Just for fun For those who cannot understand what is this all about, i should explain like this. The Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, Korean, Japanese all have names in the Chinese characters. Chinese characters have different pronounciation in different regions. For example, the character "Lin" (as in Lin Dan) is pronounced as "Hayashi" in Japanese, "Lam" in Cantonese/Hong Kong, and of course "Lin" in Chinese language, etc For Malaysian Chinese names, although they are always read in Mandarin, but in the identity card/birth cert, it is not written in pinyin mostly, but most of the time, wrriten in pronounciation in Cantonese or Hokkien or other dialect or mix of them. HOwever, compare to others, Korean less use chinese character in their names. Lin Dan Malaysian Chinese - Lim Tan Japanese - Hayashi xxx(dunno how 2 pronounce character 'dan' in japanese) Hong Kong - Lam Tan Korean - ?? Wong Choong Hann Chinese - Huang Zhonghan Hong Kong - Wong Chung Hon Japanese - ??? Korean - ??? Zhao Jianhua Malaysian Chinese - Chew Ken Wah Hong Kong - Chiu Kin Wa Japanese - xxx
oh oh, interesting what about cai yun and fu haifeng in malaysian chinese, cantonese, japanese, korean and so on ??
Cai Yun 蔡赟 Malaysian Chinese - Chua Yin Cantonese - Choy XXX Fu Haifeng 付海峰 Malaysian Chinese - Foo Hai Fong Japanese - XXX KaiXX
Kanji is the chinese characters weeyet was talking about. http://www.kanjisite.com/html/wak/wak4.html
Chinese characters or ideograms used in Japanese writing. The characters may have different meanings from their Chinese counterparts. See Hiragana and Katakana. www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/glossaries/unicode.html (kahn-gee) is Japanese for "Chinese (kan) characters (ji)." These characters originated in China approximately 4000 years ago, and were imported into Japan, where they were adapted to the Japanese spoken language. Consequently, kanji are very close to the Chinese hanzi and share many identical characters, although they are pronounced differently (eg, "kan" instead of "han," and "ji" instead of "zi"). Kanji are sometimes (loosely) called ideograms as they generally represent ideas or objects, although they are frequently used only phonetically. The other Japanese characters sets - hiragana, katakana, and romaji - are exclusively phonetic. Some words consist of just one kanji www.aproposinc.com/pages/asiantrm.htm cheers 8man