漢字文化圈現行常用漢字字形比較

Abstract

Chinese characters have been adopted in the Chinese writing system, which is a logograph ic system, in contrast with phonographic system in Semitic alphabet, which has been adopted in Arabic, Roman, and Cyrillic scripts. Chinese characters has also been borrowed and modif ied by China’s neighboring countries such as Korean, Japan and Vietnam during the past two thousand years, yielding variations. While the simplified characters are now used in mainland China since 1950s, the traditional full forms of characters remain to be used in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and oversea Chinese communities around the world. At the same time, Japanese has also recently created a set of new characters, which are distinct from both full forms and simplified forms of Chinese characters. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a three-way systematic comparison of the commonly used Chinese charac ters in contemporary East Asia for the facilitation of teaching and learning Chinese and Japanese writing systems as a second language.