Chinese characters.Because of this special relationship,they have a lot in common.for example,the Japanese language has a lot of Chinese characters and homographs,compared to learners in non-Chinese language culture circle,the Japanese have an innate advantage in learning Chinese characters,but it is also because of this,resulting in Japanese tend to have a dismissive attitude when they are learning Chinese characters,teachers also tend to ignore the teaching of Chinese characters.On the other hand,the Chinese character system is not exactly the same between China and Japan.After absorbing Chinese characters,Japan has developed its own unique Chinese character culture according to its own characteristics,some Chinese characters are different from Chinese in pronunciation,writing form,meaning and application of Chinese characters.Therefore,positive and negative transfer exist simultaneously when Japanese students learn Chinese characters.Based on the investigation of the new list of “Commonly Used Chinese characters”in Japan(2010),this paper takes 1,903 commonly used Chinese characters which selected from “The Table of Graded Chinese Characters for International Education in Chinese” as the object of study,making a comparative study on the common meaning of Chinese and Japanese characters according to the same,different and similar meanings.This research mainly includes the following three parts: First,it mainly expounds how Chinese characters in Japan came into being and the process of the evolution of the meaning of the characters,combing the historical changes of the list of “Commonly Used Chinese characters” in Japan and the causes of the changes in the meaning of the characters.Secondly,the common meaning of Chinese and Japanese common characters is divided into three parts from macro perspective,including the characters that have same meaning,the characters that have partially common meanings,the characters that having totally different meanings.According to the number of sense,the characters that have partially common meanings are divided into three cases: Chinese characters have more meanings than Japanese characters,Japanese characters have more meanings than Chinese characters,and Chinese and Japanese characters have different meanings.Thirdly,collecting some mistakes in the acquisition of the meaning of Chinese characters among Japanese students in the language database of dynamic composition from Beijing Language and Culture University,and based on the results of the comparative study on the meaning of Chinese characters between China and Japan,summarizing the corresponding teaching methods to help teachers predict the teaching difficulties,and then reduce the occurrence of bias error.The last part of the thesis is the conclusion of the thesis,and puts forward some new research angles for the comparative study of Chinese and Japanese characters in the future.