I understand that modern Chinese and Japanese are very different, even if they share many Kanji cognates. But I’m wondering, if you take the older forms of writings from both languages, where Chinese characters are predominantly used in both, can you establish much better mutual intelligibility?
3 comments
In writing sure, theoretically it is then just 2 people communicating in writing using Classical Chinese.
i would say so yes. that’s appearently how asian used to communicate with each other in antiquity.
It’d be like two people, one English and the other Finnish, writing in Latin.