Chinese-Japanese False Friends

In this lesson, we’re going to look at twenty false friends between Chinese logographic characters and Japanese kanji. Because the Japanese concept of kanji has its origins in the more complicated, Chinese traditional characters, many kanji do indeed have the same or similar meanings to the Chinese characters from which they were borrowed. As with any pair of languages with a shared linguistic history, however, you need to be especially careful of false friends. In particular, you should be mindful of Chinese-Japanese false friends when writing. False friends are much less of an issue in spoken Chinese and Japanese because the false friend characters usually have entirely different pronunciations in their respective languages.