Hi everyone! If you're currently learning Chinese, check out ChineseClass101 ►( bit.ly/Class101Chinese )◄ - one of the best ways to learn Chinese. Or for Japanese, check out JapanesePod101 ►( bit.ly/japanese-pod-101 )◄. I'm an active member on several Pod101 and Class101 sites, and I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do! For 32 other languages, check out my review! ► langfocus.com/innovative-language-podcasts/ ◄ (Full disclosure: if you sign up for a premium account, Langfocus receives a small referral fee. But if I didn't like it, I wouldn't recommend it!)
I was wondering if you mean Mandarin when you use the word "chinese" as a language. The official dialect of China is Mandarin, also call "Putonghua". More than 70% of the Chinese population speaks Mandarin, but there are also several other major dialects in use in China: Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), Min dialect, Gan dialect, Wu dialect, and Kejia or Hakka dialect. While the languages spoken in China are numerous, about seven groups are considered as the most important. Mandarin. Mandarin is the top language among the groups. ... Wu. On the coastal area in Shanghai, Wu is the Chinese dialect spoken. ... Yue. ... Xiang. ... Min. ... Gan. ... Hakka.
It's great that there are videos like this talking about the differences between Japanese and Chinese but they are much more similar than they are different. The fact of the matter is that Japanese as a written and academic language much like Korean was the result of heavy Chinese influence. I know this is going to come as a shock to most people on this video and probably the video creator as well but Japan's history stems to its Chinese related origins. Sorry to all Meiji Restoration enthusiasts but Japan didn't start because Izanagi and Izanami had tons of god children and then created the Yamato people. It started when Qin court advisor Xu Fu fled China and settled in Japan during the late term of the first Chinese Emperor's reign - the part where he went crazy and wanted all his ministers to help him find the elixir of immortality. This is why you'll find so much of Japanese culture relatable not to modern day China of course but to war-like China back in the era of Qin. As for the rest of its culture much of that is more well known to people on this side of the world. Influence from Buddhist Tang China. That's where most of the yokai and Japan's famous katana and motif of cherry blossoms come from among other things. So taking that to the language aspect you'll also find that Chinese isn't always SVO and in fact this is a much more modern form of the language. Meanwhile the same or similar Japanese SOV form is present in older forms of Chinese - and Cantonese which many people on this side of the world will point to when talking about older forms of Chinese. For example saying "I am telling you" (SVO in English where I = S, am telling = V, you = O) would be 我对你说 (SOV where 我 = S, 对你 = O, 说 = V) and similarly 私はあなたに話します (私は = S, あなたに = O, 話します = V) You can't say 我说对你. That doesn't make sense. On a side note 对 here holds the same place value as に in this sentence. Like the video suggests in Japan there's inflection where words are changed to add meaning while in Chinese you'd just add a word. BUT this is related in that the particles like に take the place of words. In this case both things mean "directed at" the object. Other particles also have this direct one to one correlation. Meanwhile verb conjugation like the different inflections of verbs in the video's examples are related to the Ainu local grammer structure of which Xu Fu and early Japanese settlers adopted to differentiate themselves from Qin China. Even the term Yamato which is the Japanese word for their people is derived from Chinese and then changed to fit with the more confident Japan of the Meiji Restoration. The bottom line here is the Meiji Restoration changed or hid a ton of what Japan was in order to promote the Dainippon state they were trying to build. In fact you can get so much more understanding of China from looking at Japanese culture. One of the best places on youtube for this is Gaijin Goomba's channel. He's done a great job of explaining the histories and origins of much of Japan's history so be sure to check him out if you haven't!
