When Chinese speakers read Japanese
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In this clip I show a Japanese sentence to a Chinese speaker to see how well she can read it.
Don’t some kanji have different meanings to their chinese counterparts.
Yes. Chinese use Kanji or Hanzi that Japanese doesn’t use and vice versa. Japanese only use around 2,000. I know that Chinese use considerably more since they don’t use any other kind of writing system.
草
@@supermarioversus I have no idea what that means and translate isn’t working😭😭
@@ihatemorgz456 It means grass
Well, occasionally they’re used for their pronunciation (rather than for their meaning), but that’s not the problem she was having. She didn’t know some of the compounds (presumably, because they’re different from the corresponding Chinese ones), but that’s not the *main* problem she was having either. She obviously doesn’t know any Japanese grammar, even really basic things like を indicating the accusative case, or です being a verb suffix in the textbook (“polite”) register, or the fact that verbs are normally at the end of a clause, or る marking a verbal (second nature to anyone who has studied Japanese at all, because it’s the lexical form). As a result, she didn’t know what role anything was serving in the sentence. If she’d had even one semester of basic Japanese grammar (or the equivalent in self study), combined with the knowledge she *did* have of the hanzi, she could have gotten *much* closer to the meaning of the sentence, because for example she’d have been looking at “hand paper” knowing that it’s a thing that the speaker/writer wants to send. (Instead, even after being told what the sentence meant, she was still confused about where the verb was, guessing that the identified noun, might be the verb.) Not sure if she’d have been able to work out what the stamp was, though, even if she had known the grammar: the thing that’s needed to send a letter, could also be an address, or a mailbox; and the connection between the postage stamp as a modern object, and the act of cutting (stamping) something out of a sheet, is only obvious if you’re used to thinking about etymology.
I am surprised she could guess that 手紙 doesn’t mean the same that in Chinese, maybe she already knew it means something else, or she didn’t realise lol.
Because 手紙 means toilet paper in chinese, not letter right?
It depends on the dialect, a lot of dialects call it 衛生紙 which I guess would translate to “sanitary paper”? Or something along those lines. I’ve also heard 手紙 be used (in Chinese) to refer to handkerchiefs/tissues, rather than toilet paper.
@caseygreyson4178 I see, thanks for the information. I don’t speak Chinese, I’ve just heard Chinese speakers make fun of the word. It makes sense that maybe she speaks a different dialect.
@@basti6643There’s not much dialectal variation in mainland China nowadays. Basically everyone knows the standard language. I think these differences are mainly due to personal preferences.
Hah. She got all the parts I didn’t get. Whereas, I followed the _grammar_ of the sentence but was missing the vocabulary for lack of being able to read kanji.
Super interesting
A good example of false friends.
False cognatives are EVEN WORSE between Japanese and Chinese than, say, what English and Italian/Spanish speakers do; they are all Indo-Europen. Japanese, an Aglutanative language just :borrowed chacters and meanings over almost a millennium. Chinese is sinitic.
Agglutinative is not a language family, it just means that the language add some particles and affixes around their words to add sense, context or grammatical meaning like verb tenses or whatever. Japanese isn’t the only one nor the most famous language in the matter.
Proto-Indo-European was agglutinative and thus all Indo-European languages are also agglutinative to some extent, but especially English is kind of an extreme case in how much those features have disappeared. Some quite agglutinative languages found in Europe (and are not IE languages) are Turkish, and the Uralic languages Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian.
そもそも切手は「郵便切符手形」の略称であって、「切符手形」は「お金を既に払ってある事を証明する紙片」という意味で使われていたのが、1200年以上前にはもう「切符」「切手」と略されて使われ続けて来た言葉。それがたかだか150年前に入ってきた鉄道輸送システムと郵便輸送システムの「料金支払を示す紙片」の意味に使われて、乗車券は「切符」が、郵便切手は「切手」が当てられた訳で。
This was a linguistic set up
No. Watch the full video.
This might be completely wrong, but I like to think they use “cut hand” for stamps because they are derived from signature seals hand carved from blocks of wood.
Full video linked under username🎯
Basic single Kanji pictographs may have similar meaning, but combining Kanji now leaves room for idiomatic expressions that go beyond the basic meaning. Plus Japanese adopted Chinese pictographs about 1500 years ago. Plenty of time for Japanese & Chinese writing to diverge. In 1500 years, Old English evolved to Middle English, Early
Modern English, to contemporary Modern English. No modern English speaker can comprehend Old English.
Wait so does that mean they use similar letters/alphabet? I mean since she could kinda read it.
Yes. I explain it in the full video that’s linked from this short. Japanese adopted Chinese characters a long time ago, and a lot of Japanese vocabulary comes from those characters and the meaning they represent.
@ Thanks I’ll give it a watch!
Thanks!
It’s not necessary to cut your hand to send paper.
That actually sounds like a sick proverb!
Chinese(in general) and Japanese only shares around 40% vocabulary of kanji, and Japanese has multiple ways to read a kanji, not mention Japanese has two other types of alphabets. so it would be more difficult for Chinese speakers to guess Japanese, easier for Japanese speakers to guess Chinese. In Chinese, I think 切手 is 郵票？
Cut hand, chops, chop marks, you know the thing the Imperial era chinese does to spanish silver.