Can Chinese Speakers Read Japanese?

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In this video I see how well native speakers of Chinese can read Japanese without ever having studied it. The results are incredibly interesting!
Special thanks to: Alfred, Channing, Judy, Paul, Jia, and Webster for participating in the video!
🎧 Japanese sentence audio and Hiragana transcription: docs.google.com/document/d/1s...
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00:00 Introduction
02:29 Video sponsor: NordVPN
04:05 Everyday sentence #1
06:43 Everyday sentence #2
08:29 Everyday sentence #3
10:40 Everyday sentence #4
12:39 Advanced sentence #1
15:34 Advanced sentence #2
17:10 Advanced sentence #3
19:17 Reflecting on the experiment

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22 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 1,6 тыс.

@Langfocus 16 дней назад

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@icebaby6714 14 дней назад

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.

@joaquinvaleri7022 13 дней назад

Hola

@bpsevil 12 дней назад

I can understand written Portuguese based on my knowledge of Spanish.

@bpsevil 12 дней назад

Since I also understand written French and Italian aside from Spanish, Portuguese is about 85 , maybe 90 percent readable.

@joaquinvaleri7022 12 дней назад

@@bpsevil ok and hello from Argentina 🇦🇷

@EdMcF1 15 дней назад

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.

@John_Weiss 15 дней назад

My husband has witnessed the very same thing.

@hiskiliu8941 14 дней назад

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.

@user-gw6fg6mv8b 13 дней назад

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.

@hiskiliu8941 13 дней назад

@@user-gw6fg6mv8b 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.

@andrewli6606 13 дней назад

@@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.

@aclahmc5976 15 дней назад

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".

@wliaputs 13 дней назад

Lol

@mfaizsyahmi 12 дней назад

Them family jewels 😂

@William_Fei 11 дней назад

LMAO

@zobek5796 11 дней назад

there is probably a common origin though since the tanuki's huge balls are linked to good fortune in japan

@pablomao6279 11 дней назад

哎哎哎，這些日本人踐踏了文明

@tobara 15 дней назад

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.

@ranawaqar7140 14 дней назад

Can you help me to learn Japanese

@zeendaniels5809 14 дней назад

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.

@dan339dan 13 дней назад

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)

@mitchellbarton7915 13 дней назад

That legitimately sounds like a blooming linguists dream there.

@MrTyty527 13 дней назад

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)

@legoism89 13 дней назад

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.

@user-np5ci8mp8g 4 дня назад

是个有趣的故事。it's an interesting story。

@DavidMenganase 10 дней назад

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.

@tinkeringpoko 9 дней назад

This is a good one. 那只能记得加油了😂

@phantomxiang 8 дней назад

So according to your explanation, it should be translated into "疏忽一時，受害一生" or something like that.

@303C 7 дней назад

Did it become a proverb?

@hoangkimviet8545 16 дней назад

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.

@Langfocus 15 дней назад

I tell a related story from my own experience in the video! 🙂

@YCprivate 15 дней назад

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

@peterii3512 15 дней назад

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.

@peterii3512 15 дней назад

@@YCprivate yes they were writing in Classical Chinese, just like how early modern europeans wrote using latin

@xdcfjngkjdrx 15 дней назад

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.

@minami1952 15 дней назад

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.

@user-gv2zt6in9f 15 дней назад

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.

@BiglerSakura 15 дней назад

Obviously because the elements of the Chinese culture that have infiltrated to Japan over centuries could do so only via the coastal line.

@jumpvelocity3953 15 дней назад

We do speak Cantonese in the mainland… there are more Cantonese speakers in the mainland than there are the population of Hong Kong.

@kevinclass2010 15 дней назад

Isn't it because Japanese people learned the Kanji from the kingdom of Wu?

@xdcfjngkjdrx 15 дней назад

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.

@yuwei._ 15 дней назад

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.

@Young-ep8ik 15 дней назад

I mean they are family jewelry so wouldn't call it a mistake 🤣🤣

@sitaoxiang7611 15 дней назад

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

@fonkbadonk5370 15 дней назад

@@Young-ep8ik It's really interesting to me that we have the exact same word for the exact same thing in German!

@emcarnahan 15 дней назад

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…

@MomoKunDaYo 15 дней назад

That's pronounced "kindama" right?

@Kenoticrunner 15 дней назад

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.

