Japanese Food, Chinese Characters

Here’s a chart which incorporates illustrations of food into their Chinese character forms [Note: these are based on Japanese kanji, so not all apply equally to Chinese; see my notes below]:

Below are the characters involved, suped up with Sinosplice Tooltips for the readings of both the Chinese and Japanese (more notes at the bottom). I get the impression the English translations were not written by a native speaker, so I’ve added a few notes in brackets to clarify where appropriate.

English	Japanese	Chinese (traditional)	Chinese (simplified)
apple	林檎	蘋果	苹果
grapes	葡萄	葡萄	葡萄
octopus	蛸	章魚	章鱼
lemon	檸檬	檸檬	柠檬
honey	蜂蜜	蜂蜜	蜂蜜
chicken	鶏肉	雞肉	鸡肉
eel	鰻	鰻魚	鳗鱼
[mandarin] orange	蜜柑	橘子	橘子
strawberry	苺	草莓	草莓
weigh	量る	稱 (重量)	称 (重量)
bamboo [shoot]	筍	筍	笋
shrimp	蛯 ( / 老 / 蝦)	蝦	虾
sausage	腹詰	香腸	香肠
pork	豚肉	豬肉	猪肉
[sweet] dumpling	団子	圓子	圆子
root [= radish]	大根	蘿卜	萝卜
egg	卵	雞蛋	鸡蛋
peach	桃	桃子	桃子
eggplant	茄(子)	茄子	茄子
noodles	麺	麺	面
seaweed	海藻	海藻	海藻
onion	(玉)葱	洋蔥	洋葱
melon	瓜	瓜	瓜
saurel [mackerel?]	鯵	鯖魚 [?]	鲭鱼 [?]
mix	混ぜる	攪拌	搅拌
cow	牛	牛	牛
flatfish [flounder?]	鰈	鰈魚 [?]	鲽鱼 [?]
milk	牛乳	牛奶	牛奶
persimmon	柿	柿子	柿子
drink	飲み物	飲料	饮料

Creating this table was a good exercise in both vocab comparison between Japanese and Chinese, and also simplified and traditional characters. A few things jumped out as I created the table above:

1. Many of the Japanese characters above are not normally written in characters (kanji). In modern Japan, many words like 林檎 (apple), 苺 (strawberry), and 蛯 (shrimp) are often just written as “りんご,” “いちご,” and “えび,” respectively, in hiragana (no characters).

2. There are words like レモン (檸檬), the word for “lemon,” which looks weird not written in katakana. And I’m not familiar with 腹詰; I’ve always encountered “ソーセージ,” which entered Japanese as a loanword from the English “sausage.”

3. 苺 means “strawberry” in Japanese, but it’s the morpheme “-berry” in Chinese, used in such words as 草莓 (strawberry), 蓝莓 (blueberry), and 黑莓 (blackberry).

4. I’m not a big fish-eater, so I’m not confident in the fish translations. Any corrections are welcome.

There’s a lot more I could say here, but unfortunately, my blogging time is limited. Comments welcome!

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Related Links:

– Source: Endless Simmer (via Brad)
– More Chinese Vocabulary Lists on Sinosplice
– Learning Curves for Chinese and Japanese on Sinosplice