How Do I Go About Translating The Characters In This Image

[LanguageBarrier]

Hello

I have been trying to work out how to go about translating the characters in the attached image.

Also how can I Identify if it's Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese and their meaning?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[renzhe]

It's Japanese form of characters 靈 and 氣.

In Chinese, this word means "Savvy; smart and intelligent nature".

It is possible that it means something else in Japanese, because the characters have slightly different meanings.

[LanguageBarrier]

Hello renzhe

Thanks for the reply. and explanation.

Can you advise a little further.

When I look at written characters how can I determine what the language Is.

Is there a rule of thumb I can use?

I spent quite a bit of time searching on the internet and there are so many characters it seemed impossible to

understand how to work out where to look for the meaning..... in a logical manner.

If I come across other characters I would like to understand how to learn to interpret them.

Any help would be appreciated .

[jbradfor]

Japanese dictionary entry here. Says the meaning is "aura".

[Shelley]

Hello,

If you want to be able to tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese etc, the only real way I know of is to learn one of them then it will obvious which one you are looking at. There is no real rule of thumb for this. You just have to know.

If you want to be able to translate characters then again you will have learn one of the languages. I am afraid that there are no shortcuts

Good luck

Shelley

[jbradfor]

Any help would be appreciated .

It's easy. Just spend 5 years learning Chinese and/or Japanese, post here a lot, and you too can read it.

[Lu]

There are three sets of Chinese characters we're talking about here: traditional Chinese (used in China and Japan in the past, now still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong); simplified Chinese (used in China nowadays) and Japanese (used in Japan, obviously).

Cantonese does not have its own script, it's written with the same characters as modern standard Mandarin. But as Hong Kong speaks mainly Cantonese and uses traditional characters, Cantonese is very often written in traditional characters.

The characters in use in Japan are a simplified form of traditional Chinese characters, but the simplifications are slightly different than the modern Chinese simplifications. In addition to characters, Japanese also uses two sets (alphabets) of kana, so if you have a longer text, you can tell it's Japanese because it contains kana.

For just words and single characters, there is no shortcut, unfortunately. Even someone who knows one language or the other might be mistaken: what looks like badly translated Chinese might be perfectly good Japanese and vice versa.

[creamyhorror]

Reiki is a mystical healing practice; I know a few family friends do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki

[LanguageBarrier]

Shelly Wrote:

I am afraid that there are no shortcuts

Thanks Shelly for confirming what I had began to realise.

It's as complicated as it looks.

I have a a few beginner Japanese books but only thought to ask

the the question to make sure I wasn't unneccessarily complicsting things.

I can do that very easily

Lu Wrote:

There are three sets of Chinese characters we're talking about here: traditional Chinese (used in China and Japan in the past, now still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong); simplified Chinese (used in China nowadays) and Japanese (used in Japan, obviously).

Cantonese does not have its own script, it's written with the same characters as modern standard Mandarin. But as Hong Kong speaks mainly Cantonese and uses traditional characters, Cantonese is very often written in traditional characters.

The characters in use in Japan are a simplified form of traditional Chinese characters, but the simplifications are slightly different than the modern Chinese simplifications. In addition to characters, Japanese also uses two sets (alphabets) of kana, so if you have a longer text, you can tell it's Japanese because it contains kana.

For just words and single characters, there is no shortcut, unfortunately. Even someone who knows one language or the other might be mistaken: what looks like badly translated Chinese might be perfectly good Japanese and vice versa.

Lu, thanks for the explanation.

It's given me a better understanding of the bigger picture with respect to the languages.

So I'll just need to persevere and learn one of the languages.

[LanguageBarrier]

Creamy Horror Wrote:

Reiki is a mystical healing practice; I know a few family friends do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki

Thank for the reply and translation

[renzhe]

Oh, it's reiki, good to know

When I look at written characters how can I determine what the language Is.

Is there a rule of thumb I can use?

Not unless you can read at least one of the languages. The character 気 is a give-away -- this is how it is written in Japanese, in Chinese, it is either 气 or 氣, but it comes up often enough that Chinese speakers are aware of it.

[LanguageBarrier]

Not trying to be a little dim but......

This site is called "Chinese-Forums.com"

So is it considered okay to post question regarding Japanese at a later date?

[renzhe]

You are more likely to get good answers at a Japanese forum.