*Chinese: I am SVO language* *Japanese: I am SOV language* *Russian: Hold my vodka. "He went to school" can be:* *SVO: Он пошёл в школу (lit.: He went to school)* *SOV: Он в школу пошёл (lit.: He to school went)* *VSO: Пошёл он в школу (lit.: Went he to school)* *VOS: Пошёл в школу он (lit. Went to school he)* *OSV: В школу он пошёл (lit. To school he went)* *OVS: В школу пошёл он (lit. To school went he)* *All of these forms are grammatically correct in Russian* P.S. Even though all of these forms are grammatically correct, some of them are still more preferable and sound more natural in different circumstances and thus may contain slightly different meaning (but English translation would still be the same). SVO and SOV are the most commonly used word orders but in some cases other word orders would seem more natural. Word order can also change the emphasize in your sentence After some experience of speaking and reading Russian you will automatically chose the most natural word order in any particular case I wouldn't call Russian word order 100% free, you still need need to learn some rules, but it's definitely much more flexible and much less strict than in English and most of other languages
@@novvain495 Yeah, true. They are hard to learn for non-native speakers, but if you master them - you can write beautiful sentences. It's also easy to write poems in such languages due to free word order
@@thedamntrain My native language, Romanian has noun cases, but the accusative and Nominative share the same endings, but still you can change the order to SVO (default), VSO and SOV, but since the Dative has different endings, you can put the indirect object where you want. EG: I gave the boy a book SVIO= Am dat băiatului o carte VSIO= (the same as above) SIOV= Eu băiatului o carte am dat ISVO= Băiatului am dat o carte And so on. This does not happen in other romance languages. Although Russian's case system surpassed romanian's by a lot.
@@novvain495 Yeah, we have six cases in Russian for EVERY situation that can happen in your speach, so there are almost no situations when you can't take one word from the end of a sentence and put it straight to the beginning. You almost always can do it and it will always be grammaticaly correct. Of course, we have most common word orders - SVO and SOV, we usually use them in our speach. So if you say OVS- "В школу пошёл он" - people may be surprised with your unusual and uncommon style of speach, but no one will tell you that this is grammaticaly wrong. People will still understand you, because the meaning of your sentence didn't change. Except for some rare situations, word order doesn't affect meaning. That's why we have a huge amount of poets - Russian is literally created for them. It's pretty useful - if you can't find a rhyme - you can take it from anywhere in the sentence, add to the end and enjoy your rhyme!
actually，in Chinese，we can say: 你吃饭了吗?svo 饭你吃了吗?osv 你饭吃了吗?sov 吃饭了吗你?vos 吃你饭了吗?vso 饭吃了吗你?ovs LOL they have a little different but they both mean:have you had your meal?
When I was working in Japan my boss told me about when his wife and daughter were travelling in China. One day they had to ask a passerby for directions when someone came up with the bright idea of pulling out a notepad and communicating via kanji. A basic level of mutual understanding was reached, directions were given and received, and everything ended happily.
That sounds like 筆談(conversation in writing) in the history of east Asia. People from China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam had different spoken languages, but they shared the same written characters(kanji/Hanzi), so they could communicate with each other with written words. I've heard that European people did similar things in the history, but in Latin.
@@alextsau that's probably true, vietnam was heavily influenced by china for a thousand years, there are native vietnamese characters based on chinese characters so that chinese people couldn't read.
@@alextsauits like in laos cambodia and thailand that has a border between themselves and in its writing the sketch is very similar as in Korea, Japan and China and historically it is linked even when the Khmer empire existed, these were annexed and culturally similar
well it's actually more seemed to have a possible meaning to guess, for example: plane blah blah blah _a character that looks like "take out" but it's actually not_ blah blah blah
8:05 It’s same when Japanese people try to read Chinese. For example... 我愛你 (It means “I love you” in Chinese.) Japanese people can read 我 and 愛, but can’t read 你, so it’s like... I love bla
actually, japanese don't use the character "你" so it's like " me love ...what??" but,since 我愛你 is famous Chinese sentence, almost every japanese understand the meaning and pronounciation.
@@ぴーあほ Oh, I didn't know 你 is not used in Japanese. Suprised as a one who learns both Japanese and Chinese. I just easily thought all chinese characters would shared of course eventhough I really haven't seen 你 in any Japanese senteces.
As a Chinese who has traveled to Japan, I will answer the last question of the video. I can basically understand road signs, signboards, place names, signs, etc. I can understand 50% of menus and product names. For news, I can guess the topic it discusses.
