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The Korean word 순진하다 - to be naive, innocent, or pure - relates to the characters 純眞.

To get an understanding of how a word is used, sometimes I do an image search. In this case, searching for 純眞 yielded what (I think?) is pictures of Japanese whetstones:

enter image description here

Perhaps these whetstones are very pure, hence the link to 純眞. But is '純眞' really rarely used apart from when describing the purity of whetstones?

2 Answers 2

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There's a couple of things going on here:

  1. 「眞」is not used as a character representing common vocabulary in Chinese and Japanese anymore, being totally replaced in those two languages with the 略字 (약자, abbreviated character) 「真」. In Japanese,「眞」retains some usage for proper nouns, while in Chinese「眞」is not used at all, unless quoting ancient texts.
  2. Korean mixed Hanja-Hangul script is not really used anymore, so Google's search function will prioritise Chinese and Japanese search results when Chinese characters are used as a search term.
  3. Based on (1) and (2),「純眞」will highly prioritise a Japanese proper noun, if it exists as a result. In this case,「純眞」happens to be part of the name of a product.
  4. Based on (1), if you want to search for images relating to the meaning「純眞」, you need to use「真」if you're using a non-Korean search engine.

enter image description here

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Edit:

droooze wrote:

韓文習慣用「眞」字,日語和中文用「真」字,「純眞」在中文或者日文必須寫成「純真」。如果寫成「眞」就只出現于日本專用名詞了。

Input 純眞 only yield Japanese results because only Japanese still use 眞 in written (name only Kanji). All the pictures in the results are having the brand name "純眞正山本" in either it's file name or description tag.

As droooze stated, to search 'naive, innocent' in Chinese term, you have to input '純真' instead

~~~~~~~~~~~

純 ='pure'; 眞= ' real' . You got those results because those products have these two characters in the file name or description tag.

純 and 眞 are originated from Chinese character, Both Japanese and Korea imported these characters (either Japanese got it first or Korea got it first)

https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B4%94%E7%9C%9F

純真

日本語 (じゅんしん)

https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B4%94%E7%9C%9E

純眞(순진)

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  • @droooze But 純眞 does appear on those Japanese product's pictures, And I am sure 眞 is still a legit Chinese Character although less common than 真. From the results we got from 純眞, we know Google treats 眞 and 真 as the same character, when it can't find 純真, it look for 純眞 instead
    – Tang Ho
    Commented Nov 25, 2018 at 13:06
  • @droooze Ah, you are correct, 純眞/ (pure and real) / 純正 (pure and authentic) and '純真' (innocent, naive) are different things. Post edited.
    – Tang Ho
    Commented Nov 25, 2018 at 14:04

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