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Actually the pronunciation is not entirely different...I think some Kanji characters have similar pronunciation to that in Chinese just that many of the pronunciations are closely related to Southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese, Fujian and Shanghai dialects, this is because Mandarin is based on Northern Chinese dialect to the north of Yellow River, it became popular only in the past 300 years. For example, "Heart" 心臓 in Chinese is "Xinzang' and in Japanese is pronounced as "Shinzō". "Teacher" 教師 or 先生, in Chinese is 'Jiaoshi' or 'Xiansheng', in Japanese is "Kyōshi" or "Sensei", very similar. In ancient China the national language varied from dynasty to dynasty, the pronunciation of Cantonese has deep root in ancient Chinese language and still keeps the same pronunciation and phrases. When Japanese students came to Xi'an China to learn Chinese in Tang dynasty in the 9th century, they adopted the pronunciation of Chinese language of that era. And when many southern Chinese in southern Chinese kingdom of Wu migrated to Japan during Japan's Kofun period during 4th to 5th century, they brought southern Chinese dialect pronunciation to Japan. Having said that if I am not wrong for every Kanji in Japanese there are two pronunciations, one is called Wu pronunciation that is similar to Wu dialect in Shanghai & Suzhou in Southern China, and the other is Japanese way of pronunciation.
I once saw Japanese tourists laughing their ass off after seeing a 金玉滿堂 banner in Taiwan. In Chinese, 金玉滿堂 literally means "Gold and jade filling house", which is an idiom for wishing people good fortune. But in Japanese, 金玉 means testis, so when Japanese trying read it becomes "Testis filling house".
I have personally seen a Japanese and a Chinese scientist discussing a concept in English, reach the limits of their English and then write down kanji to express the concepts they are trying to explain and then understand each other.
That's true. Before 20th century when Japan hadn't reformed and focused more on kanji education, it was very common for Chinese and Japanese people communicating through writing.
A lot of technical terms in Chinese are actually loanwords from Japanese Kanji terms because those ideas are introduced earlier into Japan than into China.
@@HarrySheeh Yes. Those loanwords can be easily understood by Chinese people because kanji itself indicates the meaning (this is something that latin language users can't really understand), and also many of these words were created based on ancient Chinese classics. For example the word "経済" for economy is created by Japanese scholar from a sentence "經世濟民" in a Chinese books, which can be comprehended by people from both countries.
@@hiskiliu8941 It's crazy that hiragana and katakana weren't standardized until 1900. So you could have two unique Japanese characters from different areas representing the same sound. Sounds like a nightmare.
This is the video I, a Japanese studying Chinese, have been waiting for! As you know, Chinese for Japanese is just like French for English; the more a sentence gets difficult, formal, or academic, the more you can get the words.
I feel the exact same! I am Chinese and I speak Mandarin and English. I am learning French using English, and I also found out that the more formal and academic a French text is, the more words I can understand when I am reading them, as English borrowed a lot of words from Latin and French! Reading Japanese gives me a similar feeling, but I actually think the Chinese Characters used in the Japanese Language are closer the Classical Chinese than Mandarin. I suppose that's the reason of the strong impact Classical Chinese do to the Japanese Language hundreds or even thousands of years ago!
Because most of those super technical words were first coined by Japanese after meiji restoration and then reverse introduced to Chinese 😂. I think most law, sociology, and scientific terms were 和制汉字. Then of course you guys got tired and started using katakana for the newer stuff. As a Chinese I can guess a lot of the stuff based on the katakana pronunciation of English words plus the kanjis
@@wngmv I'm so disappointed that Japanese academia had quitted (or is quitting) using Chinese vocabulary for new things. Saying コンピューター for computer is just insane. There is much shorter, simpler, and lucid word, 電脳, used just in front of our country! I really hope you Chinese people never quit this way, Chinese characters are the treasures.
@@anubisu1024 Thanks for that, highly appreciated. Hong Kong Cantonese once followed a very similar pattern to this phenomenon you mentioned here, 士巴拿 spanner, 紅地厘蛇果 Red Delicious apple (bunch of mixed using of translation)
A classic example occurred in the 1980s when Japanese investors established a factory in China. They hung a slogan reading "油断一秒、怪我一生." Chinese workers unfamiliar with Japanese were initially startled by the perceived rigor of the slogan due to a linguistic misunderstanding. In Chinese, the words translate to: "油" refers to oil, "断" means to stop or cease, "一秒" is one second, "怪" signifies blame, "我" is me, and "一生" stands for one's entire life. Hence, Chinese workers interpreted it as, if the oil (in a machine or something else) stops for a second, one should blame oneself for the rest of their life. However, in Japanese, "油断" actually means negligence, "一秒" remains as one second, "怪我" signifies to sustain an injury, and "一生" still means one's entire life. The actual intent of the slogan is to warn that a moment of negligence can result in lifelong harm.
That’s because 油断 and 怪我 are both are atejis, if not from Buddhist terminologies. They using chinese characters’ sounds to transliterate non-Chinese words
Back in the 90s my grandpa in China used to travel a lot for business. One time he met a Japanese tourist who sat next to him during the flight and they began to 'talk' to each other through writing in chinese / kanji. They ended up becoming penpals and the japanese family came back to China visiting us several times.
@@danielantony1882 Thanks for your corrections. I started relearning English four weeks ago, but I studied Japanese for a long time in university.I've realized that, aside from playing Japanese games or watching Japanese anime, it's hard to use Japanese in daily life. As a result, my Japanese skills have declined quickly."
A great story is when the Americans after Comodore Mathew Perry arrived in Japan, and no one spoke English but they had a Dutch Interpretor among them(which was the only foreign western language Japan had an interpretor for) . Diplomacy was done in Dutch verbally and in written they had a Chinese official (who did not know Japanese but knew English) write out the details in classical Chinese/kanji which the Japanese knew. Four way communication in action 😅
As a Chinese, I played through Final Fantasy 1-3 watching the Chinese kanji in Japanese when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. You can basically guess where the plot will go.
a japanese here. It was a lot of fun looking at signs and boards in Hong-Kong, because pretty much all of them had Simplified, Traditional, and English texts together so that I could confirm my guesses. It was quite satisfying to see my guesses were ok from the day one, and in couple of days I could train myself to read like 80-90% of them right. It was like being surrounded by Rosetta Stones.
What a lucky guy. Meanwhile, we westerners struggle every time we go to visit you guys when something is not translated 😂 Well... It's less of a challenge nowadays with Google Lens and such.
Interesting fact about Japanese in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong was under occupation by Imperial Japan, place names had a short but official Japanese reading. These are different than today's Japanese translations you see in tourist maps. e.g. 銅鑼灣 English: Causeway Bay Cantonese: Tung Lo Waan Japanese reading then: Dorawan Japanese reading now: Kou-su-wei Bei Another interesting example: 香港仔 English: Aberdeen Cantonese: Hoeng Gong Zai (Literally Little Hong Kong) Under Japanese occupation: 元香港 Moto-HonKon / 元港區 Moto-Minato-Ku (Literally meaning Original Hong Kong)
I am from Hong Kong and I always wondered if Japanese can read the signs written in traditional chinese characters haha (despite slight stroke differences) Just as before I learn Japanese I could already read Japanese news (because they are all essentially kanji)
Years ago when living in Japan, I took a trip to Beijing. Rather than paying the high tourist rate to go to the Great Wall of China, I hired a local taxi driver on the street for the day. Me speaking Japanese and he speaking Mandarin, the two of us couldn't talk, but I was able to use basically a written pidgin to negotiate where we wanted to go, the timing, and the cost. The final element of the negotiation involved me buying his lunch. Did it all with kanji and non-verbal communications. It worked.
Did you know, when Vietnamese natioalnalist revolutionaries went to Japan to find assistance to fight the French, although they didn’t speak Japanese, they still communicated with Japanese people quite conveniently due to kanji.
old historic documents mention that the diplomats from east asian countries, sitting around the table, didn't 'speak' but rather 'write' in order to communicate each other
This might give the wrong impression that Chinese characters themselves carry meaning. They don’t, it’s just like historical spelling in the Romance language and English. An English speaker can understand a lot of Spanish if they only use formal words. Also at that time classical chinese was a mandatory school subject both in China and Japan so they were actually using Classical Chinese not just randomly drawing characters. I say at that time but it’s still mandatory in China and Japan. Japanese students have to either take Classical Japanese or Classical Chinese for their center exam which’s basically the SAT over there.
More precisely, they communicate by a common written language called 'Classical Chinese' that is written in hanzi (not kanji precisely because classical chinese uses the chinese version of the characters). If they use kanji/chu han only, it will still be difficult to communicate, just like modern Chinese and modern Japanese in the video.
This is exactly me reading Japanese as an Chinese-native Japanese learner😂First scan out the Kanjis to form a (sometimes wrong) sketch of the meaning and then use the limited Kanas I recognize to further improve
The confusion between mother and daughter is so interesting. Actually “娘” meant “girl”in ancient Chinese language, but with time a new meaning “mother” was evolved. Even today, if combined with certain words, “娘” in Chinese still keeps its original meaning, like in “姑娘”. However if you just look at this character without context, most people will think of “mother”. There is a Chinese saying “天要下雨, 娘要嫁人”，, meaning “Rains will fall. And girls will marry. This usually refers to something which will very naturally happen. But when I searched on the internet, most people are translating it to “mother will marry”, which proves that Chinese speakers are forgetting the original meaning of this character over time. It’s very interesting to see the original meaning lost in Chinese, but is still kept in a language influenced by Chinese.
Do you perhaps use the kanji 母(informal) mom or お母さん mother (formal) when referring to mother ? Or it has a different meaning in chinese? In japan mostly its used 女の人 or 女子 when referring to “women”
What i usually feel like is, if the Japanese article is harder or more formal such as some government files or the constitution (or just road signs), it would instead musch easier for a Chinese speaker to read.
Most Chinese speakers may find it easy to guess the general idea of an article written in Japanese as long as there are some kanjis in it. Everything seems fine until you see a Chinese speaker mistakes the meaning of 金玉 for "jewelry" instead of knowing it's a slang for "testicles" in Japanese.
The most difficult thing has to be different words in Chinese and Japanese written with the same characters, because that's when you don't realize that you don't actually understand! I actually encountered such things in real life... In 2018 I went to Mt. Fuji. The tourist center at Subaru line 5th station has a 仮設トイレ, and the Chinese sign says 假设洗手间 Also, for anyone who don't want to make such mistakes, there is a list of false friends between Chinese and Japanese on Witionary
[4:49] "切手" is an abbreviation of "切符手形(きっぷてがた)" [7:17] "吃る" is a verbalization of "吃音(きつおん)" [9:22]"勉強"is said to derive from "学者固当勉強(learners should work hard)"
I’m a Japanese learner who passed JLPT N2 several years ago. But it is the first time for me to know that 切手 is an abbreviation. What is the meaning of 手形 then?
As a Chinese speaker who has learned Japanese, I'd say that the differences does create some minor confusion, but I still learned and picked up kanji terms much faster than other students who did not know Chinese. Also, knowledge in classical Chinese actually helped me more than modern Chinese as that's the time period when the Japanese was influence by Chinese the most. Once I figured out the basic rules in how kanji are used and pronouced in Japanese, I was able to transpose some of what I know of Chinese characters into Japanese kanji. The 2 languages have lots of similarities that it definately helps to know one while learning the other.
I'm japanese and understand chinese. for japanese who like to read japanese novels, it's easy to understand many clasic chinese vocabulary. 逍遥、天地開闢、天網恢々, 嶮岨, 曙光 etc.
Once my Chinese friend showed me a letter from his dad, saying “Try guess the meaning.” I missed some, but got its basic message, which impressed both him and myself. Kanji is such an important part of Japanese, I can’t imagine we stop using it. Makes me wonder if any confusion occurred when South Korea and Vietnam stopped using Chinese characters?
@@Astrid-jx5dw For Vietnamese, the confusion is a generational problem. In the early 1900's, it was decided that the Vietnamese language would stop using Chinese characters (chữ Hán) to represent the words and completely replace them with the Portuguese-Latin alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ) in order to increase literacy. While that certainly worked, it had the side effect of future generations being unable to read any Chinese characters because they never had the need to learn them thanks to the language reform. So they can't read anything that their grandparents may have written and left behind, unless they made the effort to go and learn Chinese language at a school. Its not gone completely, as they're still used for historic and religious purposes. But nowadays, no native Vietnamese can read or write them unless they were an elderly Buddhist monk, a little troubling since a large percentage of the younger generations who grew up with the internet (1990's kids and younger) are irreligious. I assume the decision of removing Chinese characters had a lesser impact on written Korean because newspapers and formal documents regarding government affairs or academic studies still use them, alongside Hangul.
@@percival086 Abandoning Hanja probably had a larger impact on the Korean language than did Vietnamese. The proliferation of homophones meant new vocabulary had to be created for disambiguation. Many meanings also became lost or mistaken due to the lack of Hanja for disambiguation. The Korean language essentially had to change (and is still changing) to adjust to the lack of Hanja for disambiguation. Vietnamese being a tonal language has a more complex phonology and does not have the same degree of homophones as does Korean.
@@taoliu3949 Can I use Hanja to learn vocabs since I know Kanji? I'm thinking Hanja to Hanguel flashcards might help with picking up meanings and vocabs even though Hanguel is primary writing system.
It’s my first time watching your video, and it was really interesting to see a foreigner explaining difference between Japanese and Chinese language in English!! Really enjoyed a lot.
About 吃: the story is quite complex. Actually it's not that 吃 has different meanings in Chinese and Japanese (“eat, stutter” in Chinese and "stutter" in Japanese as was introduced in the video), but Japanese perserves the original meaning of 吃 in pre-modern Chinese. According to Dictionary of the National Language (aka Standard Mandarin) / 國語辭典 published in 1936, 吃 only had one meaning "stutter", and the Chinese character for "eat" was actually 喫. The standard pronounciation of 吃 and 喫 were also different（jí vs chī）at that time. In folk usage, however, the two characters had long been combined into one since at least 18th century (a 18th century Chinese linguist Duan Yucai/段玉裁 discussed this phenomenon in his book): 吃 and 喫 became free variations of the same meaning “eat, stutter” with the same pronounciation chī (the pronounciation jí was abandoned), and 吃 further became the “simplified” and popular version of 喫 thus lost its original meaning and pronounciation. Such change can be briefly illustrated as follows: pre-modern Standard Mandarin: 吃 jí “stutter” / 喫 chī “eat” -------> “Vulgar” Mandarin: 吃(popular variant）/喫（more formal variant）chī “eat, stutter” In the second half of 20th century, both Mainland China and Taiwan adopted 吃 as the standard form for 吃/喫, but Taiwanese Mandarin still retained two pronounciations for 吃（ chī for “eat” and jí for “stutter” ）in its dictionaries, while Mainland China's Putonghua fully embraced the folk usage and deleted the latter pronounciation. Back to the topic, from the perspective of Standard Mandarin of not too long ago（as close as early 20th century）, 吃“stutter” in no circumstances should be confused with 喫 “eat”, it's just the “vulgarization” of modern variaties of Standard Mandarin (as what happened with vulgar Latin) that make most Chinese people “forget” the difference, while the Japanese language still keeps the original version of 吃.
I've lived in Beijing, live in Taiwan now and have spoken Mandarin for 12 years. Whenever I visit Japan I always am happily suprised how I can understand most meanings on a resturaunt menu or place-name meanings. I don't always guess correctly, but I can generally get the idea of a lot of sentences with many Kanji in them. It's really cool!
As a Spanish speaker I can say that Spanish and Porutguese people can understand each other almost perfectly in writing, especially if it's a formal text.
