do the chinese and japanese kanji characters have the same meaning?

Answer 1

Not always.

For example:
天（てん / そら, ten/sora）
Japanese: Sky
Chinese: Sky

泥棒（どろぼう, dorobō）
Japanese: Thief
Chinese: Mud Stick?!

湯（ゆ, yu）
Japanese: hot bath
Chinese: Soup

Answer 2

cc above is not correct. By and large, the Chinese characters have retained their meaning despite being used to write other languages (Japanese, formerly Korean -- which is now written exclusively in the Hangul alphabet -- and Vietnamese, which is now written in Roman alphabet). Of course because of the long histories involved, the geographic separation, etc., sometimes a character will have a sense in Japanese that is not commonly associated with it in Chinese, for example. But basically, a Japanese person looking at a Chinese newspaper headline, or a Chinese person looking at a Japanese newspaper headline, will be able to get a rough approximation of the meaning.

Answer 3

The characters come from traditional Chinese writing but after Mao's revolution China started to use simplified characters while Japan and some cities like Hong Kong still use the traditional characters. The Japanese have also made up some new characters that don't exist in Chinese.

Answer 4

Originally they did but as contexts and cultures have advanced (and like all langauges) the words' meanings have changed slighty too. I find this especially with the difference between Chinese and Japanese when characters are repeated because this changes the meaning in both, but not in all cases. Sorry, I can't think of any examples now!

Answer 5

even though the japanese borrowed chinese characters to make a writing system for their language, they did not adopt the meanings of them. japanese has two readings for their character. onyomi which is the chinese reading and kunyomi which is the japanese reading.

Answer 6

Fundamentally - yes; but there are shades of meaning different between J and C as all languages develop as time goes on.

Answer 7

No, and there are Korean kanji characters also.