EDIT: Didn’t expect this thread to blow up like it did. I just want to clarify: by no means am I saying there are no advantages to knowing Chinese in advance (that would be silly), but that there are still struggles often not seen at first glance. That’s all.
“Chinese speakers have it so easy learning Japanese. They already know Kanji.”
You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve heard this (or maybe you would), but I’m sure we all know how different the two languages are that it’s just not true. Chinese speakers struggle as well, and here are just a few that I’ve encountered.
1) Reading Kanji in Chinese
This is subconsciously instinctive, since Chinese characters are already familiar. Having to retrain our brains to read them the Japanese way can be a grueling process. When I see 野菜を食べる, I still immediately read “yěcài o shí beru.”
2) Misusing の
の is the near-equivalent of 的 in Chinese, but Chinese uses 的 for adjectives as well as nouns and pronouns, whereas Japanese doesn’t always use it for the former. Having to remember to say とても辛いチキン and not とても辛いのチキン is a pain.
3) Borrowed pronunciations don’t sound the same
When the 音読み is close to the Chinese pronunciation, it’s so easy to slip into the Chinese reading even if the Japanese reading is known and has been practiced repeatedly. For instance: 一年 is “ichi nen” (not “ichi nián”), 料理 is “ryōri” (not “liàolǐ”), and 林 is “rin” (not “lín”).
4) What kind of Kanji is that?
So many Kanji don’t exist in Chinese because (a) they were created in Japan (e.g. 駅 for “station,” which in Chinese is 站) or (b) they’re the Japanese-simplified version (e.g. 竜 for “dragon,” which in Chinese is simplified as 龙).
5) False friends
Not all Kanji terms share a meaning in both languages. I won’t name all of them, but here are just a few.
老婆：Chinese = wife, Japanese = old woman
丈夫：Chinese = husband, Japanese = hero
汽車：Chinese = automobile, Japanese = locomotive
前年：Chinese = the year before last, Japanese = last year
先生：Chinese = mister or sir, Japanese = teacher (it can mean teacher in Chinese, as it did mean such in Classical Chinese, but that meaning has fallen off in modern times)
新聞：Chinese = news, Japanese = newspaper
手心：Chinese = the palm of the hand, Japanese = consideration
If you’re a Chinese speaker learning Japanese, feel free to share your own struggles as well.
30 comments
I’m not a native Chinese speaker and what little I do know has become rusty, but from what I remember Chinese students in my class tended to do really well on written assignments and tests but also scored the worst on spoken activities since the sounds of Mandarin and Japanese can be very different.
> they were created in Japan (e.g. 駅)
駅 wasn’t created in Japan, it’s just the Japanese version of 驛/驿. I think that does exist in Chinese, right?
睪→尺 is actually a pattern that affects a few other characters too, for example 沢 (澤/泽) or 訳 (譯/译). There are several other patterns like that you can use to derive Chinese characters from their Japanese counterparts, such as 巠↔圣↔𢀖 (right side of 經/経/经), or 僉↔㑒↔佥 (left side of 劍/剣/剑)
Some common characters that were created in Japan would be, for example: 働 喰 峠 枠 畑 腺 込 雫. Although I suspect that most common kanji you think are Japanese creations are actually simplifications that don’t look like either of their Chinese counterparts, or older variants that have since fallen out of use in Chinese but remain in use in Japan (afaik 兎↔兔 is one of the latter)
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Nitpicks about your Japanese definitions:
> 丈夫：Chinese = husband, Japanese = hero
I believe じょうふ is a pretty obscure reading of 丈夫, usually it’s read a じょうぶ and means something like “robust” or “strong”
> 汽車：Chinese = automobile, Japanese = locomotive
Technically only a steam locomotive (or a train pulled by one)
> 前年：Chinese = the year before last, Japanese = last year
前年 means the previous year in relation to some other point in time, which can be (but doesn’t necessarily have to be) the present. 新明解 defines it as: ある時点を基準として、 すぐ前の年。〔先年よりは近い時点を指す〕
> 先生：Chinese = mister or sir, Japanese = teacher
先生 doesn’t really mean teacher. It can be used in reference to other people as well, like for doctors or authors (writers, mangaka, etc.)
Like u/Ben_Kerman said, while 丈夫 means husband in *modern* Chinese, it still meant “strong, reputable [man]” in classical Chinese. You might have learned of 景春 and 孟子 having a discussion of what constitutes a 大丈夫, to which 孟子 replied 富貴不能淫，貧賤不能移，威武不能屈。此之謂大丈夫。 In Japanese this is read 富貴^({ふうき})も淫^({いん})する能^({あた})わず、貧賎^({ひんせん})も移^({うつ})す能わず、威武^({いぶ})も屈^({くっ})する能わず。此^({こ})れを之^({こ})れ大丈夫^({だいじょうふ})と謂^({い})う。”Neither riches nor honors can corrupt him; neither poverty nor humbleness can make him swerve from principle; and neither threats nor forces can subdue him. These characteristics constitute the great man.” And the meaning of “I’m still doing great / I’m still dependable” is the modern meaning of だいじょうぶ in Japanese.