Native English speaker that can get around well enough in Spanish speaking countries, took a trip to Portugal with only a couple months crash course, could understand nearly everything written, thought I was ok. Got to Portugal and found that was next to useless. Had an amazing time just with a lot more hand gestures and pantomiming.
@@bear2s232 I don't know that for sure, but Latin American Spanish/Porutguese are sometimes very different from European ones. There are a lot of indigenous words and local slang in Latin American variant of the languages.
@@bear2s232not necessarily. Portuguese and Spanish are still very much different languages, so there's still a level of difficulty. There's also dozens of native languages that are spoken throughout central and South American
@@bear2s232 In writing yes, it is possible to pick up 80% to 90% of the meaning. Speaking not really, it is possible to communicate, like 30%, but if people speak slowly and strive a bit, then, it could be 50% or 60%, of course with the help of the context
1:26 Actually the word “试验/試驗” also exists in Chinese and also means test/exam. It's also commonly used. Also the difference in simplification won't matter much to native speakers if both characters keeps the basic structure of the glyph.
I'm a native Japanese speaker. For me, it is much easier to understand written traditional Chinese than simplified Chinese. Books published around early 20th century use traditional kanji but their grammar and vocabulary are basically the same as today. So we have a plenty of chance to get used to the traditional kanji characters.
There are only about a couple hundred characters that have simplified forms, and they bear some resemblance to the original form. So it would take about one afternoon to browse the table of simplified characters and be caught up on the 20th century Chinese texts.
@@Kerguelen.Mapping Oversimplification that also totally misrepresents how the Chinese language arrived in and influenced Japan. A double dose of stupidity. Very nice.
@@Kerguelen.Mapping It is not clear, but it seems like around 200 or 300 AD when kanji first arrived Japan. It must have taken several centuries to get rooted in Japan, but at least late 5c sword unearthed near Tokyo has a certain amount of kanji characters which apparently express Japanese sentence. After that, new pronunciation came to Japan with the new waves of Buddhism (especially during Tang and Song dynasties).
@@John_WeissIt's not that simple. Of course some part of simplification is just like you said, but there are also "un-cursivised" ones. I mean, they made a new block letter form from cursive script.
As an Italian, this situation is similar to reading Maltese. Maltese is basically an odd dialect of Arabic with much of the more technical or litterary vocabulary taken from Sicilian, which is generally easy for me to understand. So I would be able to understand the jist of a text about the economic goals of the Maltese government, but have no clue if a passer by asked me for directions to the city centre.
@@DarklordZagarna more closely frisian, theres a wikitongue, and other frisian vids here, also the i want to buy brown cow asked in old english to frisian farmer experiment in yt the asymmetrical inteligibility is because buy has another synonym on continental germanic, kapjan in proto, chapman, cheap etc. in english cognates. buy mostly doesnt exist in continental germanic because of random vocabs being forgotten because of disperse of the whole germanic population. this could be found in wiktionary in proto langs entries where some or a word has synoynm below its entries for the other branch of its proto languages daughter languages
This video showed up on a notification on my phone a couple days ago, but I was so busy I couldn't watch it until now, on a Saturday morning. I had great expectations, and it was just as good as I hoped it would be. Great stuff, Paul. Your channel was already great when you started, but you've improved even more. Congratulations!
being fluent in both Chinese and Japanese, this video is infinitely funny to me. reminds me of a brief trend on social media in China a while back, where people would use Japanese kanji to write Chinese. Let me demonstrate. Let's say you want to say "You are really good at Japanese." In Chinese it's "你的日语说得真好", in Japanese it's "君は本当に日本語上手ですね". What you do then is, chop all the hiragana off the Japanese sentence, and rearrange words a bit so it matches Chinese grammatical structure better. The sentence then becomes "君日本語本当上手", which is not really Chinese nor Japanese, but you can still get the gist of it. And you send it to your very confused friend. Noted, this little game was only played between Chinese people who have some level of understanding with Japanese, but it's still interesting. I've seen Japanese people on some forums do a similar thing, but write Japanese sentences using Chinese words and characters.
君日本语本当上手 has become a meme that mocks someone that pretends to know Japanese but in fact doesn't. For example, when some one says "this sign says, Mr. Xu is a illegal photographer", you can send this sentense to him.
When I was living in Hongkong, always use 食(to eat）飲(to drink),but in mainland people who don't speak Cantonese they use 吃（to eat）喝(to drink). Japanese also use 食and 飲.
But 食 and 飲 can only be used informally in hk. In formal situations we have to use a ‘written language’ 書面語 that’s basically the same as Mandarin, and write 吃 and 喝. If you write 食 and 飲 in school, you’ll get a cross.
I am Japanese and can sometimes understand some basic meanings of Chinese sentences thanks to kanjis, which sometimes helps me when traveling Chinese countries. I was a bit impressed Chinese people can do the same thing even though 平仮名 and カタカナ are included.
My favorite "reading something in another language despite not speaking it" that I have had was when I (a native English speaker) was learning Swedish and correctly guessed that "arbete" meant "work" because I knew the Japanese word "アルバイト" (arubaito, meaning "part time job") came from the German word for work, "arbeiten".
As a Chinese speaker who learns Japanese, I would say being able to recognize Kanji fast helps a lot in terms of reading speed. For casual readings I usually just skim over the kanji and make a small glimpse to the end of the sentence to make sure about negation, and that generally works well. But reading kanji is also a curse because relying too much on it means that it takes me much longer to actually remember the pronunciation of many words - they usually are just ambiguous in my mind and sometimes I need a few tries to get them correct when talking to people.
8:22 fun fact: the 吃 in Chinese is also supposed to only mean stutter, which is preserved in 口吃; The "eat" meaning is derived from the fact that 吃 is borrowed to write 喫, for it has less letters with the same pronunciation (chī). The borrowing stuck and 喫 is phased out of use. The same 喫 is used in the Japanese word 喫茶店 (lit. tea-drinking store), aka Japanese café diner.
When the Portuguese first landed in Japan, they communicated through a chinese scribe who could converse with a japanese scribe through writing. This is so interesting. It's kinda like the Latin, Greek and french loanwords scattered all over the european contintent, but much, much deeper.
They were actually communicating through Classical Chinese. During that time all educated people like scholars and scribes studied Classical Chinese. It served as a written Lingua Franca in east asia.
@@rudhardotcom Well , both are East Asian languages, so ofc they would have some similar sounds exclusive to that area. But Japanese definitely sounds a bit more like Maori or like some Bantu language imo
In the past Vietnamese Korean Japanese Chinese from south and Chinese from north can seat together and dont understand a word of each other but still able communicate by writing in Classical Chinese. give me some more historical context, in the past there are no any writing system for Korean and Japanese(not quite sure about vitnamese, the Hinagata was invented in 平安時代,in 萬葉集,and the Classical Japanese and Classical Chinese writing style developed in parallel in Japan. Still at this day Japanese student have to learn how to read both Classical Japanese and Classical Chinese. in case of korea, there was no any writing system for Korean language until 世宗大王 gathered a group of scholar , by learning the writing the writing system of Mongolian, ethnic minority in china called Jin, and Sanskrit etc, then invented what we now known as the Korean alphabet.However, since the Korea or chosen peninsula was under the influence of china for more than a thousand of year, the political system of Korea is basically the same as the chinas one. one of the most important part of which is that if you wanted to work in the government you have to pass the exam which test your understanding of knowledge of Chinese classics like confusion and more, so in general if you wanna be in upper class you have to know how to write in Classical Chinese.So when the emperor publish that new writing system, in Chinese 訓民正音(teach people how to speak and write), all the scholar were against it , said something like, "only the barbarian like Japanese Mongolian and more ethnic minority that dont know how to write in Chinese will invent there only writing system, we Korea, also 'small china', how can we abandon the Chinese culture and become a barbarian ?", so the Korean alphabet became something only women were using. not until 20 century the Korean writing system were adapted due to nationalism, and when the Korea were divided into two, both side abandon hanja, kanji,hanzi(basically 漢字), because Japan colonize Korea for a while and Korean hate Japanese and that abandon the use of Japanese and also kanji. so today in Korea only people in their 50 or 60 can understand hanja. POV: I am from Hong Kong, study Classical Chinese in free time :)
this is just like when you give a more advanced, formal english sentence to speakers of romance languages they can understand it better than everyday english, because it contains more latin!
As a Chinese guy who is studying Japanese, I think it benefits a lot for Chinese people to learn Japanese. You can easily understand a great portion of Japanese contents once you learn some basic Japanese grammar because you have few barriers in vocabulary compared to western people. It's like you only need to spend 20% of study time to reach the same level of a Japanese learner from western countries. (This is only for reading; although many words in Japanese and Chinese sounds similar, we still need to learn speaking and listening from scratch)
As a westerner, it's hell :D Even if I've acquired words from unhealthy amounts of anime consumption, I can't read them unless I study the word separately. It's frustrating to know eg. _shunkan_ easily, but then see 瞬間 and be ???. For extra comedy, I managed to spot the word from Korean text (순간 _sungan_ ) just because I'd acquired it from hearing Japanese. Being illiterate is not fun, especially when that illiteracy is unnecessary.
As a Japanese person learning Chinese, it's pretty easy to learn Chinese expect for its pronunciation. Once you overcome the barrier of pronunciation, it's soooo easy to understand Chinese. 总结来说，除了发音，我觉得中文不太难。
@@unknown-ahjtxdjupgnwMy Japanese friends have told me it’s especially easy to learn reading Chinese because of the generally easy grammar. Japanese reading and grammar are much harder for Chinese people to learn. Pronunciation is the easy one for us.
Easy to understand once you know the grammar, but still can’t speak it for the most part. The speaking part probably is just as hard as a non-Chinese. Even the loan words feel like a Frenchman trying to learn the English “butchered” pronunciation of these words with a heavy accent.
But it's good and it's also bad. As a Chinese guy who is learning Japanese too. When I see Kanji, I naturally have a "pronunciation" in my head which is not "right". LOL. So the first thing is cutting the rope between "Kanji" and "Hanzi". That's hell! LOL.
In vietnam we use alot of hán tự(漢字)word with different meaning word that used in madarin example: library in china is 圖書館in vietnam is thư viện(書院),bye in vietnam is tạm biệt (暫別),không mean: zero and no is 空,student in university in china still called 學生 in vietnam called 生員, teacher in vietnam is giáo viên (教員),hospital in vietnam called bệnh viện 病院 in china called 醫院,books in china is 書in vietnam is sách (策),thư(書)in vietnam is mail,thank in vietnam is cảm ơn(感恩)in china is 謝謝, accordance,proper,.. in china is 合适 vietnam is thích hợp (适合),like in china is 贊 in vietnam is thích(适), dragon fruit in china is 火龍 in vietnam is thanh long(青龍),fruit in china is 水果 in vietnam is hoa quả(花果)teacher in university in vietnam is giảng viên(講員) in china is still used 老師... Alot different meaning hán tự(漢字) use every day by vietnam language and madarin,..
it's fascinating Vietnamese sounds more of how ancient Chinese was. even I can't speak Vietnamese I feel Vietnamese sounds close to Cantonese. I can speak Taiwanese (southern Fukienese) and a lot of words you describe is also how it is pronounced in Taiwanese. A lot of words/phrases in Vietnamese is actually the same meaning in Chinese, just used in a more classical way rather than modern Chinese.
@@JayG0o loll only less than 1% is french word,more than 70% the word is from china,just like how latin and french influence in English (even though 30% of roma empire language word is from Greek language 😆🤣🤣)
Words like '病院' (hospital) and '図書館' (library) were exported from Japan to China after the 19th century. A vast number of modern terms, such as '電話' (telephone), '科学' (science), and '社会' (society), were also imported into China as loanwords from Japan.
I'm a chinese major, shinjitai can be a bit difficult but overall japanese kanji is understandable (knowing the proper readings is another issue) edit: the video was very interesting! As expected native speakers got the meaning much easier than I did, hearing their opinions on the differences in usage was also very helpful, thank you very much for the video as always! The point about understanding formal writing more is very accurate, a few weeks back I found a journal published by the literatue departament of Hokkaido University in our school's library, I decided to give it a go to see how much I'd understand of it (I have some prior knowledge of Japanese, nothing major) and it was much easier than I thought it would be so even though my reading speed was rather slow I was able to read a whole chapter in Japanese with 70-80% understanding of the text🙏
20:47 I'm Austrian, my native language is German and the southern Austrian dialects. However, knowing both German and English, spoken Dutch is often relatively easy to figure out, despite the geographic distance.
I learned Japanese as a child in Japanese language school, but my level was fairly low. At some point later in life, I decided to learn Mandarin, and got to a low intermediate level. More recently I came back to Japanese and my Chinese really helped me progress much faster in Japanese. It's a bit like learning more complicated English by learning Spanish--the Latin roots then become clearer.
Chinese here. Though I don’t speak Japanese, I have watched a lot Japanese anime and interested in Japanese culture. Thus I have some prior knowledge of the words with clear different meaning between Japanese and Chinese. Such words appeared in the video like 手纸、娘、勉强、上手 are familiar to me. It’s interesting to see people misunderstood these words. You can tell the guy with blur background is probably an anime fan too.
Chinese here and I also speak Japanese. Just a few additions. Pronunciation of Kanji based word, especially in 音読み. Even the example in the video 语言 vs to 言語, the pronunciation in both languages are fairly similar and it was quite easy for me to pick up the twist in Japanese. This helped me a lot when learning Japanese. I think this is more true for a southern dialect Chinese speaker （吴语 or 粤语 etc.). About written part different simplification is much less of an issue. I'm from mainland and never learned traditional Chinese but found myself no problem at all reading contents in it. This is less true in Japanese but still almost a none issue assuming one consumes diversified culture content. About the "more advanced" sentences. There are more words also used in modern Chinese in the smae context such as 自然資源 and 経済発展 hence they appeared easier. I think its worth noting that since Japan westernized first, a lot of modern concepts are "kanjinized" in Japanese first and then introduced to Chinese. 資源 and 経済 here for example. Heck when the word 共产党 was from Japanese. Since they're modern concept, used in a more recent meaning, the meaning hasn't deviated over time yet so it's easy for Chinese speakers to interprer. Arguably Japanese has more influence on modern Chinese than the other way around and it's worth noting that. Lastly I'd like to note that a fair bit of Kanji words are still used in its ancient Chinese meaning. Like the example “彼”. We still say sentences like 以彼之道还施彼身 today. This is very true in Buddhist terminologies which are widely used in both languages still today.
I’m Danish so unsurprisingly I can read Swedish and especially Norwegian Bokmål. In fact Bokmål is so easy I have several times failed to notice that it was Norwegian at all. I can also glean a lot of meaning out of French and especially Dutch. It’s unclear why exactly, but I think it comes down advanced vocabulary being very similar to my own with structural differences, exactly like what these Chinese speakers are experiencing with Japanese.
actualy for the test example you have provided at 1:24 in chinese there is another word for it which is 试验 (simplified) and 試驗 (tradition) so in that case the chinese character and japanese caracters are minimal in difference.
reading dutch as a german is realy easy. i read the dutch wikipedia for NaCl (Koukenzout or sth like that) really easily and i basically understood everything
German is my second language, English is my native language, and I also can often get most of the meaning when reading Dutch (or trying to read it), but it's somewhat similar to the situation in this video, where important parts of the sentence are recognisable to an extent that a meaning can be pieced together from context, but there are words "in between" the recognisable parts which are simply foreign. When you say it's "really easy", you may be fooling yourself, because in Dutch there are also words which appear to be the same as or very similar to German or English words, which have meanings in Dutch which are different from the words they are similar to in the other languages!