Why are there not more Chinese people who are bilingual in Japanese, or Japanese people who are bilingual in Chinese? I feel like I never hear about these people. Meanwhile in Europe it's very common to be bilingual or trilingual
@@FffffffffffffffffffffffffffffL In many European countries students learn English + another European language while in (I believe) most countries in Asia students only learn English as one foreign language
@@FffffffffffffffffffffffffffffL There's a similar situation in Brazil but even stranger because all of our neighbours are Spanish speakers, Spanish and Portuguese are quite intelligible, but bilingual Brazilians in Spanish are quite rare. Usually we learn only English as a foreign language, and those ones who want something else go to French.
so you can say bilingual or trilingual ? If we have not choose about langurage.Just like you probably can't understand me now, because I don't even know English
@Yin Enoch well, I think japanese language learners in China are quite hard to get our 助詞 to connect between sentence and sentence on the other hand for us unable to pronounce even learned each pin'in on your simplified 漢字
the visuals are consistent and adds up to the overall appeal. the appeal of being concise yet detailed. its very thought provoking and interesting. love the videos. nothing comes close to Langfocus. its my personal benchmark for linguistic studies and how projects should come out not as close to Paul san but it's definitely a goal.
actually，most of the chinese from mainland have no trouble reading traditional Chinese characters.😂 I have no idea why we understand it without systemically learning it but that is the fact. 看得懂繁體的大陸小夥伴們舉手🙋🏻
Probably just because the main base structure haven't changed so if someone from China(uses simplified) goes to Taiwan(uses traditional) would have no problem understanding I myself is one of them as well 不过还是看不惯台湾左到右上到下的中国传统写法
As a native Cantonese Chinese who grew up in Australia, and also speak fluent Japanese, I have to say, this video is BY FAR the most accurate representation of the differences I have ever watched on TH-cam. Thank you Paul, well done and please keep up the awesome work! You ROCK dude!
To answer your question, I don't have much difficulty understanding Japanese anymore, but back when I was studying Japanese I just took a guess of the core meaning of the text by looking at the kanji first and then fill up the missing context with hiragana. It's quite convenient I must admit However, the biggest hurdle is still the kunyomi...Chinese is often represented as onyomi, then there's keigo (OMG) but hey! speaking English has a huuuuuge advantage! since I could translate most katagana directly =)
I swear that bird is gonna kill me because it's been 4 months since I haven't opened the app. Remember me when i get kidna- _he didnt took his lessons so i took his life_
Love the progression of the example sentences at the beginning: 私はタバコを吸わない：I don't smoke cigarettes 在室内不能描烟: Basically means "No smoking indoors" 警察: means police The thai sentence means I'm in jail Guess he didn't stick to not smoking huh lol.
My friend and I are Vietnamese, I've been self-studying Japanese for a few years and he just started learning Chinese at university. Sometimes when we are just chilling in Discord (maybe waiting for other friends, or we're about to go to bed) he would type some Chinese sentences he remember from his lessons and I would try to guess the meaning of those, and translate a few words into Sino-Vietnamese if I can. It's very interesting how similar (and different) the three languages are.
@@XiaoMof I do this a lot too, but I made sure to get a rudimentary understanding of Japanese grammar and some Japanese-only kanji so I don't run into 大丈夫 and get confused XD
This only proves the point on pronunciation similarities because the modern word for library in Chinese is a borrowed word from Japanese. 图书馆 is a Japanese-invented noun reverse adopted in China in 1896.
kabigon the pronounciation is determined by the characters in the borrowing country, hence the similarity proved the common roots of the characters. You should check. This TH-camr also said how the pronunciation was determined when it is borrowed
This is a great video and it is very educational, thank you for making this! :) However, for more educational purposes: 1:29 老实 means "Honest", not "Naive". Maybe you can interpretate it as the person is too honest that they become naive, but 老实 means Honest literally. 3:32 Actually, you can add a “了 ( Le )” or “过 ( Guò )” inside to show you have already done that action! Examples are: 我去了学校 = I went to school 我去学校了 = I have went to school 我去过学校了 = I have already went to school
I am Chinese, and I am shocked a foreigner can understand both Chinese and Japanese so well. What you said it's all true, especially the part of Chinese people read Japanese: "cat bla bla fish bla bla food", totally agree! Your video just fantastic.
It's kind of like when an English person tries to read Spanish. Like for the sentence "I call the police" in Spanish would be " Llamó a la policía". To an english speaker this just looks like blah blah the police. Also you were surprised how much a foreigner knew Chinese, but I live in the US, you speak better English than some of the native people here. 😂😂😂😂😂
The phrase "我去学校" mentioned in video 3:37 in general Chinese means the present tense, which is "I go to school", while "我去了学校" correctly means "I went to school",The character "了" is important.
