A Contrastive Study On Chinese-Japanese Characters

Cultural and economic exchanges have frequently happened between China and Japan because of the diplomatic relations, wars and immigrations since long time ago, which drove the lingual communication and cultural propagation.Chinese and Japanese do not belong to the same language system, and Japan borrowed a lot of Chinese characters from China. Therefore, Japanese has many“Chinese characters”,which consist of Chinese words. Meanwhile, the significant differences in social cultures, language habits and language psychology lead to the divergent words in form and meaning in the two countries. To find out the common and corresponding points, to compare and explore the ways to master them become focus of the current research.The typical characteristics of Chinese-Japanese characters could be found in the three classification of homographs, allo-graphic synonyms, morphemeinversed words. Homographs could be classified into Chinese-Japanese isomorph synonym, isomorphous words, and homographs from the perspective of morphology. It is not within the scope of this article to present homomorphism synonym. We will discuss allo-graphic synonyms from the point of lexical meaning. Chinese-Japanese morpheme-inversed words have the same morpheme and reversal word order, which will be explored from the view of word order,meaning, structure.In recent years, Japanese major learners and Japanese as the second foreign language learners increase in the amount of universities in China. The commonly-used Chinese words account for a large proportion in Japanese vocabulary, and many Chinese-Japanese learners make use of this point in their Japanese learning. However, plenty of Chinese-Japanese characters have many similar wors of form or meaning, which confused the learners and brought about negative transfer in their Japanese learning. Hence, it is of great importance to perform the comparative study on the characters of the two countries due to the highly frequency of misuse.Starting from origin, evolution and propagation of the Chinese character and the impact of language to the country, and based on contrastive linguistics theory and language transfer theory, we will trace the Sino-Japanese cultural and language exchange history, analyze the correspondence and differences of homographs and allo-graphic synonyms' form and meaning; analyze the different meaning of morpheme-inversed words, distinguish it from allo-graphic synonyms,and discuss the forming reason and internal relation of Chinese-Japanese characters from the synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Aiming for improving the learners' language competence in cross-cultural communication,we cited many misuse examples of language use in our language teaching and learning, and try to explore the effective teaching methods and strategies.We hope that the Japanese researchers and learners can benefit from the research.