I was in Beijing over twenty years ago with a HK friend. We both didn't really speak putonghua. However he was a Cantonese speaker and was able to read and write Chinese up to year 6 level. We brought a notebook and pen everywhere and when we needed to communicate he would just write it out. It was interesting and quite funny at times.
this has been your best video yet paul!! thank you so much. as a chinese speaker who has studied some japanese, i can confirm that most chinese have no problems recognizing a given character in any of its forms (traditional chinese, simplified chinese, japanese, simplified japanese, hanja etc). we've seen them all frequently enough to know what maps to what.
Seriously,as a Chinese,I usually underestimate the hardness of Chinese learning,thinking the sole and the biggest challenge is just the characters.But it's not the case. Even knowing how to write kanji and respective meanings,due to the situation that most modern Chinese words are mostly formed by 2～3kanjis. And here comes the challenge,the kanjis are somewhat like the hints to help you understand the multi-kanji words. For example,語言 in Mandarin means language,both 語 and 言 mean speech and can be used as verbs meaning to say. And you put these two kanjis conversely,you get言語 which is a word rarely used colloquially and means''gossips'' ''complaints'' ''slanders'' and kinds of derogative speechs. Correction:言語 is not limited to derogative use,it generally means speech,and sometimes indicates language.But 言語 today was used to solely mean language,but to 言語,it has more meanings.
The word language can also be referring to the manner of a person's speech. Similar to some use case of 言語 in modern Mandarin. Like in "watch your language." Or more academically the "parole", as in contrast to "langue"
I'm Chinese and I've been to Japan many times. usually I will need to fill out an information form upon checking in at the hotel, I always write in Chinese characters rather than english because I'm sure that Japanese can read and understand them. I've done that so many times and have never been told to write in English. I think moments like this emphsize the feeling that Japan and china are part of a similar cultural sphere and share a lot in common throughout history.
I do the same. Never had any complaints. I usually look stuff up because I'm not sure if I'm writing the characters right but otherwise they could read my crappy hand writing 😂
My teacher that knows both chinese and japanese told me because of the changes japanese have made to the kanji so that it can be adapted for their service makes it difficult to learn both of these at the same time. Its kinda torturing that for japanese kanji we need to learn both the Chinese japanified 😂 i may say pronunciation and the japanese meaning of it which sounds nothing similar to how chinese sounds like. For example : 馬 reads as “uma” when wanting to say “ 馬がいる“ i have a horse” but when its glued to another kanji it’s pronunciation changes 馬車 for example its read “basha” 😂 meaning carriage
As a Dane, I have quite an easy time reading the written Norwegian Bokmål. That is mainly due to Denmark doing a colonialism and telling Norway "This is how you spell things now" back in the days. It doesn't work the same with Nynorsk, which is the modern Norwegian spelling convention that conforms more to actual spoken Norwegian (without getting into any long discussions about dialectical differences) and not the language of a foreign king. I can still parse it, as I can read Swedish and get some understanding from it. But there are enough differences and false friends in the languages that I cannot claim to be able to understand written Swedish or Norwegian without error.
As a Swede, I understand spoken and written Norwegian quite easily. Written Danish just as easy, but spoken Danish is more difficult. I can guess the meaning of Dutch language, because of having studied German at school.
That does make sense. As a Greek person I noticed when learning ancient Greek, that the more complex the words became, the more similar they were to modern Greek. It's usually the simple words that change the most.
I speak Mandarin and my ex colleague speaks Japanese. He was boasting that if he had to read a text in Chinese he would understand its general meaning. Lol okay, I opened a Chinese novel and suggested he translated the first paragraph. I had lots of fun while he was struggling to make out anything ("red cliff... is... sheep rolling...?!"). He didn't understand a single sentence, so much for his boasting. As someone who's proficient in Chinese, I can understand basic sentences and combinations of words in Japanese, like "Happy festival!" or "fresh fruit", or some newspaper headlines, but that's it.
I'm a native Traditional Chinese user and a Japanese learner. We once had an intensive course of Japanese reading where we first focused on the most basic Japanese conjugation and sentence formations, and then with this as a basis, we were taught to understand intermediate to advanced Japanese articles with the Chinese meaning of the kanjis within them. It worked out well as long as there's no faux amis, even if we didn't know the Japanese pronunciations of these kanjis. What's interesting to me is that in some cases Japanese has changed the meaning of the words while Chinese retains it's original meaning. Like 喧嘩 means "talking loudly" in Chinese (which is apparently the original meaning with the radical of "mouth" 口) and "fighting" (physical) or "quarreling" in Japanese. Another example would be 娘 as in your video, but this time modern Chinese and Japanese have retained different meanings from Classical Chinese and evolved from them. There are also cases where Japanese retain some characters that are no longer used in modern Chinese. For example, 罠 ("fishing line" or "net for hunting" in Classical Chinese; "trap" in Japanese) in the meme 孔明の罠 "Kongming's (Zhuge Liang's) trap," which would be translated as "孔明的陷阱" in modern Chinese.
English native speaker that is proficient in Japanese here (passed JLPT N2). Really super interesting to see the commonalities (and my envy towards Taiwanese/Mandarin learners of Japanese) of these languages together. I knew they had a huge head start when learning Japanese, but I didn't know it was THIS huge of a head start!
I'm a native Cantonese speaker and I found learning kanji onyomi readings much easier due the higher degree of similarity in character pronunciation. Without knowing how to approximate the pronunciation of the characters, I don't think I could have passed my N2 level exam. After a while, the Japanese meaning of the kanji became natural and I was no longer surprised to discover the wildly different meanings of certain characters in Japanese. 叶う means to have a dream come true, but means a leaf in simplified Chinese -_-"
I get your point. Onyomi pronunciation of kanji is a lot more similar to cantonese than mandarin. I am not certain about historical background of it but I think chinese influence in japan is mainly from southern china including current cantonese speaking region.
@@einzelganger09 Some varieties of Chinese have preserved more features of old Chinese. Cantonese retains the checked tone, and Wu Chinese retains both the voicing distinction and the checked tone, whereas Mandarin has not preserved these features. Onyomi mimics old Chinese, people who can use other varieties of Chinese may find Onyomi easier. onyomi:seki IPA:/seki/ Cantonese:sek2 IPA:/sɛk/ mandarin:shi2 IPA:/ʂɚ/
漢字簡化之前，「叶」字為「協調」之「協」字的異體，而無「葉」之義。Before kanji was simplified, the character "叶" is a variant version of "協", which meas "con-" instead of "leaf" or "葉".
As a Traditional Chinese user and Cantonese speaker, my experience with written Japanese is very similar to those featured in this video. I think it is marginally easier for me to recognise "simplified" written Kanji since I am more familiar with the source character. Being able to read Chinese characters is really useful when navigating in Japan since most of the directional signs are in Kanji. Unless I've learnt the Japanese reading I wouldn't be able to pronounce it, but functionally I'm able to find my way as quickly as the locals just with a quick glance at the signs.
Cantonese and mandarin speaker here (knows a bit japanese not fluent though): we can read most of the kanjis but since not all of them have shared meanings they can sometimes be misleading. For any newspaper or signs, knowing chinese characters can help massively, so i wont get lost in japan. But spoken japanese is close to 0% intelligible I'd say As for any differences in character as long as they still resemble the related character in chinese (whether simpliflied or traditional) we can still recognise them, and within context of course
I understood Japanese sentences with little to no knowledge of Japanese when I was visiting Japan before. In Japanese, the word for seasoning is choumiryo, (pronounced more like chomireow), which is very similar to the Chinese pronunciation for the word seasoning, which is tiaomiliao, pronounced very similar to Japanese. That's why I can understand a man asking me if I knew where the seasoning packets are, but I couldn't reply, so I just pointed.
@@officialgreengrayEach word may be easy to understand. However, in a sentence, important information may be hidden in the hiragana. If you just look at the kanji, they are the same though... この電車は大阪に行きます。 This train goes to Osaka. この電車は大阪に行きません。 This train does not go to Osaka. Sometimes sweets bags contain desiccant packets with this written on them. これは食べられません。 This is not edible. Please be careful ☺️
I’m studing Mandarin for a while, and now I live in a town here in Brazil with a big Japanese imigration, and it is very influential. So there’s some places like parks, historical sites that are written in portuguese and japanese, our city hall have some plaques in portuguese and japanese, some stores, Police stations, etc… and it is fun that I can read some of the kanji (Hanzi)! Also I have a japanese descendant cousin, sansei generation, she speaks Japanese and is fun to see the similarities and differences of kanji/hanzi in both languages!
Actually, 切手 is an abbreviation of 切符手形、so basically, the two letters 切 + 手 doesn't mean stamp. Also, Japanse who graduated highschool study Chinese classics at school, so if they didn't slept in their classrooms, they can understand a little bit better.
I studied Japanese for two years back in 2006, and also got a lot of how you say “anime exposure” up until 2018. I know the syllabaries completely and the very basics of grammar, but I really struggle with kanji. One sentence, about “he’s skilled at cooking”, I was able to read before confirmation, which I find amazing as the other Chinese speakers were able to grasp that sentence the best as well. Deep in my brain, I was able to identify the words, but prior, if you would ask me to write out “he” and “cooking”, I wouldn’t be able to. I seem to recall 100, maybe 200, kanji well enough to write them out. However, I must have learned and etched more kanji that I can visually recognize and read, though not much more. lol This was a great video! I’ve wondered how well a Chinese speaker could read Japanese sentences. Thank you for this!
中国人として私も面白かったと思う。日本語を勉強する時、I found some 漢字 in modern 日本語 still have ancient Chinese 意味。それはとても面白いな。例えば「走」、古代中国語(文言文)と現在の日本語同じ意味を持つ、だが現代中国語「走」の意味は「歩く」。 Sorry about my Japanese, still studying, hope you can understand what I'm saying. :-)
Paul, this was awesome! 😊 I don't speak or read either language, but it was still so much fun watching the interpretations the Chinese speakers would come up with.
This all reminds me of the time I was working in retail at an automotive shop called SuperCheap Auto in Nz and a deaf Hong Konger and his gf came in asking for parts. I noticed his signs and after trying to navigate their way and struggling (I could tell the gf didnt care for cars but the bf did/gf was struggling to translate) I was like 'you understand me?' in nzsl and he responded 'yes' we then proceded with the gf at parts to get them an oil filter, oil, and air filter plus a bulb... one of the greatest decisions was learning sign... i also let a 50+ year old man make his own order at kfc by himself for the first time in his life.... if i wasn't so excited to help people i would've cried then and there fortunately I left it all for later that night. I think about them often. ❤ Thank you for spreading awareness on other regions language comparisons other than the western view most think of!! ❤
Concerning your personal anecdote: I live in China as a western academic. When I upgraded my default sentence from 我不懂 (I don’t understand) to 我听不懂 (I cannot understand what I heard) a man, bless him, took a piece of paper and scribbled what he said! If I couldn’t understand his accent, maybe I would have understood his cursive 😅 Even among Chinese people, sometimes it’s hard to understand another speak. Meanwhile, writing is a shared system. Well, it wasn’t for me. But I’m to hear that this form of communication which worked for another ethnically western person!
If you don't speak the language. You can just hand someone your phone and have them type it all into a dictionary app. That's what I always did when people used words I didn't know. At least the handwriting won't be a problem at that point. (I have no idea how anyone can read cursive characters and I'm on my way to being fluent in the language.)
As a Taiwanese aka Tranditional Chinese Reader, I think most of the Japanese Kanji can be read easily. Some of them may be difficult if the Kanji is made of Japanese (Wasei-Kanji) like 峠辻凪 etc. And some of the Kanji may cannot guess the meaning right because of the both languages are different, like 娘 for daughter in Japanese and mother(usually) in Chinese. 🤩
As someone who studied Japanese for years and just got into studying Chinese, I really enjoy watching these videos. Japanese changed a lot since the 2nd WW, a lot of kanji got poofed out of use and some are just written in plain hiragana now. I'm sure the Chinese people would have a much easier time with some older sentences.
9:04 In Japanese, "大丈夫" also means a masculine man. In that case, it is pronounced "dai-jo-fu" instead of "dai-jo-bu". This is a very old literary expression.
Chinese and Japnese speaker here. For most Chinese speakers, reading Japanese is just sound like reading acient Chinese, as most of the kanji's meaning is based on the meaning in acient Chinese, for example the word 娘 has the exactly same meaning in acinet Chinese, meaning daughter, but it means mother in modern Chinese; and the word 湯 means hot water in both acinet Chinese and Japanese while it means soup in modern Chinese. It is actually possible for Chinese and Japanese to communicate through only kanji. In fact, Japan, Korea and Vietnam used to kanji and their people could use kanji to talk to China and each other through 筆談(Brushtalk) in the past, and you can find a lot of example from the past. However, Korea and Vietnam were no longer using kanji and most of their people can't even understand their names' meaning, but it is still possible for Japanese and Chinese to communicate through only kanji as kanji is still being taught at Japan and they still learn ancient Chinese article through 漢文訓読(kanbunkundoku), and China is still teaching acient Chinese(文言文).
Yes i think at least korea had many problems with Japan so they wanted to swift away from it and make smth of their own thats why they made their own alphabet its pretty cool tbh. And besides that, korea’s population had problems learning the kanji since its very difficult and most people back then didnt have access to proper education so the korean alphabet was very easy for them to learn without even needing to study much.
6:30 I think what she raises about "cut hand" being a verb in Chinese is an interesting point, because it raises a difference in word formation between Modern Chinese and Japanese. In Literary (Classical) Chinese any two part word could be either a verb or a noun depending on context, and Japanese received a huge deal of its loaning from Chinese through Literary Chinese, where in Vernacular Chinese whence Modern Standard Chinese comes the difference is more distinguished. On another note, I think it'd be cool if you got speakers of other Chinese languages like Cantonese and Hokkien in on this experiment. Perhaps you could also do a similar experiment with Literary Chinese, with speakers of different Chinese languages, as well as Japanese?
I guess its similar to the influence of the Latin alphabet on non Latin languages, most people can read it but not understand anything except on very rare occasions where a word is shared through cultural influence
For the Question of the Day: As an Urdu speaker, reading Persian is fascinating because both languages are related, and Urdu also borrows a large amount of vocabulary from Persian, but the two languages also have some differences in words that look the exact same.
As a Native Hindi Speaker, I can understand Urdu very well as 90% of the words are similar in both languages but I can't read it as I don't know the Nastaliq Script and Urdu speaker doesn't know Devnagari but still can communicate
@@William_Fei In Pakistan, the most popular / commonly spoken language is actually Punjabi, but Urdu is the lingua franca that pulls everyone together. Pakistan on the west side has the Iranic languages that are more related to Farsi (Persian), while the east side has the Indic languages, like Punjabi and Sindhi. This doesn't change the fact that essentially every popular common Pakistani tongue is related, but the Western and Eastern ones are often not mutually intelligible. Everyone in Pakistan can speak Urdu to an extent, but it is only the native language of about 7% of the population.
2:06 I can only read the Chinese characters, and you nailed it. Cat bla fish bla eat bla bla. I did a google translate, "食べる前に手を洗ってください" eat $%&* before %&*$ hand %$#@ wash %#@&
Mandarin speaker here, I write in Traditional Chinese but am familiar with Simplified Chinese also because in Malaysia where I'm from, both exist, though most people write simplified. I did learn a bit of Japanese before, but not enough to understand most of the sentences, so my guesses of those sentences are pretty similar except for a few. Based on the video, I think most people somehow know 大丈夫 means "it's okay" though it means "big husband" or "real man" used as an attribute, in the saying 男人大丈夫
Kanji (Chinese characters) has evolved to a system that each character encompasses specific meanings independent of the speaking languages. This is not only because Kanji has been used by many countries in East Asia, but Kanji in the first place has been created as a common writing system for different ethnic groups that inhabits the land of Central State.
