What does a Japan born and raised individual immediatly “sees” when presented with Chinese text?

10 comments

1. someone who reads japanese can definitely infer some level of meaning from reading chinese texts but i wouldn’t say it’s 100% intelligible. false friends also make understanding difficult and you would really only catch bits and pieces of the meaning

2. Interesting question.

   I would assume that it is somewhat similar to an English speaker reading Spanish or French.

   We can use our knowledge of English and English root words to figure out what much of the writing means, but have trouble figuring out the syntax and grammar.

   But this is just speculation.

3. This is exactly how s Chinese reader picking up only the kanji and nothing else in between so that’s like 20% but able to deduce the meaning of another 20% as Chinese reader would have any grammatical context. But if a Japanese reader kanji level is high enough, he/she would be able to read a higher percentage thus make more sense of the sentence.

4. FYI, there aren’t too many Japanese natives in this sub to answer your question, as you can see. When we do comment on a post, we often find ourselves questioned by non-natives, so I found out recently that not only myself, but other natives don’t really respond in here, either. Too many egos to deal with.

   Since I’m typing already, to answer your question…. I immediately realize/look for familiar/same characters and try my best to guess the context (like a puzzle!). But it’s hard, because I’d only know like 10% if the characters in a sentence lol We can’t read simplified Chinese characters. Fair to say that I’m not even sure they meanings are the same, so who knows if I’m even guessing it correctly lol I can only tell if I guessed correctly when I watch TV with Chinese subtitles.

5. [removed]

6. Try on /r/AskAJapanese

7. What do I see when presented with Chinese text?

   I see spam

8. As a nonnative speaker I can get the meaning of very simple signs (say instructions that might go up in a bathroom) and I can infer at least the subject of a more difficult text most of the time. I’d expect a native speaker to do better than that with a stronger command.

9. Native or non-native matters not. Both are people who learnt to read Japanese. When I see Chinese text I can infer some meaning but not all. However it can often be non-sensical with names or impossible to read given simplified Chinese characters can be quite different (Japanese: 門 Simplified: 门). What is immediately seen is “Oh, Chinese” and a similar looking writing with some understanding.

10. Have you seen Yuta’s videos on YouTube? He interviews Japanese to see how much they understand written Chinese. Most of them can understand some traditional Chinese characters but not simplified Chinese. Some words even sound similar, such as “library”, “sun” and “four”.