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Newbie Poster
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 08:10 am: | |
I have a question!
Japanese written language makes extensive use of kanji (Chinese) characters. Despite this, Japanese and Chinese are totally unrelated languages.
Therefore, I am curious to know whether a Japanese person can pick up a Chinese newspaper (printed in traditional Chinese text e.g. from Taiwan, Hong Kong) and be able to comprehend what is written?
Or is Chinese grammar so different, that the Japanese person will have little or no comprehension?
I am told that a lot of Chinese characters are not regularly used in the Japanese writing system.
What percentage of characters in a Chinese newspaper would an average Japanese person be able to recognize? Is it 40%? 60%? 90%? 100%?
How different are the meanings of words in Kanji versus Chinese?
Looking forward to your responses! |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 12:54 pm: | |
What a Japanese person can understand in a Chinese newspaper, is roughly equivalent to what an English person can understand in a French newspaper.
Some words look the same, but there are too many differences (both vocabulary and grammar) to really be able to understand anything. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 01:13 pm: | |
French sample text:
L'espagnol et le fran軋is partagent un h駻itage commun du latin et du grec. Ces deux langues ont par contre suivi des trajectoires assez diff駻entes au cours de leur histoire (le fran軋is se m駘angeant avec l'anglais, et l'espagnol se m麝ant avec l'arabe) qui fait que la compr馼ension de l'un avec la connaissance de l'autre est loin d'黎re chose acquise.
So, how much of the text above did you understand? 40%? 60%? 80%? 100%?
(Note: You must set your computer to view European texts to properly see the accents) |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Saturday, October 16, 2004 - 01:43 am: | |
The average Japanese today will not be able to understand Chinese completely, since modern Chinese characters are simplified. The kanji used in Japanese is based on the older form of Chinese characters.
As long as Chinese is written in the older form, a person with adequate education in Japanese literature (especially in "kanbun(漢文)" which is based on ancient Chinese literature) will be able to understand nearly 90% of the written language. |
Newbie Poster
| | Posted on Saturday, October 16, 2004 - 02:46 am: | |
Thanks for these informative replies. I find myself guessing at the specific meaning of the French text but it's not hard to catch the overall flavour of what is being said. Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore (I think in Malaysian Chinese schools they teach both forms), but like Japan, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong only learn the traditional script and will have difficulty reading those simplified characters. I've seen some old Japanese movies where the credits were almost entirely in Kanji, I suppose this is somewhat like "kanbun". But study of traditional Japanese literature must be quite a specialized field, it must be very hard for the average Japanese person to interpret classical Chinese poems, etc. - rather akin to learning a foreign language. |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Saturday, October 16, 2004 - 03:44 pm: | |
I have noticed that some words in Japanese sound a lot like Chinese. Is it that Japanese is just a very very distant dialect of Chinese? I know three dialiects of Chinese, and at least one dialect has the similar or same sound as the japanese for some words. Even look at the way they say the numbers:
ichi, ni, san, shi (japanese)
yi, ar, san, shi (mandarin Chinese)
yut, yee, sam, sei (Cantonese (spoken in HK and Guangdong)...
Is it? |
Anonymous
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 02:13 am: | |
No.
Japanese and Chinese have no common point whatsoever beyond the words that Japanese imported from Chinese.
The native counting system in Japanese is hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu, yottsu... as you can see, completely different from ichi, nii, san, shi which the Japanese imported from Chinese.
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