Chinese people like me who was educated all the things in simplify Chinese have no trouble to recognize traditional Chinese charaters. it's basically same to us to read, and type, just a little bit hard to hand writting
sylviasummerful Because Chinese is not my native language, I can recognize what traditional characters' simplified counterparts are quite often, but probably not as much as you. How long have you been learning English by the way?
Caleb McCall almost all the Chinese students in my age was force to learn English from middle school. but what we acturally learned from classes are nothing to use. For me, I start to speak English seriously since I met my boyfriend 1 year ago, who is a native American, Chinese blood and learned Japaness before :) He had trouble with learning Chinese between recognize charators and words, he can read some if charator comes individually, but when they are combine together, he always make me laughing :D
These days, Ariana Grande's tatoo "七輪" is bringing a lot of fuss on the 'net. The Japanese are laughing a lot because it means "barbecue" (precisely, a small barbecue to be placed on the table), but in Mandarin it means "Seven Rings".
「七」means “seven” in both Mandarin and Japanese, the misunderstanding lies on the second character 「輪」, in modern China it means “cycle”, “wheel”, etc. and in Japanese it means “ring”. Japanese people find the tattoo funny because 「七輪」is a brand of barbecue oven in Japanese(imagine someone have a “Seven Eleven” tattoo, seven is ok and so is eleven, but “Seven Eleven” just reminds you of a convenient store). I’m a native Chinese and the first time I saw her tattoo I thought it represented “seven cycles(of life)”, because “seven wheels” sounded too ridiculous.😂😂😂
chinese here. when someone hands me a japanese product, i can pretty much read the directions and get an idea what that product is for, and how to use it.
I don't speak Japanese but I know Cantonese and mandarin. some times, when I watch videos in Japanese on TH-cam, I can understand like 30 to 40 % of what is being said as there are always some Kanji or Chinese characters on the screen to aid me along the way on my understanding. it helps a lot.
@@mariacastaneda77 personally , it's still easy to learn English, i think a junior high schools student can communicate fluently if sufficiently exposure are take in our english lessons
There's actually this funny phrase called "大丈夫" which in Chinese meant "Manly man". However in Japanese, it meant "are you okay?". It was extremely confusing when I saw it in japanese text the first time.
Thank you ancient chinese people for inventing Kanji(Chinese character). As a japanese, it's a little bit difficult to learn, but once we acquire it, it's very useful. I'm really appreciating it. 我是日本人。我愛中国。偉大國家。
Anncient japanese language EVOLVED and absorbed many other japanic around. (Japan is NOT always populated by japanese, several aren't japanese, but they are absorbed to the ponit only few dozens live today)
I remember that when I was a child, there wasn't a Chinese version of most Nintendo games that existed, so the games my family had were mostly in Japanese (I couldn't read English back to that time). Since my family and I could neither speak Japanese, we guessed the meaning of dialogues by Kanji entirely. That feeling was strange that I didn't understand the meaning of 90% but from those fragmental pieces of Kanji, I can roughly know what I ought to do the next step.
@@BabySonicGT I believe communist China made everyone believe Chinese isn’t related to Japanese. Even the internet follows this propaganda. Even China got rid of characters recently that is now exclusive to Koreans and Japanese. The guy is good here but he was brainwashed.
I speak beginner-intermediate Japanese and referring to your 8:20 part, I also had the same experience when I went to Taiwan. I speak pretty much zero Mandarin/Chinese but I survived due to my Kanji knowledge, at least I can order food and use the MRT. 😂 The fact that Japanese Kanji is based from Traditional Chinese which is used in Taiwan (and also HK) is super helpful too!
Your understanding of the difference between Japanese and Chinese are quite right and I appreciate the way you explain it based on your vast knowledge about language. One addition is that japanese way of pronouncing Chinese characters are quite different as you explained but Japanese, especially high ranked people before Meiji reformation could read Chinese perfectly by some technique called Kanbun, even though phonetic way is Japanese but could understand the meaning of Chinese sentences. Kanbun is still taught in high school, especially studying Chinese Poems. Thank you.
why not ? In Korea, higher education still remains studying of Chinese literature and writting system. This language had influenced Korean and Japanese for centuries. It's just so resourceful to learn, and it's a treasure of the entire mankind.