@Langfocus 14 дней назад

Amazing!

@kjksm1111 13 дней назад

[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)"

@kekeke8988 12 дней назад

吃る is どもる it has no common origin, right?

@joeyy.7146 11 дней назад

That makes sense. It's easier for the Chinese to guess the meaning of the latter ones.

@joelwatson210 9 дней назад

wow，it becomes much easier for Chinese to understand.

@seanxi 9 дней назад

chinese can understand the full thing

@lalalalalalala127 9 дней назад

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?

@bubbajenkins123 15 дней назад

I like these new videos where you involve other people in experimenting

@Langfocus 15 дней назад

Yeah, trying something new was long overdue.

@Langfocus 15 дней назад

I'm glad you like them!

@makara2711 9 дней назад

lol i meant semitic language not semantic language xD

@equi_nokusu 15 дней назад

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.

@conbrio27 15 дней назад

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 15 дней назад

Ofc Japan “borrowed” kanji during the Tang dynasty

@saitodosan9377 15 дней назад

@@Kerguelen.Mapping Oversimplification that also totally misrepresents how the Chinese language arrived in and influenced Japan. A double dose of stupidity. Very nice.

@equi_nokusu 15 дней назад

@@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).

@equi_nokusu 15 дней назад

@@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.

@Kimuyaman 15 дней назад

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.

@cheerful_crop_circle 14 дней назад

Japanese is an Austronesian language , listen to Maori. Maori sounds like Japanese.

@rudhardotcom 14 дней назад

That last sentence of yours explains why Interlingua is easy for many. Or for some, depending on what other languages they know.

@rudhardotcom 14 дней назад

@@cheerful_crop_circle Korean also sounds like Japanese to my ears. But all three are unrelated.

@elsomnoliento 14 дней назад

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.

@cheerful_crop_circle 14 дней назад

@@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

@AelwynMr 15 дней назад

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.

@user-gv2zt6in9f 15 дней назад

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.

@Imita0903 15 дней назад

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.

@vlakieste 15 дней назад

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 14 дней назад

So the whole Latin Amarican can understand each other without too much difficulty?

@saltcutep 14 дней назад

@@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.

@Mikelaxo 14 дней назад

@@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

@davialmeida2764 14 дней назад

@@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

@ac8760 15 дней назад

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.

@NI-yy9zr 5 дней назад

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.

@HingYok 13 дней назад

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.

@hiskiliu8941 14 дней назад

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)

@Komatik_ 9 дней назад

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.

@unknown-ahjtxdjupgnw 6 дней назад

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。

@kamui_harusame 3 дня назад

@@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.

@IR-xy3ij 2 дня назад

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.

@AustinSiler1 15 дней назад

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.

@Langfocus 15 дней назад

Thanks! I hope you like this video.

@aliceamagi 14 дней назад

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.

@wuwoww 15 дней назад

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.

@user-vo3le7zd9k 14 дней назад

あなたの国で着物を来たら殴られますか？

@lamudri 13 дней назад

Blur background to hide his figure collection? 😉

@rayexception4590 15 дней назад

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.

@CosmicDoom47 15 дней назад

I believe Urdu also preserves the Persian spellings as well. Like "3ilaaqah" (Urdu) vs "ilaaqaa" (Hindi)

@rayexception4590 15 дней назад

@@CosmicDoom47 That is also true, but ain is not pronounced.

@atharv_bajpai21 13 дней назад

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 11 дней назад

Is Urdu the most popular language in Pakistan?

@rayexception4590 11 дней назад

@@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.

@LangSphere 15 дней назад

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

@andreorysdyk4044 15 дней назад

Keukenzout (Kitchen + salt for those who are wondering) :D

@fiyangga.yanggiri-hala 15 дней назад

@@andreorysdyk4044 great. thanks. 😀

@blinski1 15 дней назад

I'd say people who know both English and German can get at least the gist of maybe any Dutch sentence.

@AaronAndrewHunt 15 дней назад

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!

@DiamondMcNamara 12 дней назад

@@andreorysdyk4044 köken-saut

@iopqu 15 дней назад

上手 is similar to 高手 which means master in Chinese, 上 being up and 高 being tall

@IR-xy3ij 2 дня назад

I suppose the confusion comes from 上 being exclusively for relative position in Chinese, almost equal to “superior (anatomical)” in English

@mydogisbailey 15 дней назад

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.

