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jmchuster | 3 months ago

The term is 漢字. It's written the same in both Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese pronunciation being "kanji" and the Chinese pronunciation being "hànzì".

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zahlman|3 months ago

It can be written this way in Chinese (in those variants using traditional rather than simplified characters).

Whether that makes it the "same word" is a philosophical question. But writing "hànzì" is proper when referring to the use of the characters to write Chinese. If one is using it to mean a set of characters (rather than the general concept of characters that come from that writing tradition), they're different sets; and there are typically different expectations for typesetting etc. The decision to produce "CJK Unified Ideographs" in Unicode was not without controversy, and quite a few words have been spent by standards committees on explaining why these characters should share code points while there are completely separate Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts (despite shared history and many at-least-seemingly overlapping glyphs).

limoce|3 months ago

Japanese kanji is not the same as Chinese characters.

picture|3 months ago

Yes, and the vast majority of Chinese would now write it as 汉字 instead of 漢字

umanwizard|3 months ago

That difference in pronunciation is why “kanji”, in English, is almost exclusively used to talk about the Japanese script.

The word “hanzi” in English is much less commonly used — people studying or discussing Chinese are more likely to call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters”.