Identifying 3 traditional chinese characters from an image

[johnnyp]

Can anyone help by translating the characters in the following photo?

See attachment or here:

http://imagesocket.com/view/eyec26.jpg

if that doesn't work I found it here aswell:

http://2photo.ru/uploads/posts/1163507410_opr0ouog.jpg

The first character means "beautiful"? What about the other two?

[renzhe]

It's Japanese.

The first character is 美, the bottom one is 書, meaning "book" or "writing".

The middle one is kana, can't read it.

[johnnyp]

thanks. what is a "kana"?

[johnnyp]

Btw, also thanks for typing the characters .. when I used them to search in google.. and went to a page including them, google identifies the page as chinese language how can this be?

[Hofmann]

You know how to Google. Also recommended is learning how to do this. I have a feeling that's not all of it. It might say 美を書く or something.

[renzhe]

This is because Japanese use a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and two Japanese syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) for writing Japanese.

The latter two are called kana. Whenever you see a combination of Chinese characters and kana, it is almost certainly Japanese. If you only google the Chinese characters alone, you will typically get Chinese pages.

[jbradfor]

and went to a page including them, google identifies the page as chinese language how can this be?

美 and 書 are Chinese characters as well.

Any why can't Chinese talk about Japanese sentences as well?

[skylee]

Any why can't Chinese talk about Japanese sentences as well?

Did anyone say that?

[jbradfor]

He was surprised that what he thought was Japanese would appear on a page google marked as Chinese. Which is surprising only if Chinese can not talk about Japanese things; otherwise it's not surprising. So yes, he did basically say that.

[Hofmann]

It may be surprising for him if he thought the characters 美 and 書 had some sort of property to them that identifies them as being used in Japanese, or that they are used exclusively in Japanese. He searches for them and, having temporarily forgotten that Chinese characters are also used in Chinese, he expected to find Japanese language webpages, but found Chinese ones.

[jbradfor]

I guess. To me it's a bit like searching for "amigo" and being surprised that an English language web page shows up. I mean, what if someone says "hey, I just learned how to say 'friend' in Spanish! It's 'amigo'!" If if they are talking about an Spanish language movie? But maybe I'm being too harsh...

[johnnyp]

I have no previous knowledge of anything about Chinese or Japanese. I didn't know Japanese are actually using Chinese characters to form their writings so my surprise was about getting this characters in a page that google identified it's text as chinese. I wouldn't be surprise in a case where two languages share the same alphabet. Nor is it "surprising" getting a page where 2 languages are used.. Anyway thank you all for helping.

As for the wiki.. it was my bad forgetting to check it out... my only excuse was I was at work being occupied in multiple ways (thus the 2 posts one asking about the kana and then remembering to ask about the other...).

[johnnyp]

I guess. To me it's a bit like searching for "amigo" and being surprised that an English language web page shows up. I mean, what if someone says "hey, I just learned how to say 'friend' in Spanish! It's 'amigo'!" If if they are talking about an Spanish language movie? But maybe I'm being too harsh...

Well I partially covered that saying that I thought Chinese and Japanese used different characters. But your example takes as granted the page I saw was a blog or forum where indeed people may use different characters / encodings/ languages. In a commercial / business oriented web page usually there's one language used in a paragraph.