@user-ss1hd2rx2p 15 дней назад

As a russian, I can read almost all slavic languages, and understand 60-80% of a text

@fiyangga.yanggiri-hala 15 дней назад

you are my role model. ❤

@BiglerSakura 15 дней назад

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.

@fiyangga.yanggiri-hala 15 дней назад

@tedsteiner oh.. thanks for mentioned it. I made a mistake. haha.

@user-qo5eg7ly5u 15 дней назад

I wonder how about Lithuanian？Learnt a little Russian and I recognised some words there.

@user-ss1hd2rx2p 15 дней назад

@user-qo5eg7ly5u Lithuanian is a fully different language, it's from other language family

@user-wl9ml2iu4m 15 дней назад

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.

@play005517 11 дней назад

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"

@adamhau9336 16 дней назад

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

@officialgreengray 15 дней назад

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.

@ymgch16 12 дней назад

@@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 ☺️

@user-bl9ec8kj3w 15 дней назад

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 :)

@user-wx8yc7ct1x 14 дней назад

You seem to be unusually interested in Korea. But all Koreans will treat you as an underdeveloped nation people including Chinese

@pablomao6279 11 дней назад

繁體最好看

@user-yf9ux7tf3h 9 дней назад

@@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

@jangelbrich7056 15 дней назад

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.

@GabrielHenrique-vs2we 15 дней назад

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 😂

@NuisanceMan 14 дней назад

Well, when you're READING Danish, you don't have to deal with the potato in the mouth.

@Komatik_ 9 дней назад

The written forms are closer to dialects than proper languages. The pronunciation differences, though... 😬

@gmpeterson 13 дней назад

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".

@ekesandras1481 2 дня назад

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.

@Mikelaxo 14 дней назад

I'm learning Japanese and I didn't realize till recently that it comes with the cool side effect of being able to get a certain level of understanding of written Chinese. I find it facinat6when I see signs or menus at Chinese restaurant, or just some random Chinese text online, and I can guess what it means by looking at the characters

@tinkeringpoko 9 дней назад

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.

@IshayuG 15 дней назад

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.

@Komatik_ 9 дней назад

You speak English, much of English vocab, the higher register stuff especially, is French in origin.

@marcusgustafsson9558 7 дней назад

Dutch is in the same continuum. We from Göteborg can also understand what they write.

@kenchin4555 15 дней назад

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 -_-"

@einzelganger09 12 дней назад

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.

@mistake2492 11 дней назад

@@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/

@H4XeO6_Mars 8 дней назад

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".

@rafaumtgavioli 12 дней назад

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!

@mjai2230 14 дней назад

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.

@tru7hhimself 11 дней назад

"cat, bla, fish, bla, food, bla bla" is funniest thing i've heard in a video for a long time 😂

@OHHnoYOUdidntMAN 14 дней назад

Amazing crystal clear editing as always Paul

@Langfocus 14 дней назад

Thank you. That's much more of a compliment than the "You're a language master!" comments (which are kind, but incorrect).

@Yuxian09 12 дней назад

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.

@kankankankankankankan 16 дней назад

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🙏

@Mezelenja 15 дней назад

This is such funny & and interesting concept how has no one done this before? It's so gooddd.

@kaizokudude 16 дней назад

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.

@faenethlorhalien 16 дней назад

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.

@WhiteScorpio2 15 дней назад

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.

@aiocafea 15 дней назад

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

@paulsenecal98 14 дней назад

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.

@alexj9603 14 дней назад

It's a bit like reading Maltese - a semitic language with lots of Italian-based words.

@entropie138 13 дней назад

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!

@danielzhang1916 9 дней назад

They can read all the characters but some meanings and phrases were changed in Japanese over time

@melid4162 16 дней назад

can't wait! my sis and I are avid watchers but we live in different cities, and she happens to be visiting for a few days so we are very excited to tune into this one ❤

@John_Weiss 15 дней назад

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.

@Mullkaw 15 дней назад

it's been a while since ive seen this channel, the video quality is really good, better than i remember

@believeinpeace 14 дней назад

This was so interesting! I love this topic. Thank you so very much!

@lovfro 12 дней назад

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.

@Quzinqa1122 12 дней назад

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.

@edss 15 дней назад

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.

