Can Japanese Speakers Read Chinese?
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In this video I see how well native speakers of Japanese can read Chinese without ever having studied it. The results are incredibly interesting!
Special thanks to: Rio, Shin, Nozomi, and Nana for participating in the video!
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▶ Source of information and examples of Chinese:
"Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar" by Claudia Ross, Jing-heng Sheng Ma.
00:00 – Introduction
03:04 – Sentence 1
05:49 – Sentence 2
09:01 – Sentence 3
12:09 – Sentence 4
13:31 – Sentence 5
15:16 – Sentence 6
17:18 – Sentence 7
19:36 – Reflecting
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It was so much fun to be part of this video with my sister!
ngl I thought I could do better (๑•﹏•)
Thank you 🙏🏻
Thanks for being a part of it, Rio! Your personality and energy definitely made the video better!
that’s very nice🥩
why is lang focus so peak
fr
6:09 I’m never gonna give you up, my horse. Look at my horse, my horse is amazing.
马 caballo 🙂
lmao
lmao
Most Japanese have no problem learning Chinese in one month than any other nationals.
Paul Rick rolled you
in history, chinese and japanese exchanged words and phrases many times, so when the sentence is composed by mostly things or concepts, it’s possible to understand each other or even share almost the same characters. however, the basic grammatical differences between each other had never changed, so when sentence goes short and basic, on the contrary it loses clues for both sides to guess.
I’m Taiwanese. before i learned Japanese, i cannot understand most of the Japanese basic sentence, but somehow I can understood some titles on the Japanese newspapers.
🇹🇼🇹🇼🇹🇼
5:10 “This is something that others wrote” – technically correct. Which is the best kind of correct 🙂
Technicality so boring
It was so much fun to participate in this video with my brother🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♂️
I’m so happy🫷🏻👨🏻🦲🫸🏻
Thanks for being a part of the video, Nana! I’m sure the viewers will enjoy your moments.
I’ll check out your channel!
@@Langfocus thank you🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♀️🙋🏻♀️
I’m so happy!
@@JonahNelson7 that’s very nice🥩
@@user-xh9zh9rh6o yesss 🥩🎃
As a native Chinese speaker (both simplified and traditional) and a Japanese learner, I often understand more complicated Japanese because it contains more Kanji🤣 (Chinese characters). Sometimes even the pronunciation is very close to Mandarin or Cantonese.
Sounds like a similar situation as exists between English and French because of the Norman Conquest. Except that English already used the Latin Alphabet
Japanese on’yomi readings of kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese because Japanese took the readings from Middle Chinese, and Southern Chinese languages like Cantonese are said to be more similar to Middle Chinese in sound than Northern Chinese languages such as Mandarin.
@@erink476Point of Order: Welsh uses the Latin alphabet, yet the majority of Anglophone folks go into near meltdown when faced with comparatively straightforward phonetic transcription.
@@KabalFromMK9 Yes, the pronunciation of southern Chinese dialects retains many pronunciations of ancient Chinese
I think Sino-Japanese pronunciation is more similar to Hokkien or Hakka, whereas Cantonese sounds more like Tai-Kradai languages or Vietnamese.
As a Hongkonger who knows Japanese, it was fun to guess what would give the participants trouble.
It’s easier the other way round, because the japanese varient Kanji sometimes still hold meaning in chinese. We often use 每天, but 每日 still holds similar meaning because 日 still can mean ‘day’.
True, the Chinese tend to know the lesser uesd meaning of a character due to common education of classical chinese(文言文). And my mothertongue is Wu Chinese, we use 日 as the word for day rather than 天 😀
After studying Japanese for 10+ years and passing the JLPT N1, I started learning Chinese. This really matches my experience. Knowing kanji really gives you an advantage, but you quickly learn that the languages are fundamentally different at their core and you need to get some beginner Chinese understanding before your reading abilities are “unlocked.”
