Using Chinese characters to communicate across languages
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In this clip I talk about my experience communicating with a Chinese speaker using Japanese kanji, even though he couldn't speak Japanese and I couldn't speak Chinese.
Wow that’s awesome. One time I communicated with someone in English and they responded to me in English. He was nice
lol, I’ve done that as well!
沙发
板凳
Isn’t that how they have been used for centuries?
Yeah, it used to be done all over the Sinosphere (countries with Chinese influence).
@@LangfocusSpecifically, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, yes
中国語学びたての時に自分も中国行って同じことやりました
中国語あまり話せない中で、筆談でならスラスラと意思の疎通ができたのが便利でよかったです
And you speak Chinese now?
@@C_In_Outlaw3817 今はある程度ですけど話せますよ
でもやっぱり今でも文章の方がわかりやすいw
When I was in the US Army I went thru some electronics equipment training with other NATO soldiers in Europe. The class was conducted in English, but there were soldiers from Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. I was paired with a German soldier for hands-on sessions, and since we both spoke each others language, I suggested we each use our own language to work together. He agreed, and it worked out quite well. It was like Greedo and Han Solo in the bar.
This is a dream of mine. Being able to have multilingual conversations. Working on being bilingual first, or course.
Paul can read Chinese too‽
I can read simple Chinese, but most of that is thanks to my knowledge of Kanji. And I’ve learned some basic words in Chinese to fill in the gaps. I can’t speak Chinese though.
Hanzi is more it’s own language than it is a writing system. It is essencially independent from the phonemes of your spoken language and you learn it basically the same way a new language is learned
That’s why I refer to learning Japanese a “buy one get one half off deal”. Buy Japanese, get Chinese half off.
Btw, Kanji was my favorite part of learning Japanese.
Thanks for confirming what I’ve been theorizing for weeks
I’ll try to learn Chinese characters without learning actual Chinese or any other language that uses them, wish me luck lol
I have accidentaly done that for a year due ti my project.
It is very weird how I can grasp some chinese (and less of japanese but still) in magazines while not really knowing how to pronounce it.
I have made a system that writes my own native language using hanzi/kanji script and tried to make as intelegible as possible meaning wise. I still need to rest it with natives bur I do wonder how well it will fare compared to your own tests and videos.
Isn’t it just like using the alphabet to write in English, German, French or Spanish. Just because you know what the characters mean in your language doesn’t mean anything when you put them together in other language. And just like how there are similar and borrowed words in germanic and romantic languages, there should be a way to communicate?
I guess so. I mean, I cannot speak French and I can barely understand it, mainly it sounds so fast and just like gibberish to me but when French is written, I can pick out the meaning of quite a lot of it because a lot of the words look similar to the English word.
I can’t speak a word of it. Except stuff like hello, goodnight and some numbers.
The Chinese/Japanese characters are not letters like in European languages but closer to emoji (only a bit more cryptic). However, in Chinese, the meaning of a more complex character might be different from Japanese, and vice versa. Simple characters tend to have the same meaning in both languages, so this is why Paul and the Chinese person could communicate via writing. If they had spoken, they would not understand each other. This “communication via writing” is much more difficult with pairs of alphabet-based languages.
It is pretty much like me showing an emoji to someone who doesn’t speak English and them kind of understanding what I’m getting at!
Kanji is the Japanese logographic writing system and it developed from an ancient form of Hanzi [the name of the Chinese logographic writing system]. The two have only slighly deviated in the intervening 1200 years.
Meanwhile, the Chinese of the 9th Century is _wildly different_ from modern Mandarin Chinese, and the Japanese of the 9th Century is als _wildly different_ from modern Japanese.
Because of how Hanzi is structured, however, modern Chinese people can read texts from the 8th Century with little problem. This is why well-educated Chinese people can get something written with more basic Kanji and vice-versa [as another comment points out].