@@8qk67acq5 that is not ethnic groups, the characters were just pronounced differently by region and dialect, back then there was no national language, but they were all Chinese, that is kinda misleading
In Hong Kong, we don't use the word 手紙. We use 廁紙 for toilet paper. If we see 手紙, we will guess something like "memo", "note" or "post-it". In Hong Kong, we don't think 娘 is resticted to mother although standard Chinese does. Ww also use 娘 for female person in any age, feminine, landlady, female ambassador and female mascot. In Hong Kong, 上手 can mean "good at" or "previous (person)" but in different pronunciation. We don't use 上手 like in this video 12:03 . In Hong Kong, we can guess 自分 as 自己(self, -self). For 輸出, we can ensure it means export due to the context. 輸出(Chinese) = export or output 出口(Chinese) = export or exit 出力(Chinese) = use manpower, pay effort 輸出(Japanese) = export 出口(Japanese) = exit 出力(Japanese) = output For 言う, we can guess "mention" due to 内容 (context) but usually misuse "say", "talk" when answering in English just like in this video. Chinglish use "say", "talk" instead of "mention". For 抜群, we can guess as "exceptionally" due to 出類拔萃. 拔(Chinese) can mean "pick up" and 群 mean "group". When putting together, it looks like something "outstanding from normal" although it is not a real Chinese word. There are also many false friends among Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese Therefore, if you find Hong Kong people to read Japanese, the result will be different.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I can also testify to the fact that in this video, the more complex a sentence is the easier it is for me to guess due to the sheer number of Chinese characters in the sentence. Especially in the advanced sentence #2, I could literally guess the entire sentence's meaning where my mind was able to connect all of the similar words with Cantonese and logically come up with a narrative with the sentence along the lines of「日本係缺乏天然資源嘅國家，所以為咗經濟發展依存輸出」, which I guessed that the meaning is something like "Japan is a country that lacks natural resources, so in order to develop economically, it has to rely on exports." And the exact Japanese sentence in Cantonese would be 「由於日本缺乏天然資源，要依賴出口嚟發展經濟。」
I personally think Japanese ppl would understand more about Chinese letters because one Kanji has many meaning in japanese, so we can guess easier by context what they are written about.
@@jpnsei1171 On the other hand, japanese uses less characters because it reuses characters for multiple meanings, so they might just get stumped by chinese chatacters they've never seen before (since chinese uses more characters)
This experiment would look something like Greek people trying to read Russian. They can recognize more than a half of the letters, and the more high-style Russian examples are used (e.g. scientific, philosophical, religious texts) the more familiar Greek words they would encounter.
This video is great and reminds me of my own experience - I'm a native speaker of Chinese and am learning Japanese slowly. So right now I am able to recognise hiragana and katakana, but my understanding of kanji characters' pronunciation and meaning is fundamentally rooted in Chinese if I haven't been exposed to it in my Japanese learning. Hence, let's say I see something like 勉強する, while it's pronounced as "benkyou tsuru" in Japanese, in my head I'd read it as "mian qiang tsuru" instead.
Mandarin Chinese and English native speaker here. I am able to understand a tiny bit of Japanese from written texts, and also when listening to people speaking in Japanese, though it's usually insufficient for me to make out the entire meaning of sentences. For written texts, knowing katakana helps as well because a lot of words written in katakana are borrowed from English. As for listening, I can only pick out borrowed words and kanji read in onyomi. I'm currently learning Russian and Korean. When listening to people speaking in Slavic languages (e.g. Polish), I can pick out certain words that mean the same thing in Russian. By the way, there is an error at 7:25, the 2 green "same" should be "different" instead.
Immigrant to Sweden here. I can understand some portion of spoken Norwegian (more) and Danish (less), but when I _read_ them, I would understand some 80-90% of both languages.
I feel the same about my polish. Since I learned it, I can understand a little of what Zelensky is saying (and Putin in a even lower level). It's so crazy because I never study anything about those languages 😂
I'm Filipino, not Chinese but, historically speaking, the Philippines has had a long history with China. Even to this day, there is a portion of the population who are Filipino but have Chinese descent who are Filipino Chinese, the same with Malaysian or Indonesian Chinese. So, naturally, I studied in a Chinese school in the Philippines growing up. When college started, I had the opportunity of being a foreign exchange student in Japan. I just have to say that learning Japanese wasn't really a breeze, but the kanji made it all the more easier to learn their inherent meaning. Anyway, I'm still continuing with both Chinese and Japanese even until this day. It's funny because I do have a lot of fond memories when I used to live in Japan and, since I look Asian, people assume that I was Japanese since my close friends before were this white Mexican guy and a Swedish dude. So, every time I take this train going to Shinjuku, I would always say "日本語わかりません", and then my Mexican friend would come in, and the Japanese people would be dumbfounded. LOL, those were good times. I plan to really live in Japan someday, this time as a permanent resident.
chinese and japanese relationship is pretty close to french and english, mostly shared characters, tons of loan word from each other but different language family
But French is developed from Latin and English developed from old German. Afaik, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic are the big language families in Europe. Yes they all come from proto I do european, but by that standard french and Nepalese are probably also the same language family
@@spaceowl5957 yes, French and Nepali are from the same language family. Germanic, Romance and Slavic are branches of Indo-European language family, but they are not language families of their own.
Japan took all the society-shaping culture from ancient China, not only words but also every element of civilization rather than the other way around or you can say the cultural cores of Japan after the 7th century had been Chinese (ancient Chinese). You said China also borrowed modern loanwords from Japan, which is not fundamentally correct because those are actually not Japanese knowledge but Japanese translations of Western knowledge by using Chinese characters and Chinese grammar in the 19th century, they called it the Wasei Kango (和製漢語）or Japanese-coined Chinese words, e.g. Western word "democracy" was translated into 民主，"economy" was translated into 經濟，"republic" was translated into 共和國 ，"science" was translated into 科學，"technology" was translated into 科技.... these Western concepts didn't have ancient Chinese counterparts beforehand and Japan just translated them by using Chinese words and Chinese grammar (in the 19th century, the Japanese intellectuals had a much more pround proficiency in Classical Chinese than they were in the second half of 20th century, as after the WWII, the Japanese ditched the Wasei Kango and started to transliterate Western knowledge by mimicking the English pronunciations directly with phonetics only instead of translation by using meanings in Wasei Kango). Japan borrowed massively from Europe in knowledge since the mid-19th century when China just kept a blind eye so later when China fell too behind, it didn't bother to translate everything from scratch again and just took the Wasei Kango as they were already Chinese by nature in both grammar structure and characters and quite intuitive for Chinese speakers to understand. So if Japan hadn't translated these Western concepts, China would have translated them by itself, it was not a big deal, so I wouldn't equate such a translation job to the same significance of ancient China's transformative influence in Japan. But many Japanese today tend to downplay the latter and overplay the former to emphasize the mutual influences between the two countries in terms of equal influencing degrees. lol.
@@GoodCitizen-gm1tltalking about making of new words in the 19th century, actually Chinese did brother to do their own translation of modern concepts, I'd argue sometimes they did a better job yet ultimately those words didn't prevail. Say for example the word "evolution", the Chinese interpretation 天演 vs Japanese 進化 is somewhat more capable in grasping the idea, but perhaps the Japanese charactera choice were less abstract or simple to understand. The Chinese scholars' better knowledge in classical Chinese were also their demise when introducing new things to the mass
Fascinating video! Per your questions at the end of the video; as a Farsi/Persian speaker I can make sense of written Arabic. However, it's easiest to identify vocab for MSA rather than most dialects.
As a Chinese (Mandarin) native speaker, I took only one Japanese A1 course for 16*2 hours so I don’t really know the grammar. But thanks to Japanese TV series, games, mangas, and anime (also my mother tongue Chinese and knowledge of linguistics), my Japanese vocabulary is far richer than A1. I have a sense of grammar. For example in the sentence 試験の勉強をしなくても大丈夫です, I cannot remember what しなくても means and I cannot articulate such a sentence myself. But when I see the translation, it makes so much sense to me like “ohhhh I knew it” I’ve imagined how I could communicate in Japanese, it would be a stack of nouns, verbs, adjectives, basic auxiliary verbs with no actual grammar structure. Like 私 日本語 できない、ただし たくさんの単語 でいる、会場の入り口 どこですか？このチャンオルを好き 再生数 高い ほしい
I guess it must be like francophones trying to read Spanish where you can get the general idea of a text with some effort without completely understanding.
No. French and Spanish are two closely related languages both originating from Latin, and Japanese has nothing to do with Chinese at all aside from the kanji\hanzi.
i'd compare it to trying to understand a text about IT in bahasa indonesia you'll recognise all the new english words and the influence that english can have, but for all the other parts you are clueless
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Actually the pronunciation is not entirely different...I think some Kanji characters have similar pronunciation to that in Chinese just that many of the pronunciations are closely related to Southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese, Fujian and Shanghai dialects, this is because Mandarin is based on Northern Chinese dialect to the north of Yellow River, it became popular only in the past 300 years. For example, "Heart" 心臓 in Chinese is "Xinzang' and in Japanese is pronounced as "Shinzō". "Teacher" 教師 or 先生, in Chinese is 'Jiaoshi' or 'Xiansheng', in Japanese is "Kyōshi" or "Sensei", very similar. In ancient China the national language varied from dynasty to dynasty, the pronunciation of Cantonese has deep root in ancient Chinese language and still keeps the same pronunciation and phrases. When Japanese students came to Xi'an China to learn Chinese in Tang dynasty in the 9th century, they adopted the pronunciation of Chinese language of that era. And when many southern Chinese in southern Chinese kingdom of Wu migrated to Japan during Japan's Kofun period during 4th to 5th century, they brought southern Chinese dialect pronunciation to Japan. Having said that if I am not wrong for every Kanji in Japanese there are two pronunciations, one is called Wu pronunciation that is similar to Wu dialect in Shanghai & Suzhou in Southern China, and the other is Japanese way of pronunciation.
Hola
I can understand written Portuguese based on my knowledge of Spanish.
Since I also understand written French and Italian aside from Spanish, Portuguese is about 85 , maybe 90 percent readable.
@@bpsevil ok and hello from Argentina 🇦🇷
I once saw Japanese tourists laughing their ass off after seeing a 金玉滿堂 banner in Taiwan. In Chinese, 金玉滿堂 literally means "Gold and jade filling house", which is an idiom for wishing people good fortune. But in Japanese, 金玉 means testis, so when Japanese trying read it becomes "Testis filling house".
Lol
Them family jewels 😂
LMAO
there is probably a common origin though since the tanuki's huge balls are linked to good fortune in japan
哎哎哎，這些日本人踐踏了文明
I have personally seen a Japanese and a Chinese scientist discussing a concept in English, reach the limits of their English and then write down kanji to express the concepts they are trying to explain and then understand each other.
My husband has witnessed the very same thing.
That's true. Before 20th century when Japan hadn't reformed and focused more on kanji education, it was very common for Chinese and Japanese people communicating through writing.
A lot of technical terms in Chinese are actually loanwords from Japanese Kanji terms because those ideas are introduced earlier into Japan than into China.
@@HarrySheeh Yes. Those loanwords can be easily understood by Chinese people because kanji itself indicates the meaning (this is something that latin language users can't really understand), and also many of these words were created based on ancient Chinese classics. For example the word "経済" for economy is created by Japanese scholar from a sentence "經世濟民" in a Chinese books, which can be comprehended by people from both countries.
@@hiskiliu8941 It's crazy that hiragana and katakana weren't standardized until 1900. So you could have two unique Japanese characters from different areas representing the same sound. Sounds like a nightmare.
This is the video I, a Japanese studying Chinese, have been waiting for!
As you know, Chinese for Japanese is just like French for English; the more a sentence gets difficult, formal, or academic, the more you can get the words.
I feel the exact same! I am Chinese and I speak Mandarin and English. I am learning French using English, and I also found out that the more formal and academic a French text is, the more words I can understand when I am reading them, as English borrowed a lot of words from Latin and French! Reading Japanese gives me a similar feeling, but I actually think the Chinese Characters used in the Japanese Language are closer the Classical Chinese than Mandarin. I suppose that's the reason of the strong impact Classical Chinese do to the Japanese Language hundreds or even thousands of years ago!
Because most of those super technical words were first coined by Japanese after meiji restoration and then reverse introduced to Chinese 😂. I think most law, sociology, and scientific terms were 和制汉字.
Then of course you guys got tired and started using katakana for the newer stuff. As a Chinese I can guess a lot of the stuff based on the katakana pronunciation of English words plus the kanjis
@@wngmv
I'm so disappointed that Japanese academia had quitted (or is quitting) using Chinese vocabulary for new things. Saying コンピューター for computer is just insane. There is much shorter, simpler, and lucid word, 電脳, used just in front of our country!
I really hope you Chinese people never quit this way, Chinese characters are the treasures.
@@anubisu1024 Thanks for that, highly appreciated. Hong Kong Cantonese once followed a very similar pattern to this phenomenon you mentioned here, 士巴拿 spanner, 紅地厘蛇果 Red Delicious apple (bunch of mixed using of translation)
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that about English and French but it makes so much sense!
A classic example occurred in the 1980s when Japanese investors established a factory in China. They hung a slogan reading "油断一秒、怪我一生." Chinese workers unfamiliar with Japanese were initially startled by the perceived rigor of the slogan due to a linguistic misunderstanding. In Chinese, the words translate to: "油" refers to oil, "断" means to stop or cease, "一秒" is one second, "怪" signifies blame, "我" is me, and "一生" stands for one's entire life. Hence, Chinese workers interpreted it as, if the oil (in a machine or something else) stops for a second, one should blame oneself for the rest of their life. However, in Japanese, "油断" actually means negligence, "一秒" remains as one second, "怪我" signifies to sustain an injury, and "一生" still means one's entire life. The actual intent of the slogan is to warn that a moment of negligence can result in lifelong harm.
This is a good one. 那只能记得加油了😂
So according to your explanation, it should be translated into "疏忽一時，受害一生" or something like that.
Did it become a proverb?
@@303Cyes,but 😂😅
That’s because 油断 and 怪我 are both are atejis, if not from Buddhist terminologies. They using chinese characters’ sounds to transliterate non-Chinese words
Back in the 90s my grandpa in China used to travel a lot for business. One time he met a Japanese tourist who sat next to him during the flight and they began to 'talk' to each other through writing in chinese / kanji. They ended up becoming penpals and the japanese family came back to China visiting us several times.
是个有趣的故事。it's an interesting story。
@@xunsu-q8j 此之場合 ｢是｣=This｡ ｢It's｣＞更曖昧｡
我＜日本語学習者｡ 第4言語｡英語＞第3言語｡
漢語偉大｡
@@danielantony1882 Thanks for your corrections. I started relearning English four weeks ago, but I studied Japanese for a long time in university.I've realized that, aside from playing Japanese games or watching Japanese anime, it's hard to use Japanese in daily life. As a result, my Japanese skills have declined quickly."
@@xunsu-q8j It’s all good. Life can be hard.
@@xunsu-q8j
あなたがまた日本語学習に情熱を取り戻してくれることを日本人として願っています！🇯🇵🤝🇨🇳
A great story is when the Americans after Comodore Mathew Perry arrived in Japan, and no one spoke English but they had a Dutch Interpretor among them(which was the only foreign western language Japan had an interpretor for) . Diplomacy was done in Dutch verbally and in written they had a Chinese official (who did not know Japanese but knew English) write out the details in classical Chinese/kanji which the Japanese knew. Four way communication in action 😅
this reminds me of a sketch on madtv with bobby lee and ken jong
@@lmfaznboiif you ever remember the name, let me know.
