"COUNTRY"
"COUNTRY"
Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean characters
Traditional and Simplified Characters
Click here to download the font file (if it doesn't work, and I'll send it as an attachment). There is a font-installation tutorial here in case you need help. The file is not zipped, so you will not have to unzip it.
There are over 200 characters in this font. I tried to group the characters together in a way that made sense. If you go to the number row on your keyboard, start with 1 and hit the next twelve keys, ending with the = sign, you'll get the Chinese numbers from one to ten (ten is the zero key), followed by a hundred and a thousand. If you hold down the shift key and type those same twelve keys again, you'll get the twelve zodiac animals, in order. Holding down the shift key and moving to to the next row (QWERTYU) gives you sun, moon, and the five elements, followed by the four cardinal directions ("West" is the { key) and then the four seasons. The rest of the capital letters are mostly things found in nature, like mountain, light, and rain. The lowercase letters are mostly words like love, peace, and beauty.
There are more characters in the font than there are keys on the keyboard. Most of the characters are produced by holding down the Alt key and typing numbers on your number pad. The numbers along the top row above the letter keys will not work--it has to be the number pad on the right side of your keyboard.
Be sure to bookmark the front page so you can come back and check the key whenever you need to. The key is divided into sections by theme, with a picture of each character and the numbers to type.
I apologize for the disparity between the number of places in Korea and Japan, and places in China and Taiwan. I just ran out of room!
If you are using this font in a word processing program, you may find that the character you get is not the one you typed. The type-assist program may try to change the first character in a line to a captial letter, or change straight quotes to smart quotes, or make some other perceived "correction." You may have to disable the type-assist feature in order to use the font properly. In Microsoft Word, go to Tools > AutoCorrect and un-check everything. Refer to the key to make sure you are getting the character you want.
Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean characters
Japan and Korea both have their own phonetic writing systems, but also use Chinese characters. In much the same way that we use words borrowed from other languages, many words in Japanese and Korean are derived from Chinese and can be written in Chinese characters. These characters are called kanji in Japan and hanja in Korea. There are often connotative differences in usage between the different countries. I wasn't able to address all the differences, as my space here is limited, but in several cases I have included more than one character for a word and indicated which one is used where.
Traditional and Simplified Characters
| TRADITIONAL "COUNTRY" |
|
SIMPLIFIED "COUNTRY" |
|
| Alt+0230 | Alt+0231 |
China has simplified many commonly used chracters for ease of use. Japan also uses many simplified forms (many of which are different from the Chinese simplified forms, which makes things really confusing). Taiwan and Korea still use traditional characters. I have used mostly traditional characters here, except in a few cases (like Japanese place names).
| SEOUL |  |
 |
| Alt+0254 | Alt+0255 |
Seoul is a native Korean word and does not use Chinese characters. There are characters that are used in China when refering to the capital of South Korea, but people in Korea never use them. It is always spelled out in hangul, the Korean phonetic alphabet. I wasn't going to include the word, since this is, after all, Scrapbook Chinese and not Scrapbook Hangul, but my husband talked me into it.
While I was working on this font, I went to http://zhongwen.com/ more than anywhere else. It's incredibly comprehensive and easy to use.
http://www.mandarintools.com/ is a great site with lots of information.
http://www.kanjisite.com/index.html has a searchable kanji index and nice brush-style characters.