Sometimes I get asked how well we Japanese understand written Chinese. My answer is that I can only guess 30% of it. We studied ancient Chinese literature and poetry in high school, so I understand old Chinese better than modern Chinese. Of course I know that there are several variations of the Chinese language, but I can't distinguish between them, whether they're spoken or written.
I can, as I said, approximate the meaning to some extent in writing. We share basic vocabulary like numbers, colors, certain nouns and verbs. In addition to that, Chinese characters are ideographs, so we see them sort of as pictograms. I have to really read English in order to get the meaning, but I can glean more in Chinese writing at a glance because so many of the characters are instantly recognizable to me. Of course, given time, I understand English much better than Chinese, though. On the other hand, I don't understand spoken Chinese at all. The sounds of Chinese and Japanese are totally different.
If we're only talking about Chinese restaurant menus, I get practically everything. This is because a lot of the Chinese characters for ingredients and cooking procedures are similar to those used in Japanese.
I feel that "can" and "understand" are rarely used together, so I avoided it. Is this correct?
either is fine, you can use "can understand" or "understand" interchangeably. perfectly written! :-)
A friend of mine who was born in Korea and came to Argentina as a kid (1980?) speaks Korean perfectly of course, but he told me he can't read newspapers because the writing has a certain amount of Chinese ideograms (the most literary idioms and expressions I suppose), and you learn this in high school, which he didn't attend in Korea. BTW, the idea of being a native or almost in two languages--and so different as Korean and Spanish--just blows my mind off
That's interesting! I remember seeing a video about it.
I found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJqXd-1dEU They asked Japanese on the streets to read and guess the meaning of Chinese sentences.
title: Can We Japanese...
@jellomello @CocoPop Thank you so much!
@eugen_blick Yes, until the 15th century, Korean was written using Chinese characters as well, so they might sometimes need them.
Historically, there have been several times in Japan when people have argued that Chinese characters should be abandoned, too.
@BalaGi Thank you for sharing such an interesting video! I learned a lot from it, and I plan to write more on East Asian languages in my next post.
This is very funny. Sometimes I come across some text online and think, "man, there are so many kanji I don't know yet". I continue trying to read it, only to realize it was Chinese all along haha. When my friend was learning Korean for a bit, we too figured out that a lot of place names/shrines etc. indeed use Chinese characters.
@hdrx Yeah, it's no wonder these two languages are confused. I did some research in order to write this post and realized it'd be easy for us to learn reading Chinese. I have my hands full right now with my English studies, though.
Very interesting post! It is quite interesting to think about the similarities between both languages. Great job writing this post! I also study Chinese, feel free to read my Chinese entries, and let me know how much you understand! いい週末を！
@Misogi I saw your Death Note post. It's easier than posts about other topics because I've read its original manga. Having said that, your post is philosophical and likely has a profound meaning, which makes it a bit difficult. It came out even; I understood around 30% of it, as usual.
By the way, there were a lot of Mandarin speakers when I started Journaly, but I assume that they can't access this site from China now. That's too bad for them and Mandarin learners like you.