Quote:
Originally Posted by Kumabjorn
That sounds interesting. Could you provide some examples? The reason being that 漢字 is Chinese incorporated into Japanese. Seems to me they would just imoprt back old Chinese expressions, or are they using characters to express words like kimoi キモい and ikumen イクメン?
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Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945 and during that time Japanese was taught in schools. And unlike anywhere else in Asia, the Japanese did not behave too badly in Taiwan. They built up the infrastructure, educated the people, and kept the usual atrocities to a relatively benign minimum. So Japanese culture was welcomed, to some extent. Some examples from every day language are "ringo" for apple, "o to bai" for motorcycle, "o ba san" for an old lady, and "o ji san" for an old man. When they write they use the Kanji, but while speaking they use the Japanese pronunciation. None of these would be understood by a mainland speaker from Southern Fujian (where they use the same basic dialect). And many Taiwanese even use these words when speaking Mandarin.
The use of Japanese words is especially common for machinery and spare parts. Because many Taiwanese have opened factories in China these words have been also adopted by many mainland Chinese. But the mainland Chinese use the Kanji with the Chinese pronunciation. An example of this would be the sewing machine hook (if you have any idea what that is...), "Ka Ma" in Japanese (and pronounced that way by Taiwanese and even Koreans). The characters would be 大釜， Mandarin pronunciation is "Da Fu". But the proper Chinese word for it would be 梭頭.