@hayeonkim7838 15 дней назад

Thanks for useful and informative video as always ❤❤❤

@szazszazalekosan9706 7 дней назад

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!

@anubisu1024 8 дней назад

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.

@lxtatar7773 15 дней назад

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.

@danielzhang1916 9 дней назад

Japanese people don't understand full Chinese paragraphs, they have to use hiragana to help them

@BGP00 15 дней назад

I would love to see a similar video but for Japanese reading Chinese

@jpnsei1171 11 дней назад

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.

@bobboberson8297 10 дней назад

@@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)

@jpnsei1171 10 дней назад

@bobboberson8297 Ok I tried to read chinese, and I couldn't understand anything 🤣 Maybe I was wrong haha

@danielzhang1916 9 дней назад

Japanese people can't read full Chinese paragraphs, it doesn't really work the other way around

@LollipopLop 9 часов назад

@@jpnsei1171I think you were reading simplified mandarin 💀 It’s very hard to understand

@ZZIKOish 7 дней назад

this was super informative!

@alexxu3004 15 дней назад

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

@AlexandrFeskoff 13 дней назад

English and French are from the same language family(Indo-European), just the different branches.

@spaceowl5957 12 дней назад

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

@AlexandrFeskoff 12 дней назад

@@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.

@GoodCitizen-gm1tl 9 дней назад

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.

@FenixYuk 5 дней назад

@@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

@megamihestia4049 15 дней назад

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.

@stevierv22 3 дня назад

That's so cool

@user-db2sy4nk7f 16 дней назад

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. 🤩

@user-sn8oe4ic6w 15 дней назад

不是分娘和孃嗎？我其實是簡體使用者不太清楚。

@HenOOXX 14 дней назад

@@user-sn8oe4ic6w 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。

@Watame100points 14 дней назад

@@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。

@user-db2sy4nk7f 14 дней назад

@@user-sn8oe4ic6w 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)

@user-db2sy4nk7f 14 дней назад

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

@sandrios 14 дней назад

I definitely enjoy your more recent style of videos

@Langfocus 14 дней назад

Thanks! It was about time to try some new things.

@alcyonae 11 дней назад

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!

@3st3st77 4 дня назад

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.)

@kiga14 12 дней назад

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.

@ungorlgorl 14 дней назад

Awesome! I loved it. Maybe starting a series with "mutually intelligible or not" languages and involve more people would be great.

@goofoffchannel 12 дней назад

This is such a fun concept!

@prayuri75 4 дня назад

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.

@Sputnik1985 14 дней назад

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。

@liguibao8217 11 дней назад

Good experiment and interesting video. China is a very big country with many dialects. I think if Chinese from both north and south China were tested, it might have shown some difference. Reason being the southern Chinese dialects are closer to the language used, say 1,000 years ago in China. That coincided with the time when Japan heavily imported loan words from the Chinese language. From that perspective, a southerner (e.g. from Fujian/Guangdong provinces) is likely to understand a bit more the true meaning of Japanese kanji than someone from the north. To illustrate with an example, @12:35 上手 is readily understood by Cantonese and Southern Min (or known as Hokkien, Taiwanese) dialect speakers, especially with the older generation. Another clue I can offer regarding the test subjects' better understanding of longer sentences with more kanji is that, some of the terms made out of 2 or more kanji used for the tests were actually Japanese translations of western terms (mostly from English) during the Meiji era (1868-1912). Those days the Japanese used exclusively kanji to translate. For example, @15:54 "economic development". That expression was coined by the Japanese using 4 kanji/ Chinese characters. What happened was that Chinese at the time soon adopted such translations, since it would be an easy take. Despite the term 经济 in Chinese just 200 years ago did not mean "economy" but a different thing altogether. This explains why the meaning of such translations are commonly understood in both languages. Today, translated terms such as 化学 (chemistry), 民主 (democracy), 科学 (science), 工程 (engineering) and hundreds more, would not impose any barrier to understanding. Since they are a modern (less than 150 years old) common vocabulary of the two languages.