As with 先生, the classical meanings of some kango (漢語) are preserved in Japanese.
Not a native speaker but yes, I agree with you that comparing Chinese to Japanese is like comparing English to Spanish. There are similarities but still vast differences.
手紙 is my favorite false friend.
That being said I do think there’s an advantage to just knowing pictographic alphabets as opposed to phonetic alphabets like kana or European languages.
One of my friends is a bilingual Chinese speaker and he said whenever he tried to learn Japanese, relearning hanzi made it super difficult. I always get a crack out of telling him how Chinese words are pronounced in Japanese. I think people overestimate how helpful knowing one is to learning the other.
I agree, the struggle is real. However, for some reason I am able to switch my brain back and forth from Chinese to Japanese, so I don’t really struggle too much regarding pronunciation or meaning of characters. That being said, knowing Chinese already is definitely a blessing, and shaves off a few hundred hours on the road to fluency. I can’t complain!
I’m a legacy Chinese speaker who grew up in America and I have a moderate grasp of Hanzi from years of Chinese after-school as a child.
I commiserate with your struggles early in my Japanese studies. But overall I’m so grateful I already know Chinese. I think it still helped tremendously and I can’t image how much harder it would be to learn Japanese from scratch without any familiarity with Kanji/Hanzi. I feel like I got a tremendous running start compared with non Chinese speakers.
This is especially since I’m from Taiwan and learned traditional Chinese, traditional Chinese characters are closer to Kanji than simplified Chinese. I already knew stroke order (at least Chinese stroke order), how to look up characters via radicals, and the basic meanings (at least in Chinese) of most common Kanji.
Yes there are tons of false cognates and unexpected readings, but most of the time the Kanji and on’yomi reading at least gives me a mnemonic to help memorize it so I’m not memorizing things from scratch. So often I already know the kanji compound in Chinese so I just have to learn the Japanese reading, and any different nuances in usage, but again I’m not learning it from scratch.
Another nice advantage is that even in kun’yomi words, the Kanji chosen to represent that word will give me a rough sense of the intended meaning of that word. The Japanese scholars who chose these Kanjis were often quite good at picking the perfect Kanji that maps perfectly, where the multiple meanings of that Hanzi maps to all the same meanings in Japanese.
An example that comes to mind is 惜(お)しい means both precious and unfortunate/disappointing. In Chinese, the character 惜 xí happens to map to both meanings as well, 可惜 kěxí means “what a shame, disappointing”, whereas 珍惜 zhēnxí means “to treasure “, something precious. That Kanji helps me remember all the meanings of the word.
That said, fighting the urge to read the Kanji in Chinese is a real struggle. Also many times I’ve said (jokingly) in my mind, “omg you guys are using our Hanzi wrong”.
An interesting phenomenon for Chinese learners is that the more Kanji are present in a paragraph, the easier it is for me to read.
As someone with an intermediate Mandarin and basic Taiwanese level, I’m surprised at the amount of Japanese I can parse without having really studied it. A lot of the false friends are easy to avoid misunderstanding if you are familiar with 文言文 or classical Chinese which is kind of expected of Chinese speakers starting from elementary school in Taiwan. I can parse a lot of locations/labels/signs that I see.
On’yomi readings, while I can’t always understand them, are often similar to the Mandarin or Taiwanese as if it is just being said in Japanese style. For example the Japanese on’yomi reading for my Chinese name is almost identical to how it sounds in Mandarin Chinese.
I’m sure it doesn’t make learning Japanese easy. But you’re definitely starting with a leg up in my opinion.
Ironically, learning Japanese pronunciations has helped me remember Chinese pronunciations even better.
For example, I’ve always had a hard time remembering if a Chinese character ended in -n or -ng. Now that I know how On readings are mapped from Chinese and what the general patterns look like, if I ever forget whether 病 is pronounced bing4 or bin4 then I just remember that the word “illness” is spelled like “byOUki” in Japanese.
I used to know someone studying Japanese from Hong Kong whose native language was Cantonese. She told me learning Japanese was easy compared to learning English, because a lot of the words were similar. But that’s just by comparison, it’s still hard.
I think your complaints about the false friends and differing pronunciation apply equally well for native English speakers learning Japanese words borrowed from English. The meanings are usually different, so when you come across one of these words for the first time, you can’t guess. you really need to look it up in the dictionary to get the right meaning (although the meaning is easy to remember). All of them require a lot of practice to get the pronunciation right – it’s easy to slip into the English pronunciation, which won’t usually be understood by Japanese people.