23/9/2024 21-34
As a Chinese, I played through Final Fantasy 1-3 watching the Chinese kanji in Japanese when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. You can basically guess where the plot will go.
a japanese here. It was a lot of fun looking at signs and boards in Hong-Kong, because pretty much all of them had Simplified, Traditional, and English texts together so that I could confirm my guesses. It was quite satisfying to see my guesses were ok from the day one, and in couple of days I could train myself to read like 80-90% of them right. It was like being surrounded by Rosetta Stones.
Can you help me to learn Japanese
What a lucky guy. Meanwhile, we westerners struggle every time we go to visit you guys when something is not translated 😂
Well... It's less of a challenge nowadays with Google Lens and such.
Interesting fact about Japanese in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong was under occupation by Imperial Japan, place names had a short but official Japanese reading. These are different than today's Japanese translations you see in tourist maps.
e.g.
銅鑼灣
English: Causeway Bay
Cantonese: Tung Lo Waan
Japanese reading then: Dorawan
Japanese reading now: Kou-su-wei Bei
Another interesting example:
香港仔
English: Aberdeen
Cantonese: Hoeng Gong Zai (Literally Little Hong Kong)
Under Japanese occupation: 元香港 Moto-HonKon / 元港區 Moto-Minato-Ku (Literally meaning Original Hong Kong)
That legitimately sounds like a blooming linguists dream there.
I am from Hong Kong and I always wondered if Japanese can read the signs written in traditional chinese characters haha (despite slight stroke differences)
Just as before I learn Japanese I could already read Japanese news (because they are all essentially kanji)
Years ago when living in Japan, I took a trip to Beijing. Rather than paying the high tourist rate to go to the Great Wall of China, I hired a local taxi driver on the street for the day. Me speaking Japanese and he speaking Mandarin, the two of us couldn't talk, but I was able to use basically a written pidgin to negotiate where we wanted to go, the timing, and the cost. The final element of the negotiation involved me buying his lunch. Did it all with kanji and non-verbal communications. It worked.
Amazing!
Did you know, when Vietnamese natioalnalist revolutionaries went to Japan to find assistance to fight the French, although they didn’t speak Japanese, they still communicated with Japanese people quite conveniently due to kanji.
I tell a related story from my own experience in the video! 🙂
old historic documents mention that the diplomats from east asian countries, sitting around the table, didn't 'speak' but rather 'write' in order to communicate each other
This might give the wrong impression that Chinese characters themselves carry meaning. They don’t, it’s just like historical spelling in the Romance language and English. An English speaker can understand a lot of Spanish if they only use formal words.
Also at that time classical chinese was a mandatory school subject both in China and Japan so they were actually using Classical Chinese not just randomly drawing characters. I say at that time but it’s still mandatory in China and Japan. Japanese students have to either take Classical Japanese or Classical Chinese for their center exam which’s basically the SAT over there.
@@YCprivate yes they were writing in Classical Chinese, just like how early modern europeans wrote using latin
More precisely, they communicate by a common written language called 'Classical Chinese' that is written in hanzi (not kanji precisely because classical chinese uses the chinese version of the characters). If they use kanji/chu han only, it will still be difficult to communicate, just like modern Chinese and modern Japanese in the video.
"cat, bla, fish, bla, food, bla bla" is funniest thing i've heard in a video for a long time 😂
Caught me off guard!
That is so accurate description of my reaction
This is exactly me reading Japanese as an Chinese-native Japanese learner😂First scan out the Kanjis to form a (sometimes wrong) sketch of the meaning and then use the limited Kanas I recognize to further improve
That's how I read chinese and japanese with my limited hanzi/kanji memorized
Not wrong 😅
That's how I try to push myself in learning Japanese using my Chinese knowledge, and Chinese isn't even my native language
The confusion between mother and daughter is so interesting. Actually “娘” meant “girl”in ancient Chinese language, but with time a new meaning “mother” was evolved. Even today, if combined with certain words, “娘” in Chinese still keeps its original meaning, like in “姑娘”. However if you just look at this character without context, most people will think of “mother”. There is a Chinese saying “天要下雨, 娘要嫁人”，, meaning “Rains will fall. And girls will marry. This usually refers to something which will very naturally happen. But when I searched on the internet, most people are translating it to “mother will marry”, which proves that Chinese speakers are forgetting the original meaning of this character over time. It’s very interesting to see the original meaning lost in Chinese, but is still kept in a language influenced by Chinese.
非常有道理, 我听到这个谚语的时候, 也理解错了, 直到我看到了你的评论才反应过来.
我第一次听到这个话是袁腾飞学老毛说话, “天要下雨, 娘要嫁人, 由他去吧”, 当时我就感觉很怪, 今天突然明白了, 这个 娘 是指 姑娘
Do you perhaps use the kanji 母(informal) mom or お母さん mother (formal) when referring to mother ? Or it has a different meaning in chinese? In japan mostly its used 女の人 or 女子 when referring to “women”
@@無所謂-r5z 当你那个只会弓马，但没啥文化的满蒙主子理解错了的时候（比如空穴来风），你作为一个包衣奴才的汉人，你敢指正么？大概率不敢吧。于是乎，很多词的词和字的意思啊，就这么变了。
@@cheesaineko 母親 means mother (formal) in mandarin
What i usually feel like is, if the Japanese article is harder or more formal such as some government files or the constitution (or just road signs), it would instead musch easier for a Chinese speaker to read.
yea.ive seen it before.it’s looked totally like chinese
日本語の深淵に触れている人達がいる。
Yeah,I think so too.
The end of Japanese is Chinese
the more the kanji ,the easier to understand.
Most Chinese speakers may find it easy to guess the general idea of an article written in Japanese as long as there are some kanjis in it.
Everything seems fine until you see a Chinese speaker mistakes the meaning of 金玉 for "jewelry" instead of knowing it's a slang for "testicles" in Japanese.
I mean they are family jewelry so wouldn't call it a mistake 🤣🤣
The most difficult thing has to be different words in Chinese and Japanese written with the same characters, because that's when you don't realize that you don't actually understand!
I actually encountered such things in real life... In 2018 I went to Mt. Fuji. The tourist center at Subaru line 5th station has a 仮設トイレ, and the Chinese sign says 假设洗手间
Also, for anyone who don't want to make such mistakes, there is a list of false friends between Chinese and Japanese on Witionary
@@Young-ep8ik It's really interesting to me that we have the exact same word for the exact same thing in German!
What’s most interesting to me here is how the slang is the same in Chinese, (I guess German?), and English. We’re more alike than we are different…
That's pronounced "kindama" right?
im so glad to see langfocus is still uploading, its been a while since I last checked. love you paul!
[4:49] "切手" is an abbreviation of "切符手形(きっぷてがた)"
[7:17] "吃る" is a verbalization of "吃音(きつおん)"
[9:22]"勉強"is said to derive from "学者固当勉強(learners should work hard)"
吃る is どもる it has no common origin, right?
That makes sense. It's easier for the Chinese to guess the meaning of the latter ones.
wow，it becomes much easier for Chinese to understand.
chinese can understand the full thing
I’m a Japanese learner who passed JLPT N2 several years ago. But it is the first time for me to know that 切手 is an abbreviation. What is the meaning of 手形 then?
As a Chinese speaker who has learned Japanese, I'd say that the differences does create some minor confusion, but I still learned and picked up kanji terms much faster than other students who did not know Chinese. Also, knowledge in classical Chinese actually helped me more than modern Chinese as that's the time period when the Japanese was influence by Chinese the most. Once I figured out the basic rules in how kanji are used and pronouced in Japanese, I was able to transpose some of what I know of Chinese characters into Japanese kanji. The 2 languages have lots of similarities that it definately helps to know one while learning the other.
I'm japanese and understand chinese. for japanese who like to read japanese novels, it's easy to understand many clasic chinese vocabulary. 逍遥、天地開闢、天網恢々, 嶮岨, 曙光 etc.
Once my Chinese friend showed me a letter from his dad, saying “Try guess the meaning.” I missed some, but got its basic message, which impressed both him and myself. Kanji is such an important part of Japanese, I can’t imagine we stop using it. Makes me wonder if any confusion occurred when South Korea and Vietnam stopped using Chinese characters?
@@Astrid-jx5dw For Vietnamese, the confusion is a generational problem. In the early 1900's, it was decided that the Vietnamese language would stop using Chinese characters (chữ Hán) to represent the words and completely replace them with the Portuguese-Latin alphabet (chữ Quốc ngữ) in order to increase literacy. While that certainly worked, it had the side effect of future generations being unable to read any Chinese characters because they never had the need to learn them thanks to the language reform. So they can't read anything that their grandparents may have written and left behind, unless they made the effort to go and learn Chinese language at a school. Its not gone completely, as they're still used for historic and religious purposes. But nowadays, no native Vietnamese can read or write them unless they were an elderly Buddhist monk, a little troubling since a large percentage of the younger generations who grew up with the internet (1990's kids and younger) are irreligious.
I assume the decision of removing Chinese characters had a lesser impact on written Korean because newspapers and formal documents regarding government affairs or academic studies still use them, alongside Hangul.
@@percival086 Abandoning Hanja probably had a larger impact on the Korean language than did Vietnamese. The proliferation of homophones meant new vocabulary had to be created for disambiguation. Many meanings also became lost or mistaken due to the lack of Hanja for disambiguation. The Korean language essentially had to change (and is still changing) to adjust to the lack of Hanja for disambiguation.
Vietnamese being a tonal language has a more complex phonology and does not have the same degree of homophones as does Korean.
@@taoliu3949 Can I use Hanja to learn vocabs since I know Kanji? I'm thinking Hanja to Hanguel flashcards might help with picking up meanings and vocabs even though Hanguel is primary writing system.
It’s my first time watching your video, and it was really interesting to see a foreigner explaining difference between Japanese and Chinese language in English!! Really enjoyed a lot.
About 吃: the story is quite complex.
Actually it's not that 吃 has different meanings in Chinese and Japanese (“eat, stutter” in Chinese and "stutter" in Japanese as was introduced in the video), but Japanese perserves the original meaning of 吃 in pre-modern Chinese.
According to Dictionary of the National Language (aka Standard Mandarin) / 國語辭典 published in 1936, 吃 only had one meaning "stutter", and the Chinese character for "eat" was actually 喫. The standard pronounciation of 吃 and 喫 were also different（jí vs chī）at that time.
In folk usage, however, the two characters had long been combined into one since at least 18th century (a 18th century Chinese linguist Duan Yucai/段玉裁 discussed this phenomenon in his book): 吃 and 喫 became free variations of the same meaning “eat, stutter” with the same pronounciation chī (the pronounciation jí was abandoned), and 吃 further became the “simplified” and popular version of 喫 thus lost its original meaning and pronounciation. Such change can be briefly illustrated as follows:
pre-modern Standard Mandarin: 吃 jí “stutter” / 喫 chī “eat” -------> “Vulgar” Mandarin: 吃(popular variant）/喫（more formal variant）chī “eat, stutter”
In the second half of 20th century, both Mainland China and Taiwan adopted 吃 as the standard form for 吃/喫, but Taiwanese Mandarin still retained two pronounciations for 吃（ chī for “eat” and jí for “stutter” ）in its dictionaries, while Mainland China's Putonghua fully embraced the folk usage and deleted the latter pronounciation.
Back to the topic, from the perspective of Standard Mandarin of not too long ago（as close as early 20th century）, 吃“stutter” in no circumstances should be confused with 喫 “eat”, it's just the “vulgarization” of modern variaties of Standard Mandarin (as what happened with vulgar Latin) that make most Chinese people “forget” the difference, while the Japanese language still keeps the original version of 吃.
sound like sound borrowing or mapping one of the term in 六書 but i forgot which one
stutter in Chinese is 口吃(mouth eat).
食(Cantonese)=吃=eat
Right, 吃 has evolved very recently in Chinese to mean eat. It used to be 食 or 喫, although the latter is quite obscure.
I believe nobody is 吃る like this but どもる in this form , so it was a first for me
I've lived in Beijing, live in Taiwan now and have spoken Mandarin for 12 years. Whenever I visit Japan I always am happily suprised how I can understand most meanings on a resturaunt menu or place-name meanings. I don't always guess correctly, but I can generally get the idea of a lot of sentences with many Kanji in them. It's really cool!
As a Spanish speaker I can say that Spanish and Porutguese people can understand each other almost perfectly in writing, especially if it's a formal text.
Native English speaker that can get around well enough in Spanish speaking countries, took a trip to Portugal with only a couple months crash course, could understand nearly everything written, thought I was ok. Got to Portugal and found that was next to useless. Had an amazing time just with a lot more hand gestures and pantomiming.
So the whole Latin Amarican can understand each other without too much difficulty?
@@bear2s232 I don't know that for sure, but Latin American Spanish/Porutguese are sometimes very different from European ones. There are a lot of indigenous words and local slang in Latin American variant of the languages.
@@bear2s232not necessarily. Portuguese and Spanish are still very much different languages, so there's still a level of difficulty. There's also dozens of native languages that are spoken throughout central and South American
@@bear2s232 In writing yes, it is possible to pick up 80% to 90% of the meaning. Speaking not really, it is possible to communicate, like 30%, but if people speak slowly and strive a bit, then, it could be 50% or 60%, of course with the help of the context
1:26 Actually the word “试验/試驗” also exists in Chinese and also means test/exam. It's also commonly used. Also the difference in simplification won't matter much to native speakers if both characters keeps the basic structure of the glyph.
I'm a native Japanese speaker. For me, it is much easier to understand written traditional Chinese than simplified Chinese. Books published around early 20th century use traditional kanji but their grammar and vocabulary are basically the same as today. So we have a plenty of chance to get used to the traditional kanji characters.
There are only about a couple hundred characters that have simplified forms, and they bear some resemblance to the original form. So it would take about one afternoon to browse the table of simplified characters and be caught up on the 20th century Chinese texts.
Ofc Japan “borrowed” kanji during the Tang dynasty
@@Kerguelen.Mapping Oversimplification that also totally misrepresents how the Chinese language arrived in and influenced Japan. A double dose of stupidity. Very nice.
@@Kerguelen.Mapping It is not clear, but it seems like around 200 or 300 AD when kanji first arrived Japan. It must have taken several centuries to get rooted in Japan, but at least late 5c sword unearthed near Tokyo has a certain amount of kanji characters which apparently express Japanese sentence. After that, new pronunciation came to Japan with the new waves of Buddhism (especially during Tang and Song dynasties).
@@John_WeissIt's not that simple. Of course some part of simplification is just like you said, but there are also "un-cursivised" ones. I mean, they made a new block letter form from cursive script.
As an Italian, this situation is similar to reading Maltese. Maltese is basically an odd dialect of Arabic with much of the more technical or litterary vocabulary taken from Sicilian, which is generally easy for me to understand. So I would be able to understand the jist of a text about the economic goals of the Maltese government, but have no clue if a passer by asked me for directions to the city centre.
as an Arabic speaker, I can understand the other half that you couldn’t 😊
By the same token, English is basically an odd dialect of Dutch with much of the more technical or literary vocabulary taken from French.