@catalogiccat4206 13 дней назад

Just sharing some thoughts as a native Cantonese speaker learning Japanese (albeit very slowly)... Sentence 1: The etymology of 切手 actually makes sense if you dig deep enough. This is new knowledge even for me. A "fuller" word in this context would be 郵便切手 . That's like writing "postal stamp" which is redundant in English, but Chinese users will have a much better guess by seeing "郵便". So 切手 is short for 切符手形 . 切符 is a "cut ticket", where you take one of the two pieces of paper to prove that you are eligible to certain goods/services; that is the same concept of 券 in Chinese, also thus the presence of a knife (刀). 手形 literally means "a hand's shape", as explained in a dictionary perhaps in ancient Japan people made palm prints on documents to prove one's presence/involvement. The sense of word becomes marketable securities in modern days. Sentence 2: 娘 can refer to various kinds of women in Chinese, depending on era, location, word formation, etc. In Mandarin circle, 娘 can be used to address one's own mother. As far as I know, there aren't commonly used words with 娘 refer to one's daughter. 吃る is an interesting case. Yes, 口吃 in Chinese is stuttering, which happens to contain the letter 吃 (to eat). From what I noticed in Japanese, polysemous kanji's have differentiated pronunciations for different meanings. 食べる is "to eat", so is 食 in Chinese. A more obvious example is 負: 負う "to bear; to be loaded", 負ける "to lose; to be defeated". Sentence 3: In Japanese: 大丈夫 : (situation/person) safe and sound 丈夫 : (something) robust, durable In Chinese: 大丈夫: a man with strong mind, good virtues and great goals 丈夫: a husband; a man Not sure if etymology can connect the dots. Sentence 4: Strangely in Cantonese circle, 上手 can mean "being skilled" but usually limited to context of occupational or practical work. Advanced sentences 1-3 look like excerpted from newspaper or textbook, thus having less rhetoric features in kata and more information in kanji. Native Chinese speakers may have a better grasp on the meaning being conveyed.

@dtiberium403 10 дней назад

“娘”可以指各种女性，比方说在“姑娘”和“新娘”中就指年轻女子。读过古典小说也可以注意到，在家族中有多个女儿，可以用“XX娘”来称呼，比方说“辛十四娘”，“杜十娘” “口吃”之所以用来定义结巴，实际上是“说话的时候把一些音吞掉”的意思，所以日语用“吃る”也是符合逻辑的

@MaxwellCEdison 14 дней назад

Was recently looking for a video like this, but only found the opposite (Japanese trying to read Chinese). Really interesting to watch!

@johnathanbowes5996 13 дней назад

This is such a cool idea for a video! If you haven’t already, could you do a similar one for Spanish and Italian? I started Duolingo for Italian before a trip, and it amazed me how easy it was to figure out many words once I picked up on a few sound changes.

@Vienna3080 15 дней назад

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

@MistyOrange000 15 дней назад

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

@ikura-h 14 дней назад

As a Japanese native speaker, I can almost understand that "私日本語..." sentence.

@crbgo9854 14 дней назад

Your add revealed a lot about your personal life I did not expect your life very awesome

@aarongreenway7002 13 дней назад

Paul, this is a great video! I was wondering if you could do a video on the difference between a dialect and the language it is closest to, and when does a dialect turn into its own language? I hope this makes sense.

@user-hr1pm2rs4n 15 дней назад

I am a Tranditional Mandarin native from Taiwan. Due to heavy influence from Japan, including colonial era & recent subculture, I guess more Japanese words, like 上手 & 大丈夫, might be correctly guessed by almost all Taiwanese people (But I am actually fluent in Japanese, so please correct me if this is just my bias). Besides, it seems to be easier for Taiwanese to learn Japanese Kanji compared with people from countries where simplified Chinese is used, since tranditional Chinese characters are more similar to Japanese Kanji.

@pbworld7858 14 дней назад

I checked the internet and discovered that the Chinese word 便當 led to the Japanese word 弁当. I always thought it was the other way round but it seems the Chinese word is much older.

@user-hr1pm2rs4n 13 дней назад

@@pbworld7858 I am also surprised at your information because I also thought 便當 is a purely Japanese word 😮 The route of this word turns out to be more like "便當" (Ancient Chinese, "convenient") ->"弁当" (Japanese, "lunchbox") -> "便當" (Mordern Chinese, "lunchbox"). This seems to be another examples that Japanese borrowed old words from Chinese, changed the meaning and back influenced mordern Chinese.

