The Love Character in Chinese & Japanese
Before we start...
A quick lesson in Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji
Traditional Chinese Characters often referred to as Hanzi in Chinese, and Kanji in Japanese.
Japanese Kanji and Chinese Hanzi are often visually the same, and hold the same meaning.
However, some definitions have changed over the centuries, so the same character may not necessarily have the same meaning in both Chinese and Japanese.
For example, the sign on the front of a bath house in Japan, might lead a Chinese person to believe that he could get a hot bowl of soup inside.
Imagine the surprise when he finds "huge bowls of human soup" (people soaking in the hot tub) waiting for him as he walks in.
In the case of "love" you will hear couples say "I love you" quite often in China.
However, in Japanese culture, a man is more likely to say "I like you" (Watashi wa anata ga suki desu) or if he really means it, "I like you a lot" (Watashi wa anata ga suki desu... ...dai suki desu!)
This leaves "love" as something you are more likely to write about rather than speak if you are Japanese.
So "love" carries the same meaning in both cultures, it's just used more often in China.
Below are several versions of the Chinese love character... | ||||||
Ancient Scripts | Traditional Chinese Characters | Simplified | ||||
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This is the Chinese character for "Ai" which is "Love".
This may be hard to imagine as a westerner, but the strokes at the top of this love character symbolize the family & marriage.
The symbol in the middle is a little easier to identify. It is "xin" which is
the character for "heart" in Chinese and Japanese. I guess you can say that no matter if you are from the East or the West, you must put your heart into your love.
The strokes at the bottom create a modified "you" character which means "friend". (pronounced like "yo" -
to call someone "friend" you'd use two characters and it would sound like "pung-yo" using English pronunciation rules).
I suppose you could say that the full meaning of "Ai" is to love your family, spouse, and friends with all of your heart, since all three elements exist in this character.
A simple phrase in Chinese in which this word is used is:
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This is pronounced roughly "wha eye knee" using English words/rules of pronunciation.
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If you want a quick education on Chinese character history, read below...
Examples of the earliest pictographs or hieroglyphics in China date back almost 5000 years. The area now known as China was a fragmented region with various kingdoms rising and falling. Each kingdom or nationality in China had it's own writing system, and could not effectively communicate with people of other kingdoms.
Finally, in about 221 B.C. the Qin Dynasty unified all of China. One of the Qin Emperor's goals was to standardize the writing system across all of his empire.
The official script was the second-generation of writing approved during the reign of Qin.
This official script was still very complex to write, with the invention of the printing press still thousands of years away, official scribes literally had their hands full as they penned various documents. Historian will argue this point, but the Traditional Chinese Characters that you see today entered a somewhat final lexicon during the Wei kingdom (220-265 A.D.) and the Jin Dynasties (265-420 A.D.)
The adoption of Simplified Chinese Characters happened under Chairman Mao in the early 1950s in an effort to make it easier for under-educated people to learn to write. However, true calligraphers will only write Traditional Chinese Characters. Places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and several other regions in Asia that were unaffected by Chairman Mao's rule still use traditional characters in day to day life.
Traditional Chinese Characters are known in Japanese as Kanji. In Japan, these characters are used every day in newspapers, magazines, documents, and personal letters. However, they are mixed with Japanese-specific characters called Hiragana, which means a Chinese person trying to read a Japanese newspaper can only get the gist of what the story might be about.
In China, people speak all kinds of languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Tibetan and many other regional languages. When two Chinese people meet, they might not be able to understand each other because they speak different Chinese languages. But they can write down what they are trying to say, and be easily understood thanks to the Qin emperor's dream of a standardized writing system.
Think about this fact:
One third of the world's population can understand the Chinese characters shown above, while only 6% of the people in the world can natively understand the English words that I am writing here.
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