@@DarklordZagarna more or less 😅
@@DarklordZagarna more closely frisian, theres a wikitongue, and other frisian vids here, also the i want to buy brown cow asked in old english to frisian farmer experiment in yt
the asymmetrical inteligibility is because buy has another synonym on continental germanic, kapjan in proto, chapman, cheap etc. in english cognates.
buy mostly doesnt exist in continental germanic because of random vocabs being forgotten because of disperse of the whole germanic population.
this could be found in wiktionary in proto langs entries where some or a word has synoynm below its entries for the other branch of its proto languages daughter languages
This video showed up on a notification on my phone a couple days ago, but I was so busy I couldn't watch it until now, on a Saturday morning. I had great expectations, and it was just as good as I hoped it would be.
Great stuff, Paul. Your channel was already great when you started, but you've improved even more. Congratulations!
being fluent in both Chinese and Japanese, this video is infinitely funny to me.
reminds me of a brief trend on social media in China a while back, where people would use Japanese kanji to write Chinese. Let me demonstrate. Let's say you want to say "You are really good at Japanese." In Chinese it's "你的日语说得真好", in Japanese it's "君は本当に日本語上手ですね". What you do then is, chop all the hiragana off the Japanese sentence, and rearrange words a bit so it matches Chinese grammatical structure better. The sentence then becomes "君日本語本当上手", which is not really Chinese nor Japanese, but you can still get the gist of it. And you send it to your very confused friend. Noted, this little game was only played between Chinese people who have some level of understanding with Japanese, but it's still interesting. I've seen Japanese people on some forums do a similar thing, but write Japanese sentences using Chinese words and characters.
That's so cool
"君は本当に日本語上手ですね"这个句子中，“君”字在中文意思中也可指代“你”的意思，带有尊称的意味；“本当”这个在中文中一般解释为“本来应该”的意思，所以用来转义引申为“真的”、“确实”也是可以解释得通的；“日本語”直译为“日本话”、“日语”，这是没有任何疑问和障碍的；“上手”这个词在中文中，特别是南方，像我是浙江的，这个词的意思就是“熟练”、“学会”一类的意思。所以，在不看“は”、“に”、“ですね”的情况下，就自然理解为：“你的日语不错”。
君の日语本当上手，哈哈
射爆了
君日本语本当上手 has become a meme that mocks someone that pretends to know Japanese but in fact doesn't.
For example, when some one says "this sign says, Mr. Xu is a illegal photographer", you can send this sentense to him.
When I was living in Hongkong, always use 食(to eat）飲(to drink),but in mainland people who don't speak Cantonese they use 吃（to eat）喝(to drink).
Japanese also use 食and 飲.
But these all common Chinese characters and they actually do use nouns like 食物/食品 or 饮料/饮品 in their daily life.
Obviously because the elements of the Chinese culture that have infiltrated to Japan over centuries could do so only via the coastal line.
We do speak Cantonese in the mainland… there are more Cantonese speakers in the mainland than there are the population of Hong Kong.
Isn't it because Japanese people learned the Kanji from the kingdom of Wu?
But 食 and 飲 can only be used informally in hk. In formal situations we have to use a ‘written language’ 書面語 that’s basically the same as Mandarin, and write 吃 and 喝. If you write 食 and 飲 in school, you’ll get a cross.
I am Japanese and can sometimes understand some basic meanings of Chinese sentences thanks to kanjis, which sometimes helps me when traveling Chinese countries.
I was a bit impressed Chinese people can do the same thing even though 平仮名 and カタカナ are included.
My favorite "reading something in another language despite not speaking it" that I have had was when I (a native English speaker) was learning Swedish and correctly guessed that "arbete" meant "work" because I knew the Japanese word "アルバイト" (arubaito, meaning "part time job") came from the German word for work, "arbeiten".
originally it is a slavic word: robota. That's where the word robot is coming from, since the concept of "robot" was invented by a czech guy.
バウムクーヘン🤣
@@ekesandras1481 you mean Isaac Asimov?
As a Chinese speaker who learns Japanese, I would say being able to recognize Kanji fast helps a lot in terms of reading speed. For casual readings I usually just skim over the kanji and make a small glimpse to the end of the sentence to make sure about negation, and that generally works well. But reading kanji is also a curse because relying too much on it means that it takes me much longer to actually remember the pronunciation of many words - they usually are just ambiguous in my mind and sometimes I need a few tries to get them correct when talking to people.
8:22 fun fact: the 吃 in Chinese is also supposed to only mean stutter, which is preserved in 口吃; The "eat" meaning is derived from the fact that 吃 is borrowed to write 喫, for it has less letters with the same pronunciation (chī). The borrowing stuck and 喫 is phased out of use. The same 喫 is used in the Japanese word 喫茶店 (lit. tea-drinking store), aka Japanese café diner.
When the Portuguese first landed in Japan, they communicated through a chinese scribe who could converse with a japanese scribe through writing. This is so interesting.
It's kinda like the Latin, Greek and french loanwords scattered all over the european contintent, but much, much deeper.
Japanese is an Austronesian language , listen to Maori. Maori sounds like Japanese.
That last sentence of yours explains why Interlingua is easy for many. Or for some, depending on what other languages they know.
@@cheerful_crop_circle Korean also sounds like Japanese to my ears. But all three are unrelated.
They were actually communicating through Classical Chinese. During that time all educated people like scholars and scribes studied Classical Chinese. It served as a written Lingua Franca in east asia.
@@rudhardotcom Well , both are East Asian languages, so ofc they would have some similar sounds exclusive to that area. But Japanese definitely sounds a bit more like Maori or like some Bantu language imo
In the past Vietnamese Korean Japanese Chinese from south and Chinese from north can seat together and dont understand a word of each other but still able communicate by writing in Classical Chinese.
give me some more historical context, in the past there are no any writing system for Korean and Japanese(not quite sure about vitnamese, the Hinagata was invented in 平安時代,in 萬葉集,and the Classical Japanese and Classical Chinese writing style developed
in parallel in Japan. Still at this day Japanese student have to learn how to read both Classical Japanese and Classical Chinese.
in case of korea, there was no any writing system for Korean language until 世宗大王 gathered a group of scholar , by learning the writing the writing system of Mongolian, ethnic minority in china called Jin, and Sanskrit etc, then invented what we now known as the Korean alphabet.However, since the Korea or chosen peninsula was under the influence of china for more than a thousand of year, the political system of Korea is basically the same as the chinas one. one of the most important part of which is that if you wanted to work in the government you have to pass the exam which test your understanding of knowledge of Chinese classics like confusion and more, so in general if you wanna be in upper class you have to know how to write in Classical Chinese.So when the emperor publish that new writing system, in Chinese 訓民正音(teach people how to speak and write), all the scholar were against it , said something like, "only the barbarian like Japanese Mongolian and more ethnic minority that dont know how to write in Chinese will invent there only writing system, we Korea, also 'small china', how can we abandon the Chinese culture and become a barbarian ?", so the Korean alphabet became something only women were using. not until 20 century the Korean writing system were adapted due to nationalism, and when the Korea were divided into two, both side abandon hanja, kanji,hanzi(basically 漢字), because Japan colonize Korea for a while and Korean hate Japanese and that abandon the use of Japanese and also kanji. so today in Korea only people in their 50 or 60 can understand hanja.
POV: I am from Hong Kong, study Classical Chinese in free time :)
You seem to be unusually interested in Korea.
But all Koreans will treat you as an underdeveloped nation people including Chinese
繁體最好看
@@pablomao6279 繁体是好看，内地练书法也基本都是写繁体的然后也有修篆体之类古字体的，推广使用简化字体是为了扫盲用的人口太多了，上世纪甚至有二简字但是没推开现在只有部分老人会用，那个太抽象了
@@pablomao6279繁體的體字就遠不如中國和日本用的「体」好看。中國和日本用的「国」「鉄」「传/伝」「湾」「恋」「县/県」「学」「会」，例子不勝枚舉，在此打止。這些都很美觀又方便。中日這樣的大國會選用簡化漢字，簡化漢字肯定是利大於弊的。
@@DeanLew简化每个字的方案都不同，其中我感觉除了谷/榖 后/後 面/麵 这种合并的会造成困扰以外，其他的都还行。其他简化方式的每个字都是从古籍里找各种最简单的写法（异体字或者草书），比如国，出现时间比國还早。
this is just like when you give a more advanced, formal english sentence to speakers of romance languages they can understand it better than everyday english, because it contains more latin!
As a Chinese guy who is studying Japanese, I think it benefits a lot for Chinese people to learn Japanese. You can easily understand a great portion of Japanese contents once you learn some basic Japanese grammar because you have few barriers in vocabulary compared to western people. It's like you only need to spend 20% of study time to reach the same level of a Japanese learner from western countries. (This is only for reading; although many words in Japanese and Chinese sounds similar, we still need to learn speaking and listening from scratch)
As a westerner, it's hell :D
Even if I've acquired words from unhealthy amounts of anime consumption, I can't read them unless I study the word separately. It's frustrating to know eg. _shunkan_ easily, but then see 瞬間 and be ???. For extra comedy, I managed to spot the word from Korean text (순간 _sungan_ ) just because I'd acquired it from hearing Japanese. Being illiterate is not fun, especially when that illiteracy is unnecessary.
As a Japanese person learning Chinese, it's pretty easy to learn Chinese expect for its pronunciation. Once you overcome the barrier of pronunciation, it's soooo easy to understand Chinese.
总结来说，除了发音，我觉得中文不太难。
@@unknown-ahjtxdjupgnwMy Japanese friends have told me it’s especially easy to learn reading Chinese because of the generally easy grammar. Japanese reading and grammar are much harder for Chinese people to learn. Pronunciation is the easy one for us.
Easy to understand once you know the grammar, but still can’t speak it for the most part. The speaking part probably is just as hard as a non-Chinese. Even the loan words feel like a Frenchman trying to learn the English “butchered” pronunciation of these words with a heavy accent.
But it's good and it's also bad. As a Chinese guy who is learning Japanese too. When I see Kanji, I naturally have a "pronunciation" in my head which is not "right". LOL. So the first thing is cutting the rope between "Kanji" and "Hanzi". That's hell! LOL.
I like these new videos where you involve other people in experimenting
Yeah, trying something new was long overdue.
I'm glad you like them!
lol i meant semitic language not semantic language xD
In vietnam we use alot of hán tự(漢字)word with different meaning word that used in madarin example: library in china is 圖書館in vietnam is thư viện(書院),bye in vietnam is tạm biệt (暫別),không mean: zero and no is 空,student in university in china still called 學生 in vietnam called 生員, teacher in vietnam is giáo viên (教員),hospital in vietnam called bệnh viện 病院 in china called 醫院,books in china is 書in vietnam is sách (策),thư(書)in vietnam is mail,thank in vietnam is cảm ơn(感恩)in china is 謝謝, accordance,proper,.. in china is 合适 vietnam is thích hợp (适合),like in china is 贊 in vietnam is thích(适), dragon fruit in china is 火龍 in vietnam is thanh long(青龍),fruit in china is 水果 in vietnam is hoa quả(花果)teacher in university in vietnam is giảng viên(講員) in china is still used 老師... Alot different meaning hán tự(漢字) use every day by vietnam language and madarin,..
it's fascinating Vietnamese sounds more of how ancient Chinese was. even I can't speak Vietnamese I feel Vietnamese sounds close to Cantonese. I can speak Taiwanese (southern Fukienese) and a lot of words you describe is also how it is pronounced in Taiwanese. A lot of words/phrases in Vietnamese is actually the same meaning in Chinese, just used in a more classical way rather than modern Chinese.
I think Vietnamese still keep some ancient meaning of Chinese characters.
Very interesting, I always thought Vietnamese language have a lot to do with French.
@@JayG0o loll only less than 1% is french word,more than 70% the word is from china,just like how latin and french influence in English (even though 30% of roma empire language word is from Greek language 😆🤣🤣)
Words like '病院' (hospital) and '図書館' (library) were exported from Japan to China after the 19th century. A vast number of modern terms, such as '電話' (telephone), '科学' (science), and '社会' (society), were also imported into China as loanwords from Japan.
I'm a chinese major, shinjitai can be a bit difficult but overall japanese kanji is understandable (knowing the proper readings is another issue)
edit: the video was very interesting! As expected native speakers got the meaning much easier than I did, hearing their opinions on the differences in usage was also very helpful, thank you very much for the video as always!
The point about understanding formal writing more is very accurate, a few weeks back I found a journal published by the literatue departament of Hokkaido University in our school's library, I decided to give it a go to see how much I'd understand of it (I have some prior knowledge of Japanese, nothing major) and it was much easier than I thought it would be so even though my reading speed was rather slow I was able to read a whole chapter in Japanese with 70-80% understanding of the text🙏
As a Japanese speaker I love anything you do with Japanese!!! I can’t wait to watch it!!! Keep up the amazing work you do.
Thanks! I hope you like this video.
20:47 I'm Austrian, my native language is German and the southern Austrian dialects. However, knowing both German and English, spoken Dutch is often relatively easy to figure out, despite the geographic distance.
I learned Japanese as a child in Japanese language school, but my level was fairly low. At some point later in life, I decided to learn Mandarin, and got to a low intermediate level. More recently I came back to Japanese and my Chinese really helped me progress much faster in Japanese. It's a bit like learning more complicated English by learning Spanish--the Latin roots then become clearer.
Chinese here. Though I don’t speak Japanese, I have watched a lot Japanese anime and interested in Japanese culture. Thus I have some prior knowledge of the words with clear different meaning between Japanese and Chinese. Such words appeared in the video like 手纸、娘、勉强、上手 are familiar to me. It’s interesting to see people misunderstood these words. You can tell the guy with blur background is probably an anime fan too.
あなたの国で着物を来たら殴られますか？
Blur background to hide his figure collection? 😉
In the video, many people seem to understand that "大丈夫" means "it's okay," which suggests they must have seen some Japanese comics and games.
@@lamudri lol
Chinese here and I also speak Japanese.
Just a few additions.
Pronunciation of Kanji based word, especially in 音読み. Even the example in the video 语言 vs to 言語, the pronunciation in both languages are fairly similar and it was quite easy for me to pick up the twist in Japanese. This helped me a lot when learning Japanese. I think this is more true for a southern dialect Chinese speaker （吴语 or 粤语 etc.). About written part different simplification is much less of an issue. I'm from mainland and never learned traditional Chinese but found myself no problem at all reading contents in it. This is less true in Japanese but still almost a none issue assuming one consumes diversified culture content.
About the "more advanced" sentences. There are more words also used in modern Chinese in the smae context such as 自然資源 and 経済発展 hence they appeared easier. I think its worth noting that since Japan westernized first, a lot of modern concepts are "kanjinized" in Japanese first and then introduced to Chinese. 資源 and 経済 here for example. Heck when the word 共产党 was from Japanese. Since they're modern concept, used in a more recent meaning, the meaning hasn't deviated over time yet so it's easy for Chinese speakers to interprer. Arguably Japanese has more influence on modern Chinese than the other way around and it's worth noting that.
Lastly I'd like to note that a fair bit of Kanji words are still used in its ancient Chinese meaning. Like the example “彼”. We still say sentences like 以彼之道还施彼身 today. This is very true in Buddhist terminologies which are widely used in both languages still today.
I’m Danish so unsurprisingly I can read Swedish and especially Norwegian Bokmål. In fact Bokmål is so easy I have several times failed to notice that it was Norwegian at all.
I can also glean a lot of meaning out of French and especially Dutch. It’s unclear why exactly, but I think it comes down advanced vocabulary being very similar to my own with structural differences, exactly like what these Chinese speakers are experiencing with Japanese.
You speak English, much of English vocab, the higher register stuff especially, is French in origin.