@pbworld7858 13 дней назад

@@user-hr1pm2rs4n Yes, I only knew after checking Wiktionary. I too had thought it originated from Japan. However, I wonder whether the usage in Taiwan came directly from older Chinese, or whether it came back to Taiwan from Japan because Taiwan used to be a Japanese colony. A word which does come from Japanese is 取り消す-> 取消. It seems like another ordinary Chinese word, but I guessed correctly it was from Japan because in Japanese it is pronounced as torikesu, which is a native Japanese pronunciation (訓読).

@DarkWgf 12 дней назад

便當這用法是從日本傳進來的以前同樣的東西在台灣是稱為飯包現在還有些店在用

@walktroughman1952 9 дней назад

My mom watches Taiwanese series from time to time and being intermediate to advanced in Japanese I can actually understand what's being said by reading the subtitles, 90% of the characters are the same

@mew2knight337 13 дней назад

I like the new colors to mark differents parts of sentences

@WesleyWai 8 дней назад

18:54 We have 出類拔萃 which very alike 拔群 in Japanese

@user-px7bu6wb2f День назад

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'.

@ariccy 15 дней назад

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.

@user-yz8wt5bs4i 14 дней назад

Kanji is the classical emojis 😮😊😂

@danielzhang1916 9 дней назад

Different groups? Chinese is only used by the Han people, unless you mean the different dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien

@8qk67acq5 8 дней назад

@@danielzhang1916 No there used to be different groups, different way of logographic writing. Qin Shihuang unified China, and standardized the writing system even though when spoken the languages are different. Chinese writing is created to transmit ideas rather than to record phonetics. And China in ancient times is big, and people spoke different langauges.

@danielzhang1916 8 дней назад

@@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

@samuraialfredo 15 дней назад

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.

@the_unforseen8224 15 дней назад

NEW LANGFOCUS VIDEO WOOOOO

@koopakoop 10 дней назад

This was very interesting. I actually learnt a few things. Thank you.

@dirk73156 15 дней назад

I once spent a number of weeks in Greece (Crete) and I found I could generally understand the signage. I was familiar with Cyrillic characters from having taken Russian reading in high school and I could make sense of the words by relating them to the Greek roots of many English words. The people I was with were amazed and assumed I could understand Greek, LOL!

@maximilianisaaclee2936 15 дней назад

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

@TheLivetuner 9 дней назад

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.

@groverchiri4031 15 дней назад

So interesting, thanks a lot.

@Danilaschannel 15 дней назад

Awesome, I wonder how it'd be the other way around

@muic4880 11 дней назад

Actually, instead of using mandarin, a lot of the Japanese kanji was quite similar to Minnan language, since it was way older than mandarin. The same for cantonese.

@Dwarfplayer 14 дней назад

This video is really interesting I was waiting a while for someone to do some tests on it! Based upon this idea that different peoples can read the same text based on kanji I decided to do my own exercise. I wrote my native language (which has 0 to do with any chinese language or dialect) using hanzi, from verbs to particles to vocabulary, and I still want to test it out to see if native 普通话/国语 speakers can understand phrases written in my native language. If anything it might be even more recognizable than the examples you used in japanese because I especifically targeted character meaning and used based upon modern 普通话

@estherlow917 13 дней назад

I have recently found your channel and this was really informational! How about chu nom and Chinese? That would sound like a good video

@CMVBrielman 15 дней назад

This was just fun to watch.

@Langfocus 15 дней назад

I'm glad it was fun to watch!

@generaledelogu1892 15 дней назад

After having learned Spanish for 6 years, learning Portuguese is actually a lot easier. So much of the two languages are similar in writing although they are pronounced differently and have a fair bit of words that arent the same in either language, it's fascinating

@AnthonyEhrhardt 15 дней назад

I can't understand Portuguese if spoken slowly

@SenhorKoringa 15 дней назад

most people i talk to admit portuguese ends up being easier mostly because the language is pronounced more like english ie more slowly and less mumbled

@jeffkardosjr.3825 15 дней назад

I speak Spanish and French and have studied Portuguese a little bit. When I was in Quebec for vacation some years ago, I understood a Portuguese speaker just fine thinking they were speaking French. But this past week I heard somebody speaking Portuguese and I wasn't understanding them. I was wondering if they were speaking Romanian. I asked them afterwards and found out they spoke Portuguese. Could be it was a different accent or the difference between Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese. I haven't been around many speakers of French recently, so I'm not getting immersion there, but I have been around Spanish speakers a lot recently. But the Spanish didn't seem to help with me understanding Portuguese.