Japanese and Chinese are very different, despite sharing much of the writing system. Most posters here don't know Japanese, so there's lots of guessing involved.

[jbradfor]

As renzhe says, I don't think you will upset anyone, but you'd likely get better answers at, say, http://www.japanforum.com/ .

[LanguageBarrier]

Renzhe and jbradfor

I wasn't aware of japanforum

Thanks for the advice, it makes a lot of sense.

[Gharial]

If you just want to continue dabbling and looking up characters from time to time (and there's nothing wrong with that!), all you need to really do is learn the Kangxi 214 radicals (as this is the system used for indexing not only dictionaries detailing traditional Chinese characters, but also in Japanese character i.e. kanji 漢字 dictionaries too), and the basics of writing and looking up characters (strokes, stroke order/the order in which strokes are ideally written, and counting strokes in radicals versus residues/the non-radical parts of characters). There's no end of stroke and radical guidance and Kangxi-based dictionaries online, but if you aren't sure where to start, by all means ask and I'll try to provide some suggestions and/or a crash course.

FWIW, two books that cater for the study of Chinese as well as Japanese are P.G. O'Neill's Essential Kanji (though the quite dated Wade-Giles rather than Pinyin alphabet is the system used for the Chinese pronunciations - and I do mean Chinese, versus the on-yomi for the kanji!) and the excellent though somewhat more expensive NTC/Kenkyusha New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (which supplies Chinese pronunciations in modern standard Pinyin). Bear in mind however that you won't actually be able to look up the simplified Chinese characters in such books, only the traditional, and then only when the Japanese form doesn't differ (or differ too substantially) from the traditional Chinese one.

The following list is a good place to start in comparing Chinese hanzi with Japanese kanji:

http://en.wikipedia....ed.2C_and_Kanji

[LanguageBarrier]

Hello Gharial

Thanks for the excellent and helpful post.

Plenty of food for thought there.

To Quote You

If you just want to continue dabbling and looking up characters from time to time

Great, that's probably more where I am at the moment.

I see the written language and am interested to know what it means.

To Quote You

all you need to really do is learn the Kangxi 214 radicals (as this is the system used for indexing not only dictionaries detailing traditional Chinese characters, but also in Japanese character i.e. kanji 漢字 dictionaries too),

Indexing..... I didn't know how to ask the question! .... Obvious now you've answed it .....Thanks.

The link and book references are great too, as when I looked in the library or book shop it's endless....where does one start.

Thanks for the start I was seeking.

[Gharial]

Heh, you're very welcome, LanguageBarrier! We all had to start somewhere!*

Anyway, I'll see about posting a few more gifs a bit later that provide a crash course in dictionary look-up skills - watch this space.

*Me, I recall starting out with Hadamitzky & Spahn's excellent Kanji & Kana, and became pretty familiar with the Kangxi radicals by just browsing the book's charts. I didn't however really look up that many characters until I did a postgrad Chinese diploma where timed translations of newspaper stories were soon the order of the day, so I had to become familiar with the indexes of dictionaries like the Oxford/CP Concise, and the Xinhua. And I didn't really get that good (fast, more absolutely sure) at looking up characters until just a few years ago, when I returned to Chinese after a decade TEFLing (which allowed me to bring some [ELT-based] lexicographical insights to my Chinese study, and to really appreciate the quality of the original ABC C-E Dictionary). But the question that really set me off on my writing of learner materials was simply "How are the handful of single strokes that serve as radicals actually used? That is, in which positions are they counted as radicals by such and such a dictionary, versus other dictionaries?". In the process of studying them and then the rest of the radicals, I became much more familiar with the advantages of the simplified look-up system used in the ABC C-E and the POCD (Pocket Oxford Chinese Dictionary), the latter of which I took as the prototypical~representative simplified dictionary for the purposes of the Guide to Simplified Radicals, and Dictionary Look-up Skills: A Crash Course, that I began writing.

[Gharial]

Here is the promised crash course in dictionary look-up skills! Enjoy!(?).

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/35274-dictionary-look-up-skills-a-crash-course/

[LanguageBarrier]

Gharial

Thanks for your "Crash Course" link.

It's definately in at the deep end but I think that's deliberate as you want a responses from a total beginners like myself.

My first question is:

I've only glanced at the gif's and will need to spend some time working through them.

Is there a way for me to save the gif's, when I try this I can only get thumbnails?

I'd like to print them.