"Dragon" Japanese / Chinese Character

A quick lesson in Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji

The three boxes in the middle below are all forms of
Traditional Chinese Characters often referred to as Hanzi in Chinese, and Kanji in Japanese.

Simplified Character

Printed Calligraphy

Typical Calligraphy

Typical Handwriting

Ancient Official Script

If you want to open your mind to more, 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 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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