Because alphabets are _phonemic_ and not logographic, alphabets _encode exactly how a language was spoken_ at the time that the spelling was codified. This is why English [and increasingly, French] spelling is such a train-wreck: they encode pronunciation from several centuries ago. And to make English spelling even _more_ of a mess, it was codified right smack in the middle of The Great Vowel Shift, when the pronunciation of English was changing _rapidly_ from Middle-English to its modern form.
BTW: As a French Person to try and read a text in 9th Century French. Or go try and read Beowulf in the orginal Old “English” from 1000 years ago, or maybe some writings by the Venerable Bede from the 7th Century in that older version of Old English.
@John_Weiss love your detailed comment! and yes, I read Beowulf in translation because of Old English being more similar to modern German than modern English. However, interestingly enough I was able to push myself to read a text in what was “latín vulgar” and now Spanish, from the 12th century and was able to grasp what was going on
@@melid9 Thank You! 😁
One thing that an alphabet helps with that a logographic script cannot is what a language sounded like in the past.
Linguists have to guess at what, for example, Middle-Chinese sounded like, whereas we _know_ what Middle English, Middle French, Middle Spanish, and Middle High German sounded like.
When I took a class in Middle High German while doing a semester in Germany, the professor told all of us American students, “I love having non-German students in my course, because to you, Middle High German is simply another language. Your German colleagues, on the other hand, often see Middle High German as just a ‘weird’-German, and so don’t treat it in its cultural context.”
So yeah, we really should _not_ be thinking of Middle English and Old English as, “past versions of Modern English,” but as separate dialects of English if not as separate languages. Same goes for any language once you’ve gone back 500-1000 years.
As an English to ASL interpreter in the USA, I did something similar when I went to the UK. I learned the BSL (British Sign Language) manual alphabet before going (it’s 2 handed compared to ASL’s one handed) and I met Deaf people in Scotland and we were able to communicate to a degree since some signs can be similar, but knowing the alphabet helped to bridge more of the language gap too. I also met Romanian Deaf people in London, and because they use the same manual alphabet as we do in the US, it was even easier because they knew British English, so we learned signs from each other, me learning Romanian signs, and they ASL signs. It wasn’t fast by any means, and very simple sentences, but still cool to be able to communicate with strangers and become friends!
笔谈 😊筆談 [笔谈] ㄅㄧˇ ㄊㄢˊ[n/v] conversation in writing • comment in writing; give a written statement • pen conversations (often used in book titles)
Interesting!
My husband once watched Chinese, Japanese _and Korean_ colleagues talk to each other in a mix of English and Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja [Hanja is the Korean version of Hanzi, which is the proper name for the “chinese characters”]. He said it was very interesting.
Hanja? Not Hangul?
@@Black-And-WhiteWorldview8488 Correct. Hangul is the Korean *_alphabet._*
But before King Sejong the Great commissioned the creation of Hangul, Hanja was the writing system used in Korea.
And from what I understand, Hanja was/is still taught in South Korea. [Though I don’t know in what context. Do they learn it the same way we learn Latin and/or Koine Greek? Was it taught alongside Hangul during the 20th Century but at some point in the past 40-50 years it’s no longer taught? I don’t know.]
As a native Chinese speaker, I would be delighted to know more about this!
I think it’s called “brushtalk” in English. It’s possible since Han characters can have radically different readings depending on language. For instance 筆談 can be read like this:
1. bǐtán (Mandarin)
2. bāt tàahm (Cantonese)
3. pit-tâm (Hokkien)
4. hitsudan (Japanese)
5. pildam (Korean)
6. bút đàm (Vietnamese)
that’s really cool
임진왜란을 다룬 영화인 노량에서도 조선 군인과, 명나라 군인, 일본 군인들이 서로 말이 안 통하니 필담 나누는 장면이 나오더라구요. 여기 채널에서 필담이 나와서 신기해서 댓글 달아봤습니다.