12:22 吃 also has the meaning stutter in Chinese when it’s in 吃子(stutterer),口吃（stutter）.As a matter of fact, it is the original meaning of 吃. And the kanji 吃 can also be written as “喫” in traditional Chinese, I’m wondering if shown them this character, the participants might be abled to understand the sentence better😀
喫茶店 means tea/coffee shop, so people might understand it as drinking.
喫煙(to smoke) is so.
“喫” is a variant of “吃”
My Japanese teacher told us that she uses Chinese subtitles when Japanese is not available. When it’s in traditional characters she said that she more or less can understand what’s going on, and with simplified much of what’s written.
I remember before Finding Nemo was released in Japan there was a bootleg dvd with Chinese subtitles being shared around. lol
Correction, 考 can also mean to think in Chinese: as in 思考 – To think (about something), or 考虑 – To think/To Consider (Usually a proposal).
And also means old age like in 寿考 and a dead father like in 考妣 (and in ancient Chinese just father like in 皇考）
Native Chinese speaker here.
At 6:31, you can see her confuse the simplified version of 話(话) as 活, especially with the way how that radical was simplified (言→讠), it looks almost identical to the radical for water (氵).
I didn’t catch that. In fact 活 does in fact mean “living” like in Zhang Yimou’s banned in China but famous movie translated into English literally as “to live” 活著/活着
Super interesting! It seems like Chinese compound words and particles pose the most difficulty. Most Japanese kanji compound words exist in Chinese, but many Chinese compound words don’t exist in Japanese.
As someone who doesn’t know Japanese or Chinese, I find it interesting to see how similar sentence structures are between Chinese and English.
I feel the same. Chinese is easier to study for English speaker (grammarly)😅
so true! I’m a Mandarin speaker and have noticed the similarity too
I would like to give two examples: Many years ago, I traveled from China to Tokyo. Once, I was shopping in a store, but they ran out of stock. The clerk told me to go to another store and gave me the address, but I couldn’t understand. I asked her to write it down in kanji, and as soon as she did, I immediately understood. The second example is when I went to the train station to travel from Tokyo to Yokohama. I needed to take the 田园都市线. The staff couldn’t speak English, so I kept repeating “Tian Yuan Dushi Xian” in Chinese. The staff eventually understood and repeated it back to me in Japanese. I realized that the pronunciation of “Den-en-toshi Line” is almost the same in both Chinese and Japanese, with the Japanese pronunciation sounding more like the dialect from the Shanghai area.
It’s fun how their brains can read something like “I each sky cheer cafe” and all correctly interpret it as “I drink coffee every day”. Such a cool video!
A Japanese native here. As Paul pointed out in the previous video, the more formal and complex the sentences are in both languages the better speakers of each language would understand them; an interesting bit of trivia is that up until fairly recently from a historical standpoint Japanese (and Korean and Vietnamese as well for that matter) intellectuals studied classical Chinese extensively to the point that diplomats in East Asia were able to communicate by writing down classical-looking Chinese sentences. This type of communication via kanji can and does happen today as well, as I’m sure many Japanese and Chinese speakers would have experienced when visiting each other’s countries.
Another tidbit of historical geekery I’d like to offer is that in the mid 19h century Japan before mass media there were such tremendous differences among dialects in Japanese from across the archipelago to the point they were almost or partially mutually unintelligible. So when anti-shogunate rebel samurais who would later establish the Meiji government were plotting a next coup or two in Kyoto some of them are said to have communicated in written kanjis instead of trying to decipher their Kagoshima (Southernmost Kyushu) dialect or Tosa (south Shikoku) dialect.
I’d like to point out that the reason why formal sentences in both languages are similar is not because of ancient Sinitic influences on Japan, but because in the 19th century after the Meiji reform Japan translated a lot of new western ideas especially terms related to science and politics into Japanese by creating new Sino-Japanese words called Wasei Kango or 和制漢語 to represent these new ideas, and subsequently these new words created in Japan made their way to Korea, China, and Vietnam.