Definitely not all, but most do. But also keep in mind that Japanese underwent much less (and different) simplification than Chinese. So while knowing Chinese is an advantage, it might also confuse you occasionally.
For example 面 vs. 麺 vs. 麵 is a fun one…
Nope, there are a lot of Kanji that don’t carry the same meaning as they do in Sinitic. For instance, 勉強 is “to study” as opposed to “barely”; 湯 is “hot water” as opposed to “soup”; 新聞 is specifically “newspaper” as opposed to just being “news”. There are also plenty of Kanji with no Standarin equivalent such as 手紙 “letter”, 空港 “airport” etc
They’re often quite similar but often also quite different. You can use English and French as a rough example. In French demand means to ask. In English demand means to… demand. You can tell they’re from the same place immediately and they’re very close but also not quite the same thing.
They say about 60% of Chinese is intelligible to Japanese and vis-versa.
BUT since kanji came to Japan, Chinese has evolved its own way and Japanese has evolved its own way.
A particular character in modern Chinese might have different meanings than the same character would have in Japanese – 我会開車 (我会开车) (I can drive a car), is nonsensical in Japanese. It looks like a misspelling of “I start a meeting car.”
might be unrelated but it’s easier to guess what a Chinese sentence says from a Japanese point of view but quite hard to do the opposite, which again depends whether or not the vocabulary is shared
手紙
Japanese meaning is closer to 文語文 meaning than 白話 meaning
走 is “run” not “go” or “walk”
快 is “pleasant” not “fast”
A large proportion of Chinese characters were created some 3000-4000 years ago. A significant portion of those do not mean the same things 2000 years ago they did 3000 years ago. And this is within Chinese.
eg. 字 was “to love (one’s offspring)”, 九 was “(bent) elbow” etc. Meaning changed over time. You’d think 300BC is old, but digging deeper into bone oracle script ~1000BC and you’ll find another meaning for the same character.
If you’re asking legitimately, the answer is clearly no, but you need to know what extent and how to mitigate these.
For example 行 was “to go” in Old Chinese, and still remains the go-to character for Southern Min and Japanese, which both preserves the Old Chinese meaning. The other dialects all descend from Middle Chinese and hence they use another word.
By and large, Japanese borrows heavily from Old Chinese and preserves them. As mentioned above, All of the dialects except Min descends from Middle Chinese. This includes Mandarin. Such that a significant amount of time has passed between when Japanese imported kanji and when the modern dialects really took shape. In this case, there are handful of characters have changed their meaning between the lengthy period of time.
No. It can be quite entertaining at times as someone who grew up with Chinese and started learning Japanese in uni. One of the best parts is if I don’t remember how a certain word or phrase is pronounced in Japanese, I can type it into Google translate using its Chinese pronunciation to find out.
For the most part though, I would say Chinese speakers (who don’t speak/read Japanese) would do pretty well with signs in Japan, although there can be some misunderstandings.
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Definitely not all, but most do. But also keep in mind that Japanese underwent much less (and different) simplification than Chinese. So while knowing Chinese is an advantage, it might also confuse you occasionally.
For example 面 vs. 麺 vs. 麵 is a fun one…
Nope, there are a lot of Kanji that don’t carry the same meaning as they do in Sinitic. For instance, 勉強 is “to study” as opposed to “barely”; 湯 is “hot water” as opposed to “soup”; 新聞 is specifically “newspaper” as opposed to just being “news”. There are also plenty of Kanji with no Standarin equivalent such as 手紙 “letter”, 空港 “airport” etc
They’re often quite similar but often also quite different. You can use English and French as a rough example. In French demand means to ask. In English demand means to… demand. You can tell they’re from the same place immediately and they’re very close but also not quite the same thing.
They say about 60% of Chinese is intelligible to Japanese and vis-versa.
BUT since kanji came to Japan, Chinese has evolved its own way and Japanese has evolved its own way.
A particular character in modern Chinese might have different meanings than the same character would have in Japanese – 我会開車 (我会开车) (I can drive a car), is nonsensical in Japanese. It looks like a misspelling of “I start a meeting car.”
might be unrelated but it’s easier to guess what a Chinese sentence says from a Japanese point of view but quite hard to do the opposite, which again depends whether or not the vocabulary is shared
手紙
Japanese meaning is closer to 文語文 meaning than 白話 meaning
走 is “run” not “go” or “walk”
快 is “pleasant” not “fast”
A large proportion of Chinese characters were created some 3000-4000 years ago. A significant portion of those do not mean the same things 2000 years ago they did 3000 years ago. And this is within Chinese.
eg. 字 was “to love (one’s offspring)”, 九 was “(bent) elbow” etc. Meaning changed over time. You’d think 300BC is old, but digging deeper into bone oracle script ~1000BC and you’ll find another meaning for the same character.
If you’re asking legitimately, the answer is clearly no, but you need to know what extent and how to mitigate these.
For example 行 was “to go” in Old Chinese, and still remains the go-to character for Southern Min and Japanese, which both preserves the Old Chinese meaning. The other dialects all descend from Middle Chinese and hence they use another word.
By and large, Japanese borrows heavily from Old Chinese and preserves them. As mentioned above, All of the dialects except Min descends from Middle Chinese. This includes Mandarin. Such that a significant amount of time has passed between when Japanese imported kanji and when the modern dialects really took shape. In this case, there are handful of characters have changed their meaning between the lengthy period of time.
No. It can be quite entertaining at times as someone who grew up with Chinese and started learning Japanese in uni. One of the best parts is if I don’t remember how a certain word or phrase is pronounced in Japanese, I can type it into Google translate using its Chinese pronunciation to find out.
For the most part though, I would say Chinese speakers (who don’t speak/read Japanese) would do pretty well with signs in Japan, although there can be some misunderstandings.