In the case of Japanese, the use of Chinese characters has facilitated broad-ranging interchange with Chinese, despite the fact that, etymologically speaking, Chinese and Japanese vocabulary in bird names is largely unrelated. In Vietnamese, on the other hand, the deep-rooted Chinese influence of several millennia was nullified when the Chinese writing system was jettisoned in the early 20th century. By adopting a romanised script, the Vietnamese declared cultural and linguistic independence, obscuring many lexical similarities with Chinese and freeing Vietnamese from adherence to the Chinese model. On the other hand, a glance at Vietnamese would leave the impression that the two languages were quite unrelated. The reasons for this paradox are directly and indirectly related to the orthography.
Chinese characters facilitate cross-recognition.
In Japanese, Chinese characters are used to write not only words borrowed from Chinese but also native Japanese words. Thus, the character , read ying 1 in Chinese and meaning 'hawk', is used in Japanese to write the purely native word taka . To the Chinese speaker, it looks as though the Japanese and Chinese word are the same. In fact, taka is not a Chinese word at all. Japanese speakers also feel a huge affinity with Chinese because of the use of Chinese characters.