I was planning on learning Chinese after Japanese, would that be a bad idea? (offer no advantage as opposed to learning a different language?)
From all my years learning Japanese, Chinese people seemed to have a huge advantage writing and understanding some of the kanji so they could read and get meaning. However they struggled the most with pronunciation and speaking. While Koreans were able to pick up Japanese quite fast.
I took 4 years of Chinese in HS. I think it has actually helped a in learning Japanese like 6 years later, given I’m not native level.
Taking Chinese previously has made sentence structure and some grammer 100x easier imo, since its so counter intuitive to western style structure. I have some moments where i want to say the Chinese word instead of the Japanese word but, since i have a limited kanji base i tend to understand the characters of the language.
I can get this as a native level. I tend to mess up French more often because there’s a lot more words similar to English.
>老婆：Chinese = wife, Japanese = old woman
丈夫：Chinese = husband, Japanese = hero
Did anyone laugh at this part or is that just me?
A lot of linguists are of the opinion that Chinese isn’t actually a language, but a family of languages (unless given evidence to the contrary, I’m inclined to agree), and what is usually referred to as its dialects are actually each distinct languages. When I hear people say things like “Japanese must be easy for Chinese speakers, because they’re similar”, I just wonder “What Chinese?”, if Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc are that different from each other, they’re probably varying degrees of different from Japanese. Not to mention that Chinese isn’t closely related to Japanese in the first place.
I guess because I am a native Cantonese speaker, I don’t have any of your issues while learning Japanese.
1. If you know more than one Chinese dialect, then you are used to different pronunciations for every single word
2. Cantonese equivalent for 的 is 既 or 啲, but they can be dropped, and they are often dropped colloquially
3. Onyomi readings are usually pretty close if not identical to Cantonese pronunciation. I feel like I speak Cantonese better, with fewer lazy pronunciation （懶音）after starting to learn Japanese. For example, words like 國 (gwok) , I used to pronounce just gwo, now I always end it with -k because of 国(ごく)
4. I can read both traditional and simplified Chinese, so no problem with just a mix of the two
5. Whenever a kanji meaning diverges a lot from Chinese, I look it up in the Chinese dictionary, and usually discover it’s because Japanese keeps the original meanings in Classical Chinese. I feel like my classical Chinese knowledge has improved drastically after learning Japanese.
I would never think that Chinese speakers have an *easy* time learning Japanese, but you have a good head start.
I am a french native speaker, and I think it’s much easier for me to learn Spanish and English than it has been for Chinese and Japanese learners. Simply because of the vocabulary, syntax and overall grammar being really close.
That being said, even though we are very linguistically close, many french speakers still struggle with grammar and pronunciation.
Just fyi: I know what you’re speaking about even though I am not Chinese, because I studied Chinese before starting on Japanese. It’s for sure not easy, and I think many people who do not know both languages do not understand that as languages, they are fundamentally different in terms of structure and native vocabulary.
Having said that, knowing Chinese is a massive asset, for the following reasons:
1. You already know characters, even if they either are written differently (簡体字) – it is incredibly difficult to learn the basic functioning, structure and reading of characters if you come from an alphabet-based language like English or French.
2. A good number of the expressions, proverbs, etc will be if not the same, still more relatable than they are for people with roots in Europe or North America – think about the common background – the number of expressions or turns of phrases and even loanwords in Japanese, taken from classical Chinese, is incredible – almost more even than what we absorbed from Latin or ancient Greek in Western European languages.
and I can think of some other reasons. Maybe think about it as someone from Spain learning German or Polish: very different languages, but more of a common basis than with for example, Vietnamese…
As a native mandarin speaker, I realised I am using Mandarin too much as a clutch. On the bright side the knowledge of kanji allows intuitively understanding words and help in the reading (the more kanji the easier the reading becomes).
On the downside, I grow too reliant in not actively trying to learn kanji and their readings, esp 読み方. This has really stunt my progress esp in listening (not saying it’s good in the first place) and oral.
手紙
To preface I am NOT saying that your problems are not real and invalid, all I want to do is offer an alternate point of view.
I personally did not have any issue studying Japanese as a native Chinese, in fact it was so easy I felt like I was cheating. All I needed to do was assign new meanings to characters which I already know and recognise, which is nice! When I consume any form of language, my brain is able to easily switch between language “modes”, and will parse the content according to what mode I am currently in. The moment any Hiragana or Katana appears, my brain automatically switches to Japanese mode.
It was so easy for me to pick up Kanji, and I really cannot imagine learning Kanji from scratch as an adult lol. This is my personal experience as a native Chinese learning Japanese!
