No, people who are fluent and literate in the Japanese Language cannot understand people who are fluent and literate in a Chinese Language beyond a surface level without prior knowledge in the other Languages and vice versa.
Do you have a particular point you are curious about?
No. Though Japanese speakers can sort of infer what written Chinese might mean, in a loose sort of sense. I’ve seen street interviews in Japan where folk are given Chinese sentences and asked to give the meaning.
It was close in the abstract sense but not at all close to actual understanding. Sort of like how English speakers can vaguely understand Spanish due to some similarities, but not to the degree of actual comprehension.
No. And the simplified characters used in the PRC are difficult even for Taiwanese to understand let alone an untrained Japanese reader.
Not Quite
Chinese people can’t even understand other Chinese people. They sometimes have to write out characters in their hand with their fingers if it isn’t the same dialect.
A good amount of kanji have a similar meaning to their hanzi counterparts in broad strokes, so looking at a small handful of kanji in isolation might result in a Japanese person getting the gist, so to speak, but on the scale of even a single full sentence the odds of even getting in the ballpark are slim to none.
Japanese people do typically take a year of Mandarin in high school. Having said that, I’ve met several Taiwanese people who can speak Japanese well and not one single Japanese person who can speak Mandarin. That’s just people I’ve met, not a rule, of course.
I used to work in a japanese company. My manager is a japanese.
Once i had to show him a report from a Taiwanese supplier which was in chinese. Although he would need me to explain what the report says, he can pick up say 10-20% of what was written because of the kanji. And he wasn’t learning chinese btw.
Not really, the languages are very different. But there are Chinese loanwords in Japanese that are still recognizable, e.g. toshokan and túshūguân for library. Also you can very vagely guess written text by the meaning of the hànzì which is still the same for hundreds of characters in both languages. And if you only learned kanji or traditional hànzì, the simplified ones are often still easy to recognize.
I understand only Japanese but when I watch a movie in Chinese with subs I recognize familiar words here and there. And if I see a short Chinese text I can guess what it‘s about and it‘s usually correct. But I can‘t understand or read Chinese.
I think some of the answers here err on the side of caution, which I believe is correct but are way to negative, compared to the reality.
Let’s make the difference between spoken and written. Spoken? No, a Japanese speaker without prior knowledge or education will not understand any Chinese.
Written? Then it becomes more complicated.
One issue is the characters that have been simplified in the Mainland China and not in Japan, that’s one obstacle.
But assuming even the characters are more or less similar, let’s say the Traditional Characters of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Then the question comes in, what the level of education is of the Japanese speaker in question. I would say the higher the education level, the more they will understand. And I am willing to bet every Japanese knows more than what learners think they do (2136 characters only? No way. Never seen Chinese anywhere ever? Yeah right.)
It has to be added that many Japanese take 古文 at school and are aware of the elastic nature of how Kanji works, and that it does not strictly follow only Japanese grammar.
I think Chinese is very different from Japanese but to say that there aren’t wide areas of substantial mutual intelligibility in its written form is incorrect. The Japanese are clearly the group that have the largest advantage when it comes to Chinese. A colossal one in fact.
The existence of the phenomenon of 偽中国語 (fake Chinese, by which Japanese speakers will consciously use the kanji form of every word and eliminate the kana grammar in a sentence to make it look Chinese) further bolsters my argument.
And yes, an educated Japanese person for sure will be able to pick apart the content of a lot of Chinese texts with a bit of imagination.
The mutual intelligibility in the written form is nonetheless underlined in other informal ways: Say a Chinese and Japanese roommate leaving signs in Chinese characters to another to give a message that the other will understand (story I have).
Stay cautious on this subject, manage expectations, but the written mutual intelligibilty is very very high, and higher for a Japanese once one gets past some of the basic differences, and some grammatical Kanji (but even then I have been surprised who intuitive it can be for many Japanese). Essentially, I think with some tweaks, a massive amount can be understood, and some Japanese quora responses seem to underline that a lot of Japanese struggle more with the pronunciation than anything else.
I would say however that there are many many Japanese that simply don’t care about Chinese and are uninterested entirely.
My perspective as a British person who learnt Japanese and then Mandarin: with written language, you can certainly make things out. I had a much easier time with characters than fresh learners because they’re either straight up the same or similar enough. I will say you’d need to actively learn some grammar because that’s completely different, but it’s relatively easy to guess what a sentence means if you can pick those parts out. Spoken language is more difficult, you can maybe hear some similarities on certain words but that’s rarer.