Dutch is in the same continuum. We from Göteborg can also understand what they write.
actualy for the test example you have provided at 1:24 in chinese there is another word for it which is 试验 (simplified) and 試驗 (tradition) so in that case the chinese character and japanese caracters are minimal in difference.
reading dutch as a german is realy easy. i read the dutch wikipedia for NaCl (Koukenzout or sth like that) really easily and i basically understood everything
Keukenzout (Kitchen + salt for those who are wondering) :D
@@andreorysdyk4044 great. thanks. 😀
I'd say people who know both English and German can get at least the gist of maybe any Dutch sentence.
German is my second language, English is my native language, and I also can often get most of the meaning when reading Dutch (or trying to read it), but it's somewhat similar to the situation in this video, where important parts of the sentence are recognisable to an extent that a meaning can be pieced together from context, but there are words "in between" the recognisable parts which are simply foreign. When you say it's "really easy", you may be fooling yourself, because in Dutch there are also words which appear to be the same as or very similar to German or English words, which have meanings in Dutch which are different from the words they are similar to in the other languages!
@@andreorysdyk4044 köken-saut
I was in Beijing over twenty years ago with a HK friend. We both didn't really speak putonghua. However he was a Cantonese speaker and was able to read and write Chinese up to year 6 level. We brought a notebook and pen everywhere and when we needed to communicate he would just write it out. It was interesting and quite funny at times.
there is a same word "试验" in Chinese language, and it also means testing, test, verify, experiment, examination etc.
In Mandarin which I was focusing on, it doesn’t mean examination as in a school examination. That’s what it means in Japanese.
Shiken 試験 can also mean experiment or trial in scientific field in Japanese too. 試験的に○○する。
this has been your best video yet paul!! thank you so much. as a chinese speaker who has studied some japanese, i can confirm that most chinese have no problems recognizing a given character in any of its forms (traditional chinese, simplified chinese, japanese, simplified japanese, hanja etc). we've seen them all frequently enough to know what maps to what.
Seriously,as a Chinese,I usually underestimate the hardness of Chinese learning,thinking the sole and the biggest challenge is just the characters.But it's not the case.
Even knowing how to write kanji and respective meanings,due to the situation that most modern Chinese words are mostly formed by 2～3kanjis.
And here comes the challenge,the kanjis are somewhat like the hints to help you understand the multi-kanji words.
For example,語言 in Mandarin means language,both 語 and 言 mean speech and can be used as verbs meaning to say. And you put these two kanjis conversely,you get言語 which is a word rarely used colloquially and means''gossips'' ''complaints'' ''slanders'' and kinds of derogative speechs.
Correction:言語 is not limited to derogative use,it generally means speech,and sometimes indicates language.But 言語 today was used to solely mean language,but to 言語,it has more meanings.
The word language can also be referring to the manner of a person's speech. Similar to some use case of 言語 in modern Mandarin. Like in "watch your language." Or more academically the "parole", as in contrast to "langue"
Chinese isn't that hard. I taught myself to read a newspaper in 2 years and I read 論語 after 5 years.
I'm Chinese and I've been to Japan many times. usually I will need to fill out an information form upon checking in at the hotel, I always write in Chinese characters rather than english because I'm sure that Japanese can read and understand them. I've done that so many times and have never been told to write in English. I think moments like this emphsize the feeling that Japan and china are part of a similar cultural sphere and share a lot in common throughout history.
I do the same. Never had any complaints. I usually look stuff up because I'm not sure if I'm writing the characters right but otherwise they could read my crappy hand writing 😂
My teacher that knows both chinese and japanese told me because of the changes japanese have made to the kanji so that it can be adapted for their service makes it difficult to learn both of these at the same time. Its kinda torturing that for japanese kanji we need to learn both the Chinese japanified 😂 i may say pronunciation and the japanese meaning of it which sounds nothing similar to how chinese sounds like. For example : 馬 reads as “uma” when wanting to say “ 馬がいる“ i have a horse” but when its glued to another kanji it’s pronunciation changes 馬車 for example its read “basha” 😂 meaning carriage
This is so interesting!
切手 is actually a shortened form of 切符手形, which 切符 for ticket and 手形 for bill combined.
As a Dane, I have quite an easy time reading the written Norwegian Bokmål. That is mainly due to Denmark doing a colonialism and telling Norway "This is how you spell things now" back in the days. It doesn't work the same with Nynorsk, which is the modern Norwegian spelling convention that conforms more to actual spoken Norwegian (without getting into any long discussions about dialectical differences) and not the language of a foreign king. I can still parse it, as I can read Swedish and get some understanding from it. But there are enough differences and false friends in the languages that I cannot claim to be able to understand written Swedish or Norwegian without error.
As a Swede, I understand spoken and written Norwegian quite easily. Written Danish just as easy, but spoken Danish is more difficult. I can guess the meaning of Dutch language, because of having studied German at school.
That does make sense. As a Greek person I noticed when learning ancient Greek, that the more complex the words became, the more similar they were to modern Greek. It's usually the simple words that change the most.
I speak Mandarin and my ex colleague speaks Japanese. He was boasting that if he had to read a text in Chinese he would understand its general meaning. Lol okay, I opened a Chinese novel and suggested he translated the first paragraph. I had lots of fun while he was struggling to make out anything ("red cliff... is... sheep rolling...?!"). He didn't understand a single sentence, so much for his boasting.
As someone who's proficient in Chinese, I can understand basic sentences and combinations of words in Japanese, like "Happy festival!" or "fresh fruit", or some newspaper headlines, but that's it.
Japanese people don't understand full Chinese paragraphs, they have to use hiragana to help them
I'm a native Traditional Chinese user and a Japanese learner. We once had an intensive course of Japanese reading where we first focused on the most basic Japanese conjugation and sentence formations, and then with this as a basis, we were taught to understand intermediate to advanced Japanese articles with the Chinese meaning of the kanjis within them. It worked out well as long as there's no faux amis, even if we didn't know the Japanese pronunciations of these kanjis.
What's interesting to me is that in some cases Japanese has changed the meaning of the words while Chinese retains it's original meaning. Like 喧嘩 means "talking loudly" in Chinese (which is apparently the original meaning with the radical of "mouth" 口) and "fighting" (physical) or "quarreling" in Japanese. Another example would be 娘 as in your video, but this time modern Chinese and Japanese have retained different meanings from Classical Chinese and evolved from them.
There are also cases where Japanese retain some characters that are no longer used in modern Chinese. For example, 罠 ("fishing line" or "net for hunting" in Classical Chinese; "trap" in Japanese) in the meme 孔明の罠 "Kongming's (Zhuge Liang's) trap," which would be translated as "孔明的陷阱" in modern Chinese.
Better educated Japanese would also be able to understand the word "陥穽", although it is specifically used for traps involving a hole in the ground.
English native speaker that is proficient in Japanese here (passed JLPT N2). Really super interesting to see the commonalities (and my envy towards Taiwanese/Mandarin learners of Japanese) of these languages together. I knew they had a huge head start when learning Japanese, but I didn't know it was THIS huge of a head start!
I'm a native Cantonese speaker and I found learning kanji onyomi readings much easier due the higher degree of similarity in character pronunciation. Without knowing how to approximate the pronunciation of the characters, I don't think I could have passed my N2 level exam. After a while, the Japanese meaning of the kanji became natural and I was no longer surprised to discover the wildly different meanings of certain characters in Japanese. 叶う means to have a dream come true, but means a leaf in simplified Chinese -_-"
I get your point. Onyomi pronunciation of kanji is a lot more similar to cantonese than mandarin.
I am not certain about historical background of it but I think chinese influence in japan is mainly from southern china including current cantonese speaking region.
@@einzelganger09
Some varieties of Chinese have preserved more features of old Chinese. Cantonese retains the checked tone, and Wu Chinese retains both the voicing distinction and the checked tone, whereas Mandarin has not preserved these features. Onyomi mimics old Chinese, people who can use other varieties of Chinese may find Onyomi easier.
onyomi:seki IPA:/seki/
Cantonese:sek2 IPA:/sɛk/
mandarin:shi2 IPA:/ʂɚ/
漢字簡化之前，「叶」字為「協調」之「協」字的異體，而無「葉」之義。Before kanji was simplified, the character "叶" is a variant version of "協", which meas "con-" instead of "leaf" or "葉".
As a Traditional Chinese user and Cantonese speaker, my experience with written Japanese is very similar to those featured in this video.
I think it is marginally easier for me to recognise "simplified" written Kanji since I am more familiar with the source character.
Being able to read Chinese characters is really useful when navigating in Japan since most of the directional signs are in Kanji.
Unless I've learnt the Japanese reading I wouldn't be able to pronounce it, but functionally I'm able to find my way as quickly as the locals just with a quick glance at the signs.
2:14 as a Chinese learner this is exactly what I see, except instead of "Bla bla" it's "curly letter, curly letter" 😂
Cantonese and mandarin speaker here (knows a bit japanese not fluent though): we can read most of the kanjis but since not all of them have shared meanings they can sometimes be misleading. For any newspaper or signs, knowing chinese characters can help massively, so i wont get lost in japan. But spoken japanese is close to 0% intelligible I'd say
As for any differences in character as long as they still resemble the related character in chinese (whether simpliflied or traditional) we can still recognise them, and within context of course
I understood Japanese sentences with little to no knowledge of Japanese when I was visiting Japan before. In Japanese, the word for seasoning is choumiryo, (pronounced more like chomireow), which is very similar to the Chinese pronunciation for the word seasoning, which is tiaomiliao, pronounced very similar to Japanese. That's why I can understand a man asking me if I knew where the seasoning packets are, but I couldn't reply, so I just pointed.
@@officialgreengrayEach word may be easy to understand. However, in a sentence, important information may be hidden in the hiragana.
If you just look at the kanji, they are the same though...
この電車は大阪に行きます。
This train goes to Osaka.
この電車は大阪に行きません。
This train does not go to Osaka.
Sometimes sweets bags contain desiccant packets with this written on them.
これは食べられません。
This is not edible.
Please be careful ☺️
@@ymgch16 これは食べられます, means "this is edible."?
@@Zj-Aka Yes, you're correct!!👍
@@ymgch16 😄thanks.
I’m studing Mandarin for a while, and now I live in a town here in Brazil with a big Japanese imigration, and it is very influential. So there’s some places like parks, historical sites that are written in portuguese and japanese, our city hall have some plaques in portuguese and japanese, some stores, Police stations, etc… and it is fun that I can read some of the kanji (Hanzi)!
Also I have a japanese descendant cousin, sansei generation, she speaks Japanese and is fun to see the similarities and differences of kanji/hanzi in both languages!
It's very interesting that these three countries are connected somehow. I was surprised when I first knew Lisa Ono 小野丽莎 was a Brazilian.
Actually, 切手 is an abbreviation of 切符手形、so basically, the two letters 切 + 手 doesn't mean stamp.
Also, Japanse who graduated highschool study Chinese classics at school, so if they didn't slept in their classrooms, they can understand a little bit better.
This is such funny & and interesting concept how has no one done this before? It's so gooddd.
I studied Japanese for two years back in 2006, and also got a lot of how you say “anime exposure” up until 2018. I know the syllabaries completely and the very basics of grammar, but I really struggle with kanji. One sentence, about “he’s skilled at cooking”, I was able to read before confirmation, which I find amazing as the other Chinese speakers were able to grasp that sentence the best as well. Deep in my brain, I was able to identify the words, but prior, if you would ask me to write out “he” and “cooking”, I wouldn’t be able to. I seem to recall 100, maybe 200, kanji well enough to write them out. However, I must have learned and etched more kanji that I can visually recognize and read, though not much more. lol
This was a great video! I’ve wondered how well a Chinese speaker could read Japanese sentences. Thank you for this!
They can read all the characters but some meanings and phrases were changed in Japanese over time
I have been studying Japanese for 20 years and live in Japan. This was really fun to watch. I want to learn Chinese now. I think it would be fun.
日本語母語話者としてこの動画はとても面白かったです。中国語母語話者が日本語を読むときと、日本語母語話者が中国語を読むときでは少し理解度が違うような気がするので逆のパターンも見てみたいです。
中国語の母語話者は、同じ意味を持つ漢字だけを理解でき、同じ発音を持つ漢字もある。彼らは、カタカナが古代中国の筆運びに似ていると考えている。
はい、せ-の、漢字😊
He already has the opposite video made😂, it is fun 😊
中国人として私も面白かったと思う。日本語を勉強する時、I found some 漢字 in modern 日本語 still have ancient Chinese 意味。それはとても面白いな。例えば「走」、古代中国語(文言文)と現在の日本語同じ意味を持つ、だが現代中国語「走」の意味は「歩く」。
Sorry about my Japanese, still studying, hope you can understand what I'm saying. :-)
Paul, this was awesome! 😊
I don't speak or read either language, but it was still so much fun watching the interpretations the Chinese speakers would come up with.
The formal use of toilet paper is ‘厕纸’ or ‘卫生纸(衛生纸)’. 手纸 is used in a casual way becasue in some chinese dialets, 'go to toilet' is called '解手'.
0:43 言語 is used in chinese as well, but often in a more literary, formal or poetic sense.
Yes, I can confirm
Amazing crystal clear editing as always Paul
Thank you. That's much more of a compliment than the "You're a language master!" comments (which are kind, but incorrect).
This all reminds me of the time I was working in retail at an automotive shop called SuperCheap Auto in Nz and a deaf Hong Konger and his gf came in asking for parts. I noticed his signs and after trying to navigate their way and struggling (I could tell the gf didnt care for cars but the bf did/gf was struggling to translate) I was like 'you understand me?' in nzsl and he responded 'yes' we then proceded with the gf at parts to get them an oil filter, oil, and air filter plus a bulb... one of the greatest decisions was learning sign... i also let a 50+ year old man make his own order at kfc by himself for the first time in his life.... if i wasn't so excited to help people i would've cried then and there fortunately I left it all for later that night. I think about them often. ❤ Thank you for spreading awareness on other regions language comparisons other than the western view most think of!! ❤
Concerning your personal anecdote: I live in China as a western academic. When I upgraded my default sentence from 我不懂 (I don’t understand) to 我听不懂 (I cannot understand what I heard) a man, bless him, took a piece of paper and scribbled what he said! If I couldn’t understand his accent, maybe I would have understood his cursive 😅
Even among Chinese people, sometimes it’s hard to understand another speak. Meanwhile, writing is a shared system. Well, it wasn’t for me. But I’m to hear that this form of communication which worked for another ethnically western person!
If you don't speak the language. You can just hand someone your phone and have them type it all into a dictionary app. That's what I always did when people used words I didn't know. At least the handwriting won't be a problem at that point. (I have no idea how anyone can read cursive characters and I'm on my way to being fluent in the language.)
As a Taiwanese aka Tranditional Chinese Reader, I think most of the Japanese Kanji can be read easily.
Some of them may be difficult if the Kanji is made of Japanese (Wasei-Kanji) like 峠辻凪 etc. And some of the Kanji may cannot guess the meaning right because of the both languages are different, like 娘 for daughter in Japanese and mother(usually) in Chinese. 🤩
不是分娘和孃嗎？我其實是簡體使用者不太清楚。
@@ポラス-b8f 可能一開始有分，但後來都混在一起了。我台灣人也很少見過「孃」這個字。
@@HenOOXX我也是台灣人，我想應該跟年紀有關，1990年以前的出版的說，還是有不少「孃」的，印象中主要是在故事、小說裡，現在只在特定的詞語例如舞孃使用。
@@ポラス-b8f 最以前好像真的是這樣分的，但是後來古人就逐漸合併成娘了
而孃在簡化字中也作為異體字和娘合併了(例如台臺合併成台)
我查教育部簡編本字典是：
孃：
1 稱謂，稱母親。例如爹孃。
2 女子。例如舞孃。
娘：
1 女子。例如姑娘。
2 稱謂：
(1) 稱母親，通孃。例如爹娘。
(2) 稱妻子。例如娘子、老闆娘。
(3) 對長輩或已婚婦女的通稱。例如大娘。
重編本再新增：
3 舊時奴僕對女主人的敬稱。
例如《金瓶梅》第二三回：「娘是小的一個主兒，娘不高抬貴手，小的一時兒存站不的。」
4 罵人的話。語句中插入「娘」字，表示憎惡或怨恨。
例如元．無名氏《陳州糶米》第一折：「這百姓每刁潑，拏那金鎚來打他娘！」
不過我日常生活中是沒什麼看過孃的
As someone who studied Japanese for years and just got into studying Chinese, I really enjoy watching these videos. Japanese changed a lot since the 2nd WW, a lot of kanji got poofed out of use and some are just written in plain hiragana now. I'm sure the Chinese people would have a much easier time with some older sentences.