Mm yes, my favourite word 勉强(強 is traditional chinese) which means reluctant in chinese but study in japanese
As a native Chinese speaker, I feel that the various ‘struggles’ in learning Japanese that come about as a result of already knowing Chinese is way, way insignificant compared to the amount of time you save in your study of elementary/intermediate Japanese.
1: Reading Kanji in Chinese
What’s important when reading Japanese text is getting the meaning right. No one’s judging you by the way you pronounce kanji characters in your head. No one’s gonna tell you that you are wrong for reading ‘mian qiang suru’ instead of ‘benkyou suru’ in your head.
2 and 3: ~~Skill issue.~~ ok no. Knowing Chinese isn’t the issue here, it’s about being bi-/tri-/etc-lingual. It’s not uncommon for people who know more than one language to occasionally forget the term for something in one language but have the correct term ready in another.
4: I admit that my biggest hurdle in Elementary Japanese Kanji was to differentiate between 海 (Chinese: 2 dots) and 海 (Japanese: one vertical line), 强 and 強 etc.
5: That’s only natural since you’re comparing between two different languages, there’s bound to be slight differences in various places.
Overall, I consider knowing Chinese has half the battle won in my study of Japanese, and I hardly noticed the struggles I had because of knowing Chinese.
This was very interesting to read. I often wondered if mandarin speakers had some advantage when learning Japanese and vice versa.
I sometimes pondered if I’d ever dabble in mandarin since I know a decent amount of kanji, but I think I’d rather struggle completely with Korean (which is what I’m doing now) than confuse myself to death with mandarin
As a heritage speaker in mandarin Chinese, I’ve actually found that my knowledge of Chinese and my past experiences in being bilingual in two very different languages (English and Mandarin) has helped a lot in learning Japanese, specifically in areas of pronunciation.
Things like pitch accent I pick up automatically since I already know what to look out given that Chinese is a tonal language, and it’s helped a lot personally in that regard – I’ve barely came across any issue at least in terms of the pronunciation side of things.
Of course, I do sometimes use my knowledge of hanzi as a crutch when reading kanji which can sometimes result in me “reading” and fully understanding a specific word without actually knowing how it is pronounced at all.
But beyond a couple of loan words and cultural concepts, that’s where the similarities end. Things like grammar and vocabulary are completely different from mandarin, and I’m finding that I’m facing the same issues as everyone else in that regard.
While it’s certainly not “easier” to learn Japanese with a pre existing knowledge of Chinese, I do agree that there definitely exists a small headstart in areas like kanji. It is a bit funny however whenever I come across a word in japanese that means something completely different in Chinese and I feel that it has really made me appreciate the history of the two languages.
Hi! As a Spanish speaker who had to learn Portuguese, I understand your frustration. What helped me was:
-look for books *Designed for and by Chinese on how to learn Japanese* it’ll definitely emphasize the false friends so you can be prepared when you find them. I know there I’d more study material in English, but trust me, it’ll be worth it.
-learn as much as you can of the etymology of words. Learning when and why japanese borrowed terms from Chinese will help you get their meaning a bit better.
Gluck! You’ve got this!
The Japanese writing system is literally designed to interpret 文言文 as understandable Japanese called 書き下し. You really begin to understand how the writing system and particularly kunyomi came to be if you study some 漢文 which is mandatory for all Japanese students and either it or Classical Japanese has to be taken for センター試験.
Before I share my opinion, here’s my background:
– English is my mother tongue. Did literature as well
– Learnt Chinese since young, including some basic classical Chinese and Chinese literature
– Familiar with 2 Chinese dialects
– Studied Japanese more than 10 years back
From my experience, no qualms that it is an asset to know Chinese, especially classical Chinese and dialects since Japanese branched off from there.
Sorry author, was really surprised you said it was a struggle! My suggestion will be for you to go read up more about the differences when you have the time 🙂 It’ll drill deeper as to why there are some differences you mentioned.
These are definitely issues that could be frustrating, however, from a net gain/loss perspective – knowing hanzi SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the time required to learn Japanese due to the need for kanji memorization.
This is statistically supported by the demographics of people who pass N1.
Visual schematics have a 90% overlap – so its just about memorizing pronunciations. It reduces the workload for vocabulary acquisition on a significant widespread scale.
Consider it a significant advantage and have it spur you on towards learning more and more 🙂
As a native speaker of Mandarin chinese I would get confused with false friends and remembering pronunciations wrong, like 自由 would always be じよう
in my mind.
But after a year of studying, I’ve spent so much more time in Japanese that pretty much all the problems associated with knowing Chinese are gone. If I see a kanji out of context the first thing I hear in my mind would be onyomi and not the chinese pronunciation.