In Western schools, many Eastern topics are briefly touched upon or adapted. China acts much like Rome does in the West, so in school it kind of seems like learning one's roots.
As a Chinese who speaks Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and Japanese (and many other languages), I want to say that Japanese pronunciation is closer to Shanghainese than Cantonese.
I ’ｍ a Japanese. I think, it's not an accidental matter. According to an old Chinese history book(三国志魏書第三十巻東夷伝烏丸鮮卑東夷伝倭人条) 、ancient Japanese had very similar culture and customs to that of old southern Chinese kingdoms(呉or越). A Japanese ethnologist Prof. Kenzaburo Torigoe analyzed that such ancient Japanese people (or what are called “Yayoi-jin”弥生人) were originally emigrants from Lower Yangtze area and Japanese nation’s name in character”倭”was supposedly came from the kingdom’s name”越”.
I agree. I would say when a Chinese tries to learn/speak Japanese. Shanghai dialect speakers tend to have the closest pronunciation right off the bat. Cantonese is a lot more nasally and isn't as close to Japanese in comparison.
I'm a native speaker of both, and wow this summary is amazingly accurate! Thanks Paul, you made my day! Maybe just one comment about the tone: I think the Japanese language is somehow tonic, not in a linguistic sense (they still get the meaning) but there is certainly a natural tone for each word/sentence (... and yes some are pretty picky about it). There are also a few cases where you can only differentiate the words by tone (e.g. kaki: 柿/persimmon (accent on "ki") vs 牡蠣/oyster (accent on "ka") e.g. hashi: 橋/bridge (accent on "shi") vs 箸/chop sticks (accent on "ha")) but they are indeed super rare.
Yeah, there is something in Japanese called pitch accent (高低アクセント), which is technically part of the word, and a different accent can indicate that it’s a different word with a different meaning. But in context they almost never cause confusion. Like, if I say I’m going to eat an あめ and I use the pitch accent for “rain”, you’ll still know that I mean “candy”. And of course, the pitch accents differ depending on the region. I often discuss certain words with my Japanese wife and her parents, and there’s often a debate over which accent is correct, or whether a certain accent is standard or dialectal, etc.
@@yz293 ye I was pretty shocked when I was in my weeb phase trying to type japanese with romaji and the word is completely different meaning in Chinese
Actually, he should have mentioned some Chinese dialects rather than only Mandarin. Shanghainese is the dialect that most similar to Japanese. Cantonese, Fujianese, and Hokkien are also more similar to Japanese than Mandarin. Remember, Chinese is not just a single language.
@@RC-sc5li Late but Hokkien and Fujianese are basically the same I am from Fujian and I just call it Hokkien more specifically I am from Fuzhou there isn't really a closest language(still debated) but I personally believe Hokkien is the closest
@@RC-sc5li "Cantonese and Hokkien are more similar to Japanese than Mandarin" That's just not true... If anything Cantonese is more similar to Vietnamese than Japanese
Dibe_007 A good trick to distinguish a South Asian language like Sanskrit is to look for a continuous horizontal line, with most of the character features being below the lines (not above, like Arabic). For example Hindi: क्या हाल है? Nepali: तिमीलाई कस्तो छ? Punjabi: ਤੁਸੀ ਕਿਵੇਂ ਹੋ? To quickly point out Thai, notice the many tiny circles on the characters (often referred to as "heads"), not all fonts include the heads on the characters, but if they do, you can be sure it is Thai. Without the heads, it may be easier to mix up with other Southeast Asian abugidas like Lao and Khmer.
The meaning of “I went to school “, usually expressed in Chinese is “我去过学校了” or “我去了学校”. “I have gone to school “ usually express in Chinese is “我已经去过学校了”.
To say "I went to school" in Chinese, you would say: 我去了學校。 (wǒ qù le xuéxiào) With the character "了 (le)", indicating the complete past of the action.
as a japanese I could say that I can understand almost 60〜70% of chinese text. In many cases, simplified chinese character confuses me but I strangely like to guess what that mystery kanji initially was lol
This is because Chinese characters used to be written in many ways, for example, the country, it can be written into 国、圀、國、囻、囯 in the past. Smplified Chinese 国 is just one of its forms, is not created by the CCP.
