A commonly met scene at language training schools in Japan is this one: A Western student says to a Chinese student, with a mixture of envy and admiration, "You know kanji. Learning Japanese for you is easy!"

Kanji are Chinese characters. For people whose native languages don't use them, Chinese characters are their greatest difficulty in studying Japanese. "Each word is like a picture," says Ali, a 26-year-old from Turkey who has lived in Japan for six years and speaks Japanese fluently but who still goes to language classes to study kanji.

Can Chinese people learn Japanese faster than other people? Many language experts say they can. Mao-feng Tsai, Dean of the School of Foreign Language and Literature at Soochow University, points out that even though many kanji have a different meaning than they do in Chinese, there are even more whose meaning a Chinese person can understand at once or guess. According to his experience, most Chinese people can learn to read Japanese books, newspapers, and magazines after about a year and a half of applied study.

Writing is said to have been introduced to Japan in A.D. 285 by two scholars from Korea who brought with them as a gift to the Japanese emperor ten rolls of the Confucian Analects and one of the Thousand Character Classic, forming the beginning, as it were, of the study of sinology in Japan.

In the eighth century during the Nara period, the Japanese developed two phonetic writing systems, or syllabaries, of their own to represent particles and grammatical endings not easily expressed with ideograms: katakana, based on the left-hand side of various Chinese characters, and hiragana, based on their shorthand form.

The syllabaries supplemented but did not supersede the use of kanji, which continued to evolve in their own way, resulting in forms and uses that Chinese people find puzzling. Characters were created that never existed before; many of their shapes were changed; and they were combined in new and unusual ways. And many of them acquired meanings, such as the examples above, completely different from their meanings in Chinese.

How did the writing system develop? Why did it become the way it has? These questions are certainly of interest to linguists. But for Chinese people trying to learn the language, the use of kanji in unexpected and unfamiliar ways only creates interference. It's not such a big problem in grasping the meaning, Mao-feng Tsai points out, where the solution lies in flipping through the dictionary. The real problem comes in remembering how to pronounce them.

Almost every kanji can be read in at least two ways, according to its on readings and its kun readings. The on readings originated in China and to Chinese sound rather familiar, but the kun readings, representing native Japanese words, are completely unrelated to the character's pronunciation in Chinese.

And there is no rule to follow in knowing which reading to use. Mixing them up not only creates communication problems but may lead to ridiculous results.

Chung Fang-chen, a lecturer in Japanese at Soochow University, often cites the character for beef-fried rice as an example. If a Chinese person picks the wrong reading, a Japanese waiter will understand what's wanted but will be bemused by the image of a cow perched on a rice bowl.

Another difficulty for Chinese people in learning Japanese is the intonation. Professor Tsai points out that Japanese consists mainly of a high pitch and a low pitch, much less markedly cadenced than the four tones of Mandarin or the seven of Fukienese. As a result, teachers in language schools are constantly telling their Chinese students, "Say it softer! Say it softer!" and many Japanese people feel that Westerners speaking the language sound more natural.

Be that as it may, ideograms give Chinese people a big advantage in learning Japanese, but they also produce problems, such as looking at a character but not daring to pronounce it or flipping through a newspaper and "getting the drift but not the point." A little learning is a dangerous thing . . .

Do Chinese people learn Japanese faster than other people? Let's take a monitory lesson from the tortoise and the hare.

[Picture Caption]

The characters are Chinese in origin, but the language is distinctly Japanese. This is the signboard from a hotel of the Edo period (1603-1867). It says, "This hotel is operated by Kouchiya Shouemon; please come for a stay." (photo courtesy of The Japanese Encyclopedia of the History of Urban Life)