Samuel B. Johnson, Attorney, PLLC

Chinese

    Samuel Johnson was co-leader of a university student group in Beijing, where he and the students studied Chinese language and culture for a semester.   His study of Chinese was greatly aided by his familiarity with Chinese ideographs, which he had learned to read when he lived in Japan and studied Japanese.  The Japanese language is linguistically very different from Chinese, but the Japanese borrowed the Chinese ideographs for writing purposes.  Thus, both a Chinese person and a Japanese will write 人 and mean "person," but the Chinese person will say rén and the Japanese person will say hito.   To make things even easier, in some cases the Japanese borrowed not only the character but also the Chinese pronunciation, adapted to the Japanese sound system.  Thus a Chinese person and a Japanese person will both write 愛人 and will both mean, "beloved person," and will both read it aloud almost identically; for the Chinese it is aìrén and for the Japanese it is aijin.

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