At the same time the cross in 渋 is very ugly and confusing for native Chinese speakers, no matter mainland China, Taiwan or Hong Kong Cause it's a strange simplification out of nowhere, Similar examples like the three dots upon 桜
@@蔡徐坤油管分坤 some of them picked form exists before, but many of simplified words are just made up and nonsense. the worst thing is to simplified some completely different words into a single character just because they pronounce the same. Like 發髮are totally not related, but they are all simplified to 发
I'm from Japan and speak Japanese Thai and Chinese. I think that your remark that Chinese has no tense is not correct. Chinese actually has some tenses like 去了(went) 去过(have gone) 去着 (have just gone) as Thai has some tenses like ไปแล้ว (went) เคยไป (have gone) เพิ่งไป (have just gone) . They are grammatically corresponding but their meanings are slightly different, though.
As Suki L.P mentioned in this comment, Chinese has a complicated tense system. (So is Thai, actually.) The idea about time is different from English so it is often difficult to translate to English as simple one-to-one relation. Anyways they do have tense systems.
Depends on how you define tense. From what I understand as an applied linguist, tense in a narrow sense refers to the series of inflections one can add to the infinitive form of a word to render it meanings of something happened in the past. 去了, 去过, 去着 all denote something happened in the past that is correct. But notice when you construct these expressions you actually add an additional word to 去 instead of adding something to the word 去 itself. It is true that you can easily describe something that happened in the past easily in Chinese. But that definition to tenses, I wouldn't say there are tenses in Chinese. It's the same as that there is not future tense in English. You use "will" or "would" or "may" etc. to express the meaning that something is going to happen instead of adding an inflection to the infinitive form of the word to achieve the same effect, like you could do with the past tense (eg. walk (present tense) -> walk-ed (past tense). Get it?
@@helen6627 I don't blame him (well maybe I do), another lay person attempting to claim he knows more than a linguist in the realm of linguistics/the study of languages.
The phenomenon of "returned loan words" is so interesting to me. Especially as a native English speaker learning Japanese, and seeing words like "waifu" and "karaoke" that have made their way back to English as a Japanified version of the original English word.
@@augustawind69 Thank you, I didn't know that. The greek origin of 'orchestra' makes this phenomenon even more impressive. I don't have any doubts that there is karaoke in Greece :) This means that word made interesting journey :)
As a native Chinese speaker, the examples of pronunciation you just mention"家庭" and "死亡" are very similar to us. Even though the western alphabets look like different.
bc there is a pattern of sound changes. 死亡 in cantonese is sei mong so ei becomes i and the ng sound wilk become a long vowel of o (nearly no exception).
I'm Japanese. When I look at Chinese text, I feel I can understand almost all of the meaning. But it would be often totally wrong after getting it. This is because there're so many words that have the same kanji but completely different meaning between Chinese and Japanese. For instance, "大丈夫" means "It's OK" in Japanese, but "full-fledged man" in Chinese. Sorry for my poor English.
@Jacky Chew Dude, do you have a problem with Japanese using Kanji? You've written who knows how many comments that basically say the same thing: that Japanese might as well abandon the use of Kanji. It comes off as ridiculous and insecure.
Quadronnn, do you think koreans are ridiculous and insecure? They did exactly that. You saying it comes off as ridiculous and insecure comes off as ridiculous and insecure, by the way.
I remember I was hanging out with my Asian friends, and we did this experiment. I would whisper something to my Chinese Malaysian friend adn she would write it, and then my Japanese friend would read it and say it loud back in English. Most of the time the meaning was intact.
I am Japanese. I very much enjoyed the video. I can probably understand 50% of what is written in Chinese. It took some time to be used to simplified Chinese, though.
Jay E Japanese people need to learn how the characters are simplified in China. Chinese People probably have some exposure to the traditional characters, so they may have an easier time grasping the core meanings.
Correctly speaking "史" was the traditional expression for history in China. According from Wiki, '史' is commonly used in China and the use of '歴史' is barely found. But, by chance, a Chinese book with "歴史" in title (歴史網鑑補 by 袁黄 of 明) were imported to Japan, (maybe) widely read by the intelligentsia and then the usage had spread. Afterword, it was also used as the translation of the 'history', and then the usage imported back to China. As far as the video concerns "歴史" as the translation of the western idea of 'history', it's not much wrong. It is the same for the word, '共和' (republic). Japanese translator back then took this word from a period in 周 dynasty when two ministers governed together without monarch. It can be said the word was 'borrowed' from China, but the usage was 'invented' in Japan.
