Chinese characters are their own language. You don’t read them so much as you translate them. That’s why Chinese folk can mostly read written Japanese even though Japanese and Mandarin have almost nothing in common.
This is 100% untrue unless you’re talking about menus and such. Japanese uses three other writing systems (counting Roman letters) two of which Chinese speakers are not going to know without study. A handful of the hiragana/katakana still look and are pronounced like the old Japanese kanji they came from, but those also were not Mandarin but from other dialects of middle Chinese (I want to say there was a lot of Wu, but I can’t recall for certain). EDIT: and even knowing how to read them is going to be useless in the most important case, which is that they conjugate verbs, and do other very important lifting in the language.
Japanese, on the other hand, can read a lot of the kanji, but aren’t going to necessarily get a lot out of anything because Chinese grammar is so radically different to Japanese.
Both will have trouble with characters whose meaning for the same character differs in the other language, and potential difficulty with characters invented in one of the countries independently.
Source: live in Japan, married to Japanese, a number of Chinese friends (mostly Taiwan and HK, but a few mainland)
Edit: sample sentence: 猫がネズミに食べされました。Here it is with the kanji for ネズミ instead, which would give Chinese readers a better chance: 猫が鼠に食べされました。However, I don’t think a Chinese speaker with no internet/dictionary and no previous knowledge of Japanese is going to get the meaning correct. The second one with the kanji will fair better, but I still suspect it would be wrong.
I agree with you about not being able to get hiragana and katakana, but it was very manageable to travel through Japan with no dictionary . I also carried a notebook where I was writing Chinese and showed it to random Japanese people and they almost always got the meaning. Obviously your first example is a bit mean, because you’d know what a Chinese speaker would interpret it like. But this sentence won’t exist in the “wild”. The second example is a bit easier to get. A lot of assumptions are coming with this “on the fly” translation. For example I played dark souls in Japanese but I don’t speak it. It was manageable to play when there were enough Kanji, because of how items were shaped etc. A lot of assumptions but it kinda works
Yeah, I can read Chinese restaurant menus OK (usually; some names are less literal and I have no idea). From what I’ve seen on the net, I could deal with some navigation.
My sentences are a bit mean by design, but even a lot of signs use grammar like that.
For anyone wondering, the sentence might look like “the cat ate the mouse” but it’s actually the opposite (cat was eaten by mouse). More polite japanese grammar indirects things a lot and it can be really rough. For example, official documents, credit card applications, and a lot of signs. I’ve been in Japan most of a decade and it’s still tough
Interesting! Thanks for the insight. I also find it interesting that Japanese sometimes use their own Version of Kanji, neither traditional nor simplified Chinese. Like 楽 vs 樂 vs 乐。 Oftentimes the Kanji use feels “archaic” in contrast to Chinese to me. Not sure how to describe it. Maybe words like 駅? I can’t think of a good example from the top of my head but maybe you know what I mean?
Chinese characters are their own language. You don’t read them so much as you translate them. That’s why Chinese folk can mostly read written Japanese even though Japanese and Mandarin have almost nothing in common.
This is 100% untrue unless you’re talking about menus and such. Japanese uses three other writing systems (counting Roman letters) two of which Chinese speakers are not going to know without study. A handful of the hiragana/katakana still look and are pronounced like the old Japanese kanji they came from, but those also were not Mandarin but from other dialects of middle Chinese (I want to say there was a lot of Wu, but I can’t recall for certain). EDIT: and even knowing how to read them is going to be useless in the most important case, which is that they conjugate verbs, and do other very important lifting in the language.
Japanese, on the other hand, can read a lot of the kanji, but aren’t going to necessarily get a lot out of anything because Chinese grammar is so radically different to Japanese.
Both will have trouble with characters whose meaning for the same character differs in the other language, and potential difficulty with characters invented in one of the countries independently.
Source: live in Japan, married to Japanese, a number of Chinese friends (mostly Taiwan and HK, but a few mainland)
Edit: sample sentence: 猫がネズミに食べされました。Here it is with the kanji for ネズミ instead, which would give Chinese readers a better chance: 猫が鼠に食べされました。However, I don’t think a Chinese speaker with no internet/dictionary and no previous knowledge of Japanese is going to get the meaning correct. The second one with the kanji will fair better, but I still suspect it would be wrong.
Here’s another one 猫が鼠にご飯を作ってくれた。
I agree with you about not being able to get hiragana and katakana, but it was very manageable to travel through Japan with no dictionary . I also carried a notebook where I was writing Chinese and showed it to random Japanese people and they almost always got the meaning. Obviously your first example is a bit mean, because you’d know what a Chinese speaker would interpret it like. But this sentence won’t exist in the “wild”. The second example is a bit easier to get. A lot of assumptions are coming with this “on the fly” translation. For example I played dark souls in Japanese but I don’t speak it. It was manageable to play when there were enough Kanji, because of how items were shaped etc. A lot of assumptions but it kinda works
Yeah, I can read Chinese restaurant menus OK (usually; some names are less literal and I have no idea). From what I’ve seen on the net, I could deal with some navigation.
My sentences are a bit mean by design, but even a lot of signs use grammar like that.
For anyone wondering, the sentence might look like “the cat ate the mouse” but it’s actually the opposite (cat was eaten by mouse). More polite japanese grammar indirects things a lot and it can be really rough. For example, official documents, credit card applications, and a lot of signs. I’ve been in Japan most of a decade and it’s still tough
Interesting! Thanks for the insight. I also find it interesting that Japanese sometimes use their own Version of Kanji, neither traditional nor simplified Chinese. Like 楽 vs 樂 vs 乐。 Oftentimes the Kanji use feels “archaic” in contrast to Chinese to me. Not sure how to describe it. Maybe words like 駅? I can’t think of a good example from the top of my head but maybe you know what I mean?