Awesome! I loved it. Maybe starting a series with "mutually intelligible or not" languages and involve more people would be great.
9:04 In Japanese, "大丈夫" also means a masculine man. In that case, it is pronounced "dai-jo-fu" instead of "dai-jo-bu". This is a very old literary expression.
it's been a while since ive seen this channel, the video quality is really good, better than i remember
Chinese and Japnese speaker here.
For most Chinese speakers, reading Japanese is just sound like reading acient Chinese, as most of the kanji's meaning is based on the meaning in acient Chinese, for example the word 娘 has the exactly same meaning in acinet Chinese, meaning daughter, but it means mother in modern Chinese; and the word 湯 means hot water in both acinet Chinese and Japanese while it means soup in modern Chinese.
It is actually possible for Chinese and Japanese to communicate through only kanji. In fact, Japan, Korea and Vietnam used to kanji and their people could use kanji to talk to China and each other through 筆談(Brushtalk) in the past, and you can find a lot of example from the past. However, Korea and Vietnam were no longer using kanji and most of their people can't even understand their names' meaning, but it is still possible for Japanese and Chinese to communicate through only kanji as kanji is still being taught at Japan and they still learn ancient Chinese article through 漢文訓読(kanbunkundoku), and China is still teaching acient Chinese(文言文).
Yes i think at least korea had many problems with Japan so they wanted to swift away from it and make smth of their own thats why they made their own alphabet its pretty cool tbh. And besides that, korea’s population had problems learning the kanji since its very difficult and most people back then didnt have access to proper education so the korean alphabet was very easy for them to learn without even needing to study much.
6:30 I think what she raises about "cut hand" being a verb in Chinese is an interesting point, because it raises a difference in word formation between Modern Chinese and Japanese. In Literary (Classical) Chinese any two part word could be either a verb or a noun depending on context, and Japanese received a huge deal of its loaning from Chinese through Literary Chinese, where in Vernacular Chinese whence Modern Standard Chinese comes the difference is more distinguished.
On another note, I think it'd be cool if you got speakers of other Chinese languages like Cantonese and Hokkien in on this experiment. Perhaps you could also do a similar experiment with Literary Chinese, with speakers of different Chinese languages, as well as Japanese?
I guess its similar to the influence of the Latin alphabet on non Latin languages, most people can read it but not understand anything except on very rare occasions where a word is shared through cultural influence
For the Question of the Day: As an Urdu speaker, reading Persian is fascinating because both languages are related, and Urdu also borrows a large amount of vocabulary from Persian, but the two languages also have some differences in words that look the exact same.
I believe Urdu also preserves the Persian spellings as well. Like "3ilaaqah" (Urdu) vs "ilaaqaa" (Hindi)
@@CosmicDoom47 That is also true, but ain is not pronounced.
As a Native Hindi Speaker, I can understand Urdu very well as 90% of the words are similar in both languages but I can't read it as I don't know the Nastaliq Script and Urdu speaker doesn't know Devnagari but still can communicate
Is Urdu the most popular language in Pakistan?
@@William_Fei In Pakistan, the most popular / commonly spoken language is actually Punjabi, but Urdu is the lingua franca that pulls everyone together. Pakistan on the west side has the Iranic languages that are more related to Farsi (Persian), while the east side has the Indic languages, like Punjabi and Sindhi. This doesn't change the fact that essentially every popular common Pakistani tongue is related, but the Western and Eastern ones are often not mutually intelligible. Everyone in Pakistan can speak Urdu to an extent, but it is only the native language of about 7% of the population.
2:06 I can only read the Chinese characters, and you nailed it. Cat bla fish bla eat bla bla. I did a google translate, "食べる前に手を洗ってください" eat $%&* before %&*$ hand %$#@ wash %#@&
Mandarin speaker here, I write in Traditional Chinese but am familiar with Simplified Chinese also because in Malaysia where I'm from, both exist, though most people write simplified.
I did learn a bit of Japanese before, but not enough to understand most of the sentences, so my guesses of those sentences are pretty similar except for a few. Based on the video, I think most people somehow know 大丈夫 means "it's okay" though it means "big husband" or "real man" used as an attribute, in the saying 男人大丈夫
Kanji (Chinese characters) has evolved to a system that each character encompasses specific meanings independent of the speaking languages. This is not only because Kanji has been used by many countries in East Asia, but Kanji in the first place has been created as a common writing system for different ethnic groups that inhabits the land of Central State.
Kanji is the classical emojis 😮😊😂
Different groups? Chinese is only used by the Han people, unless you mean the different dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien
@@8qk67acq5 that is not ethnic groups, the characters were just pronounced differently by region and dialect, back then there was no national language, but they were all Chinese, that is kinda misleading
In Hong Kong, we don't use the word 手紙. We use 廁紙 for toilet paper. If we see 手紙, we will guess something like "memo", "note" or "post-it".
In Hong Kong, we don't think 娘 is resticted to mother although standard Chinese does. Ww also use 娘 for female person in any age, feminine, landlady, female ambassador and female mascot.
In Hong Kong, 上手 can mean "good at" or "previous (person)" but in different pronunciation. We don't use 上手 like in this video 12:03 .
In Hong Kong, we can guess 自分 as 自己(self, -self).
For 輸出, we can ensure it means export due to the context.
輸出(Chinese) = export or output
出口(Chinese) = export or exit
出力(Chinese) = use manpower, pay effort
輸出(Japanese) = export
出口(Japanese) = exit
出力(Japanese) = output
For 言う, we can guess "mention" due to 内容 (context) but usually misuse "say", "talk" when answering in English just like in this video. Chinglish use "say", "talk" instead of "mention".
For 抜群, we can guess as "exceptionally" due to 出類拔萃. 拔(Chinese) can mean "pick up" and 群 mean "group". When putting together, it looks like something "outstanding from normal" although it is not a real Chinese word.
There are also many false friends among Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese
Therefore, if you find Hong Kong people to read Japanese, the result will be different.
As a native Cantonese speaker, I can also testify to the fact that in this video, the more complex a sentence is the easier it is for me to guess due to the sheer number of Chinese characters in the sentence. Especially in the advanced sentence #2, I could literally guess the entire sentence's meaning where my mind was able to connect all of the similar words with Cantonese and logically come up with a narrative with the sentence along the lines of「日本係缺乏天然資源嘅國家，所以為咗經濟發展依存輸出」, which I guessed that the meaning is something like "Japan is a country that lacks natural resources, so in order to develop economically, it has to rely on exports." And the exact Japanese sentence in Cantonese would be 「由於日本缺乏天然資源，要依賴出口嚟發展經濟。」
I would love to see a similar video but for Japanese reading Chinese
I personally think Japanese ppl would understand more about Chinese letters because one Kanji has many meaning in japanese, so we can guess easier by context what they are written about.
@@jpnsei1171 On the other hand, japanese uses less characters because it reuses characters for multiple meanings, so they might just get stumped by chinese chatacters they've never seen before (since chinese uses more characters)
@bobboberson8297
Ok I tried to read chinese, and I couldn't understand anything 🤣
Maybe I was wrong haha
Japanese people can't read full Chinese paragraphs, it doesn't really work the other way around
@@jpnsei1171I think you were reading simplified mandarin 💀
It’s very hard to understand
As a russian, I can read almost all slavic languages, and understand 60-80% of a text
you are my role model. ❤
This experiment would look something like Greek people trying to read Russian. They can recognize more than a half of the letters, and the more high-style Russian examples are used (e.g. scientific, philosophical, religious texts) the more familiar Greek words they would encounter.
@tedsteiner oh.. thanks for mentioned it. I made a mistake. haha.
I wonder how about Lithuanian？Learnt a little Russian and I recognised some words there.
@user-qo5eg7ly5u Lithuanian is a fully different language, it's from other language family
This video is great and reminds me of my own experience - I'm a native speaker of Chinese and am learning Japanese slowly. So right now I am able to recognise hiragana and katakana, but my understanding of kanji characters' pronunciation and meaning is fundamentally rooted in Chinese if I haven't been exposed to it in my Japanese learning.
Hence, let's say I see something like 勉強する, while it's pronounced as "benkyou tsuru" in Japanese, in my head I'd read it as "mian qiang tsuru" instead.
Mandarin Chinese and English native speaker here. I am able to understand a tiny bit of Japanese from written texts, and also when listening to people speaking in Japanese, though it's usually insufficient for me to make out the entire meaning of sentences.
For written texts, knowing katakana helps as well because a lot of words written in katakana are borrowed from English. As for listening, I can only pick out borrowed words and kanji read in onyomi.
I'm currently learning Russian and Korean. When listening to people speaking in Slavic languages (e.g. Polish), I can pick out certain words that mean the same thing in Russian.
By the way, there is an error at 7:25, the 2 green "same" should be "different" instead.
This was so interesting!
I love this topic.
Thank you so very much!
As a Hong Konger, I am a Chinese speaker who study Japanese, I can say that when we study Kanji it’s not that hard compare with a non-Chinese speaker
Thanks for useful and informative video as always ❤❤❤
Immigrant to Sweden here. I can understand some portion of spoken Norwegian (more) and Danish (less), but when I _read_ them, I would understand some 80-90% of both languages.
I feel the same about my polish. Since I learned it, I can understand a little of what Zelensky is saying (and Putin in a even lower level). It's so crazy because I never study anything about those languages 😂
Well, when you're READING Danish, you don't have to deal with the potato in the mouth.
The written forms are closer to dialects than proper languages. The pronunciation differences, though... 😬
I'm Filipino, not Chinese but, historically speaking, the Philippines has had a long history with China. Even to this day, there is a portion of the population who are Filipino but have Chinese descent who are Filipino Chinese, the same with Malaysian or Indonesian Chinese. So, naturally, I studied in a Chinese school in the Philippines growing up. When college started, I had the opportunity of being a foreign exchange student in Japan. I just have to say that learning Japanese wasn't really a breeze, but the kanji made it all the more easier to learn their inherent meaning. Anyway, I'm still continuing with both Chinese and Japanese even until this day. It's funny because I do have a lot of fond memories when I used to live in Japan and, since I look Asian, people assume that I was Japanese since my close friends before were this white Mexican guy and a Swedish dude. So, every time I take this train going to Shinjuku, I would always say "日本語わかりません", and then my Mexican friend would come in, and the Japanese people would be dumbfounded. LOL, those were good times. I plan to really live in Japan someday, this time as a permanent resident.
Good luck on your residence!!!
23/09/2024 21-52
chinese and japanese relationship is pretty close to french and english, mostly shared characters, tons of loan word from each other but different language family
English and French are from the same language family(Indo-European), just the different branches.
But French is developed from Latin and English developed from old German.
Afaik, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic are the big language families in Europe. Yes they all come from proto I do european, but by that standard french and Nepalese are probably also the same language family
@@spaceowl5957 yes, French and Nepali are from the same language family. Germanic, Romance and Slavic are branches of Indo-European language family, but they are not language families of their own.
Japan took all the society-shaping culture from ancient China, not only words but also every element of civilization rather than the other way around or you can say the cultural cores of Japan after the 7th century had been Chinese (ancient Chinese).
You said China also borrowed modern loanwords from Japan, which is not fundamentally correct because those are actually not Japanese knowledge but Japanese translations of Western knowledge by using Chinese characters and Chinese grammar in the 19th century, they called it the Wasei Kango (和製漢語）or Japanese-coined Chinese words, e.g. Western word "democracy" was translated into 民主，"economy" was translated into 經濟，"republic" was translated into 共和國 ，"science" was translated into 科學，"technology" was translated into 科技.... these Western concepts didn't have ancient Chinese counterparts beforehand and Japan just translated them by using Chinese words and Chinese grammar (in the 19th century, the Japanese intellectuals had a much more pround proficiency in Classical Chinese than they were in the second half of 20th century, as after the WWII, the Japanese ditched the Wasei Kango and started to transliterate Western knowledge by mimicking the English pronunciations directly with phonetics only instead of translation by using meanings in Wasei Kango). Japan borrowed massively from Europe in knowledge since the mid-19th century when China just kept a blind eye so later when China fell too behind, it didn't bother to translate everything from scratch again and just took the Wasei Kango as they were already Chinese by nature in both grammar structure and characters and quite intuitive for Chinese speakers to understand. So if Japan hadn't translated these Western concepts, China would have translated them by itself, it was not a big deal, so I wouldn't equate such a translation job to the same significance of ancient China's transformative influence in Japan. But many Japanese today tend to downplay the latter and overplay the former to emphasize the mutual influences between the two countries in terms of equal influencing degrees. lol.
@@GoodCitizen-gm1tltalking about making of new words in the 19th century, actually Chinese did brother to do their own translation of modern concepts, I'd argue sometimes they did a better job yet ultimately those words didn't prevail.
Say for example the word "evolution", the Chinese interpretation 天演 vs Japanese 進化 is somewhat more capable in grasping the idea, but perhaps the Japanese charactera choice were less abstract or simple to understand. The Chinese scholars' better knowledge in classical Chinese were also their demise when introducing new things to the mass
Fascinating video! Per your questions at the end of the video; as a Farsi/Persian speaker I can make sense of written Arabic. However, it's easiest to identify vocab for MSA rather than most dialects.
As a Chinese (Mandarin) native speaker, I took only one Japanese A1 course for 16*2 hours so I don’t really know the grammar. But thanks to Japanese TV series, games, mangas, and anime (also my mother tongue Chinese and knowledge of linguistics), my Japanese vocabulary is far richer than A1.
I have a sense of grammar. For example in the sentence 試験の勉強をしなくても大丈夫です, I cannot remember what しなくても means and I cannot articulate such a sentence myself. But when I see the translation, it makes so much sense to me like “ohhhh I knew it”
I’ve imagined how I could communicate in Japanese, it would be a stack of nouns, verbs, adjectives, basic auxiliary verbs with no actual grammar structure. Like 私 日本語 できない、ただし たくさんの単語 でいる、会場の入り口 どこですか？このチャンオルを好き 再生数 高い ほしい
As a Japanese native speaker, I can almost understand that "私 日本語..." sentence.
I guess it must be like francophones trying to read Spanish where you can get the general idea of a text with some effort without completely understanding.
More like trying to read words in the old Gothic alphabet: you can still recognize the letters, mostly, even if you have no idea of the language.
No. French and Spanish are two closely related languages both originating from Latin, and Japanese has nothing to do with Chinese at all aside from the kanji\hanzi.
i'd compare it to trying to understand a text about IT in bahasa indonesia
you'll recognise all the new english words and the influence that english can have, but for all the other parts you are clueless
As a french speaker, if I read something in Spanish I can kind of understand what it's about. However, the languages are better much different.
It's a bit like reading Maltese - a semitic language with lots of Italian-based words.