@@ryotakus.1560 The western books were first translated by Japanese and spreaded into Asian cultures, true. That means Japanese chose the corresponding characters for western terms. But I would not say these are new terms at all. For example, history is not a new term at all in Chinese or Japanese culture, right? They were using one character 史 or 歴 in different contexts all the time for over 2000 years. I am sure, the ancient Chinese would have no problem understanding the term "歴史" however they didn't write in that wasterful manner most of the time because of expensive writing materials. The same as "'共和", it is a good choice of characters and word, but it is not creating new word or new idea at all. I think Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji is so similar, it doesn't make sense to really say whether a word is translated to Kanji or to Hanzi. Between Hanzi and Kanji, there is no import or export possible because people can read them as one language, if there is, it is just boring political patriotism.
I can see that the difference between those two sentences is the use of “le” which is the particle of Completion which you simply inserted into the middle of the sentence.
Eh... If you use"I went to school" to express "I got education (those years)", it's much better to say 我上过学. As a native speaker of Chinese, personally I suggest that 我去学校 lay more emphasis on the action of going from home to school.
I'm studying Japanese. I'm still at a fairly beginner level but I do know a lot of N5 & N4 kanji. When I went to the local Chinese market, I picked up a newspaper in Chinese and was able to get the basics of an article. I even asked the lady behind the counter if I was correct. Turns out for most of it, I was.
i once read a technical manual for Japanese world war 2 Zero fighter when I was working in DC during my college summer break; to my surprise, it was almost entirely written in Chinese (although the sentence construction was kind of like reading Chinese old text). I was in China with my parents during my early teens so I had no problem reading the manual. My friend, who were pretty fluent in Japanese, couldn’t make out what the manual was saying, and we read later in US navy documents that their Japanese experts had great difficulty understanding it as well. One part I remember clearly even today was the engine start sequence, which contained many words my Japanese speaking friend told me she had never studied. Apparently it was written in a prewar technical Japanese to assert elite status of engineering department (almost like writing a manual entirely in Latin to show how educated you are.
As a Chinese teacher I could tell you it is not 100% correct. We use "了“ to indicate something happen in the past. I went to school is 我去学校了 / 我去了学校。 Where to place the "了” could be very tricky. It is depends on what the second part of the sentence might be. Putting the "了“ before school (the subject) normally dedicates you want to explain what has happened after you went to school. If your sentence ends at I went to school, you normally put the “了” right after the subject “school” . However, you could also use ”了“ with future tense sentences, such as things are about to happen. Such as It is about to rain, I am about to arrive, and etc. My students found it very hard to master ”了“, and I totally agree with them.
既然您特意强调了自己是汉语老师，我就必须得登个号更正一下。您能分清“我去过学校”和“我去了学校”的区别吗？前者很明显是表示过去发生了什么事，而后者表示过去发生的动作已经完成了。“我养过花”和“我养了花”，哪一个表示的是过去的状态？哪一个表示对现在的影响？完成了完成了，“了”这个字很明显是完成时的标志好不好。I have gone to school/I have been to school 我去学校了/我去了学校，这么翻译一一对应，有什么问题？您说这个“了”也可以表示将来要发生的事情，好啊没错，英语中不是有个将来完成时么？I will have finished the work/我就要完成了，有没有问题？ 人们只是平常说话习惯加个“了”，是不是过去时还得看有没有“过”好吧。继续说“我去了学校”，完整的表达可以是“我去过了学校”，不是吗？“过”这个字才真正指代过去时。使用“了”是出于习惯，不代表完成时就是过去时。本人阅历可能不够，但是“过”和“了”的用法还是能分清的。希望您在教授外国学生的时候，能更严谨认真一点。
Ahmad Al_shanqeety Formally, Yes. You could ignore them when you write fast or for some artistic intention like font designing and we still recognize the letter fine. But it's informal. They said Thai letters are invented for carving in stone first. The bubble which we call the letter's "head" is always where you start to write the letter. Because it's where you punch a dot first before starting to punch stroke away from that point. But the writing in late 600-800 years are mostly by heat iron write on dried palm leaves book, The fonts are evovle from dot to circular starting point.
