[Kanji_The_Wanderer]

Originally Posted by Hatredcopter

Here's my Japanese mini-tip of the day.

"go" or "語" translates to 'language' or 'word'. Therefor, nihongo/日本語 is Japanese. Furansugo/フランス語 is French. Doitsugo (from Deutsch)/ドイツ語　is German.

"jin" or "人" translates to 'people'. Nihonjin/日本人 is Japanese people. Kanadajin/カナダ人　is Canadian people, and so on.

It is rather strange that we choose not to use the native word Nihon for Japan, but that tends to happen to many location names across the world. This is most likely due to the fact that Portugal was one of the first western nations to make contact and trade with Japan.

So you are saying that Japan is called Japan due to a cultural mistake? What I don't understand is, wouldn't the Japanese people want everyone in the rest of the world to call their country Nihon like they do? If a word was used to describe my country that doesn't exist in my language, I know that I would want to have it corrected....Since most people their country is what they care about the most...

Originally Posted by kireikoori

So you're saying that in the process of Japan adopting the Chinese writing system, they also incorporated a lot of Chinese words into their language as well, not just the writing system?

Makes sense. Though surely less than half of Japanese words are Chinese in origin.

Oh yes, during my studies of Asian culture in High School, I found out that the Japanese adopted over 30,000 characters/symbols from the Chinese language. Over the years, the system has changed and has become much more unique. Someone who knows Eastern culture well, can tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese writing, a long time ago, it was much harder.