TLDR: you can piece together certain written things but not so much as being able to naturally ‘speak the language’
11 comments
No, people who are fluent and literate in the Japanese Language cannot understand people who are fluent and literate in a Chinese Language beyond a surface level without prior knowledge in the other Languages and vice versa.
Do you have a particular point you are curious about?
No. Though Japanese speakers can sort of infer what written Chinese might mean, in a loose sort of sense. I’ve seen street interviews in Japan where folk are given Chinese sentences and asked to give the meaning.
It was close in the abstract sense but not at all close to actual understanding. Sort of like how English speakers can vaguely understand Spanish due to some similarities, but not to the degree of actual comprehension.
No. And the simplified characters used in the PRC are difficult even for Taiwanese to understand let alone an untrained Japanese reader.
Not Quite
Chinese people can’t even understand other Chinese people. They sometimes have to write out characters in their hand with their fingers if it isn’t the same dialect.
A good amount of kanji have a similar meaning to their hanzi counterparts in broad strokes, so looking at a small handful of kanji in isolation might result in a Japanese person getting the gist, so to speak, but on the scale of even a single full sentence the odds of even getting in the ballpark are slim to none.
Japanese people do typically take a year of Mandarin in high school. Having said that, I’ve met several Taiwanese people who can speak Japanese well and not one single Japanese person who can speak Mandarin. That’s just people I’ve met, not a rule, of course.
I used to work in a japanese company. My manager is a japanese.
Once i had to show him a report from a Taiwanese supplier which was in chinese. Although he would need me to explain what the report says, he can pick up say 10-20% of what was written because of the kanji. And he wasn’t learning chinese btw.
Not really, the languages are very different. But there are Chinese loanwords in Japanese that are still recognizable, e.g. toshokan and túshūguân for library. Also you can very vagely guess written text by the meaning of the hànzì which is still the same for hundreds of characters in both languages. And if you only learned kanji or traditional hànzì, the simplified ones are often still easy to recognize.
I understand only Japanese but when I watch a movie in Chinese with subs I recognize familiar words here and there. And if I see a short Chinese text I can guess what it‘s about and it‘s usually correct. But I can‘t understand or read Chinese.
I think some of the answers here err on the side of caution, which I believe is correct but are way to negative, compared to the reality.
Let’s make the difference between spoken and written. Spoken? No, a Japanese speaker without prior knowledge or education will not understand any Chinese.
Written? Then it becomes more complicated.
One issue is the characters that have been simplified in the Mainland China and not in Japan, that’s one obstacle.
But assuming even the characters are more or less similar, let’s say the Traditional Characters of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Then the question comes in, what the level of education is of the Japanese speaker in question. I would say the higher the education level, the more they will understand. And I am willing to bet every Japanese knows more than what learners think they do (2136 characters only? No way. Never seen Chinese anywhere ever? Yeah right.)
It has to be added that many Japanese take 古文 at school and are aware of the elastic nature of how Kanji works, and that it does not strictly follow only Japanese grammar.
I think Chinese is very different from Japanese but to say that there aren’t wide areas of substantial mutual intelligibility in its written form is incorrect. The Japanese are clearly the group that have the largest advantage when it comes to Chinese. A colossal one in fact.
The existence of the phenomenon of 偽中国語 (fake Chinese, by which Japanese speakers will consciously use the kanji form of every word and eliminate the kana grammar in a sentence to make it look Chinese) further bolsters my argument.
And yes, an educated Japanese person for sure will be able to pick apart the content of a lot of Chinese texts with a bit of imagination.
The mutual intelligibility in the written form is nonetheless underlined in other informal ways: Say a Chinese and Japanese roommate leaving signs in Chinese characters to another to give a message that the other will understand (story I have).
Stay cautious on this subject, manage expectations, but the written mutual intelligibilty is very very high, and higher for a Japanese once one gets past some of the basic differences, and some grammatical Kanji (but even then I have been surprised who intuitive it can be for many Japanese). Essentially, I think with some tweaks, a massive amount can be understood, and some Japanese quora responses seem to underline that a lot of Japanese struggle more with the pronunciation than anything else.
I would say however that there are many many Japanese that simply don’t care about Chinese and are uninterested entirely.
My perspective as a British person who learnt Japanese and then Mandarin: with written language, you can certainly make things out. I had a much easier time with characters than fresh learners because they’re either straight up the same or similar enough. I will say you’d need to actively learn some grammar because that’s completely different, but it’s relatively easy to guess what a sentence means if you can pick those parts out. Spoken language is more difficult, you can maybe hear some similarities on certain words but that’s rarer.
TLDR: you can piece together certain written things but not so much as being able to naturally ‘speak the language’