Chinese Language Now

4 Responses to “Do Chinese characters have two pronunciations like Japanese characters?”

1. Billy Z Says:
   November 11th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   Nope they usually have one. Although classical chinese has sometimes two pronounciations to distinguish words. Modern chinese only have one. But people speaking different dialect will pronounce them differently or read in their own dialect. Like when I read mandarin I just translated into cantonese grammar almost automatically.

2. Elena S Says:
   November 11th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   most of the characters only have one pronunciation…
   but some can have two or three…

3. ali Says:
   November 11th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   No, just 1.

4. Arren Says:
   December 8th, 2009 at 6:27 am

   Generally speaking, no, they usually have just the one, unless Billy Z mentioned, it’s a Classical Chinese context. However there are some characters that do and one example from Mandarin Chinese, the common 还 character, can mean “also” when used as an adverb which is pronounced as “hái” but when used as a verb, it means “to return” (like to return a book) and would then be pronounced “huán”.

   Bear in mind that different dialects may not have these, or might have more, but they do exist in Chinese, but are fairly rare. They exist in Japanese mainly because their language was heavily derived from Chinese, and this led to several Classical, Modern, poetic, name, etc readings (from both languages) and so certain kanji might have more than 8 readings, but don’t worry about that since even native speakers have trouble. Hope that clears things up.