Quote:
Originally Posted by Lilongyue
I know that Japanese uses many Chinese characters, but I was a little surprised to see that they use 外国人 as their word for foreigners. That's exactly what Chinese say, only it's pronounced wai4 guo2 ren2 (the numbers being tone markes). Another expression used in China, one you'll usually hear every day as you walk the streets, is 老外 and is pronounced lao3 wai4. Do Japanese use it also? For anyone interested in language, check out the Chinese language page on wikipedia. Some scholars believe that a lot of words to describe recent inventions, like telephone, etc., came originally form the Japanese. Since the Japanese used the Chinese characters to write the word, like 电话 (dian4 hua4) for telephone, it was easy for Chinese to adopt them.
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Kanji (漢字） basically means Chinese Characters. All characters are derived from Chinese characters. Some are already simplified along the way so it may not exist in the original Chinese character list. "老外” I think this reads as "rougai" , am not entirely sure though. I'll check on this. Anyways, Kanji has 2 basic reading the "unyomi" and "kunyomi",which is Chinese and Japanese reading respectively. For Chinese, they usually don't have problems understanding the kanji, cause each kanji has basically interprets into the same meaning. But each characters have different reading depending upon the next character before it, so that is the hard part of it. And it does not have a specific rule to it.
lets take 人 as an example , basically this reads as "jin" , "hito".
外国人 - gaikokujin - in this case it is read as jin
旅人 - tabibito - in this case its read as hito --> bito
人間 － ningen - in this case its read as nin
so in this example, the character for person can be read as jin, hito, bito, nin.