@AnthonyEhrhardt 15 дней назад

@@SenhorKoringa I don't like how Brazilian Portuguese sounds, although I understand it more than Dominican Spanish.

@AnthonyEhrhardt 15 дней назад

@@SenhorKoringa Fresh fish sounds like "pekao frek" in dominicana

@hanswang7891 15 дней назад

Fluent speaker of English and Chinese here, and recently been learning Japanese here and there. Typically, the more advanced and more "difficult" a sentence is to local Japanese people, the easier it actually is for Chinese speakers to decipher its meaning. Still, learning all the hiragana bits and actual Japanese pronunciation is important to actually be able to speak and use Japanese, even if we do technically get a head start in Kanji meaning Also in practice, having an entire paragraph or article is actually easier for Chinese speakers to understand than single sentences, I've tried this with my grandparents in the past. With more content comes more context, which helps in understanding even if there are more gaps.

@mydogisbailey 15 дней назад

just clicked play and i already know its going to be a banger!!

@FeliceChiapperini 15 дней назад

I would like to see this same experiment done with French speakers who don't know English and give them both informal and formal (legal, for example) sentences in English to interpret. I would hypothesize a similar outcome.

@eazydp 14 дней назад

I was thinking the same thing. I remember my vacation in Paris be surprised how much I understood of a warning sign.

@ANCalias 14 дней назад

Yeah, as a frenchman, it would appears that we understand (french) nouns but not the grammar (except word order) If you don't know french or any latin langages, try to guess this sentence 😊 "Le chat a une relation extraordinaire avec son maître, leur énergie mêlée est si inspirante" I think, it is possible to deduce the meaning of this sentence only knowing english

@amandacapsicum686 13 дней назад

The cat has an extraordinary relationship with his mother. Their fighting spirit is truly inspirational! [My guess about what this means as an English and Spanish speaker (without looking anything up)]

@ANCalias 13 дней назад

@@amandacapsicum686 not bad (pretty good), the global meaning is understood The translation : The cat has an extraordinary relationship with its owner, their mixed energie is so inspiring

@kekeke8988 12 дней назад

@@ANCalias The cat has an extraordinary relationship with his mother, and his melee energy is inspiring? Not sure about the second part.

@oooChickenatorXooo 14 дней назад

I find that the more $5.00 words I know in English, the more I can vaguely understand Greek phrases, most notably names and descriptions. There was a nondescript red brick building in my neighbourhood emblazoned with a bunch of Greek letters whose meaning was, for the longest time, a mystery to me. But once I learned what the Greek letters were, and sounded them out, I figured out that the building was a church, because the inscription read something like "Ellenikos Ecclesia" Because I was familiar with the words "Hellenic" and "Ecclesiastical" I didn't need to know what the third word was to understand what the building was for.

@walktroughman1952 9 дней назад

Probably "Hellenic Orthodox Church" (it'd look like Ελληνική Ορθόδοξη Εκκλησία)

@oooChickenatorXooo 9 дней назад

@@walktroughman1952 You'd figure that, but no. It was ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΗ ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΑ which I also found surprising. Google thinks it's the word "Evangelical" but the English translation on the building was "Gospel" I felt dumb not connecting "evaggeliki" to "Evangelist" in hindsight.

@walktroughman1952 9 дней назад

@@oooChickenatorXooo yeah that would be evangelic kinda, it'd translate to "Hellenic Evangelic Church"

@jaycee330 5 дней назад

I'm guessing it was either the "Greek Orthodox Church" (Ελληνική Ορθόδοξη Εκκλησία - Elleniki Orthodoxi Ekklesia) or the Greek Evangelical Church (Ελληνική Ευαγγελική Εκκλησία - Elleniki Evangeliki Ekklessia). There are several in the Boston area.

@jaycee330 5 дней назад

@@oooChickenatorXooo Ah, I was right. Well, "evangelist" is more like "Presbyterian" to the Greeks. It's a branch of the Presbyterian church.

@bobboberson8297 10 дней назад

It's cool that you included the pitch on the japanese words (and also pronounced them accordingly). usually don't see that in these kinds of videos about japanese

@xi2035 14 дней назад

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).