Chinese characters on shirt?

[Keegan]

I believe this is chinese. It doesn't look like japanese, and I know it's not korean. Besides, the shirt was made in china. I was curious if anyone can translate it. I'm hoping it's some sort of anti-american hate slogan I took the photo as detailed as I could since the characters are a little ambiguous.

http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p270/xShifty/IMG_0211.jpg

[renzhe]

They are Chinese characters, but very difficult to read. The second one looks like 家 (home), the third looks like 令 (lead).

You'll need to wait for a native speaker to read it, I'm afraid. I can't make anything out of the remaining characters.

[Keegan]

Let the Red Army lead you home? >_>

[renzhe]

Both characters can have many different meanings, depending on the characters they're combined with, so it could be many things. You need to see the whole phrase, and a native speaker can make a better guess at the missing characters. They look like blobs to me.

[liuzhou]

The first looks like 寂

The second is 莉

The third is 命

The last is perhaps 會

It seems to be a Buddhist quotation. The meaning is highly ambiguous - almost Zen like. Something about destiny or fate.

(With thanks for help from native speaker who even put on her glasses to see it better.)

[monto]

It is Japanese though in Chinese characters. The third one is 命 (life or command, instruct ). I haven't identified the other three. It looks like an old days writing, good skilled, may not be explained in Chinese.

By the way, it looks to have nothing to do with anti-anyone or anti-anything appearently.

[Keegan]

Ah, I was suspicious if it might be Kanji

[caiming]

it is Kanji, it is not the Chinese word.

[liuzhou]

My intrepid (Chinese) native speaker, who also knows Japanese, is fairly certain it isn't Japanese.

I think it's Welsh!

[889]

What suggests the text is Japanese are the hiragana to the right of the kanji; these are sometimes written to indicate the pronunciation of the kanji.

Of course a given string of characters could be equally intelligible in both Chinese and Japanese, particularly in the case of titles and such.

[adrianlondon]

It could just be a meaningless pile of crap, like the random English words you often see on t-shirts.

[liuzhou]

Is hiragana Japanese for ink splashes?

[Akira99]

that's Japanese~........

I awared that there are some strange symbols besides the character.

[alexmatz]

Japanese for sure.

The hiragana next to the kanji is called furigana. This is often used in children's books or with obscure characters to clarify the reading of the character. Sometimes it is also used with made up compound words... I've seen it used in manga where they use a foreign word and kanji-fy it based on it's meaning and then write the word in katakana next to it.

Unfortunately the furigana in these characters is more difficult to make out than the characters themselves.

[Hofmann]

The furigana might not even be correct.

Sure, those are Chinese characters, but it's nonsense.