8:50 This is my favourite part about the Chinese language. As a bookworm it's pretty extreme. There are plenty of words I'd not know how to pronounce but can get by understanding them in a text well enough. It's probably mind boggling to people who've never learnt such a language. Maybe it's controversial, but to me Chinese is a written language first, and a spoken language second.
i speak japanese, and oftentimes at work i'm asked to translate something that turns out to be in chinese. the experience ends well for no one involved.
I myself as a native Chinese speaker had similar experience when using google translate to tranlate Japanese Kanji and it just deteced it as Chinese and spitted out the same characters in return. So I now always translate them into English.
they used to abandon kanji after WW2 but then they give up by the way, for example, the sketch contest in school . and jizz in the mouth contest is same pronounced in japanese
I’m simply amazed to see around me how many non-Japanese speak Japanese fluently after they’ve put in only a few 100 hours of studying it... It took me full three decades to become able to speak and write English. I’m Japanese. And the beauty of the Chinese language always charms me greatly.
As someone who is studying Japanese since 3 years now I can assure you that unless you’re Korean, Chinese or Taiwanese it will take a long, long time to learn Japanese as a Westerner. I‘m now at the point where I can fluently read NHK Easy articles or play Ace Attorney (a Visual Novel) on my Switch ( tho I have to look up words for every sentence) Honestly I think it‘ll take me many more years to understand anime or something like that^^ On a related note, your English is great👍
@@luxy9530 how long have you been studying? I'm 5 months in and Did rtk and the first 2 tango decks and I'm moving of from NHK easy article's since their too easy
I don't think it is the case haha. I have studied Japanese for about 6 years to get to a shaky N2 level. That's more than a few hundred hours. But tbf I'm a terrible lazy student. I do know people that have done it faster but generally it takes at least 3 years to get to a comfortable level as far as I can see.
@@luxy9530 I understood anime growing up as a kid cuz I was brought up that way its only the super hard stuff I dont get, haha I find reading is way way harder I spent years and years of work, it surprises me that I see so many people who haven't grown up with Japanese can use so many kanji many that I do not know and those who havent necessarily spent as long as me, however I often see really bad grammar structures in use. Unless they are very advanced in which they might use certain structures that I tend not to. I also see people writing Japanese in english structures or using too many pronouns when those don't matter so much in Japanese. I know people who learn Japanese without the kanji though purely for speaking or even just write almost everything in hiragana.
I’ve been learning Japanese for the past few months and let me tell you, it was a huge confidence boost when I could immediately recognize which was Chinese or Japanese, I also relatively understood a handful of examples from memory!
Sounds like the role of Chinese words in Japanese is very much like French words in English. In a way also the writing, since so many French words are recognizable to an English speaker in print, but are pronounced very differently, e.g. point, centre
I like your idea. But I would say, by writing e.g. vocabularies there are more similar/identical words between the Chinese/Japanese languages. While in English and French, the similarities are less recognizable by the pronunciation, but only by writing.
Sorta. Except English is really close to French both being Hindo-European. With English being helpful for learning French and vice-versa, it is not just that the 60% of the complicated words in English are romance/French-derived. It is also that French often uses similar grammar to English to express things. I am going to do something Je vais faire quelque chose Where is my cat? Où est ma chatte? (Yep, in Alice the cat was female). The French are tolerant of lovers Les Français sont tolérants des amoureux There is no such luxury in the Sino-Japanese pair.
:) Common ancestry may still mean fairly different grammar. Russian vs English (both "derived" from PIE over the ages) makes a good example. Languages do share a lot of Swadesh in simple words -- but use different basic constructs. Like, Russian is notorious for lack of use of modal verbs. There is totally no "to be" and "to have" in modern Russian, up to the point "I have something" in Russian being expressed with something like "At mine, there is" (у меня есть).
Actually I would say french words in english still sound very similar cause mostly the word origin both from latin. Chinese and Japanese loanwords as well as the pronounciation differ more from each other.
I've heard some native English speakers take "than" for "then" because they remember by sound and this is my first time to see "then" is really used instead of "than"
Jacky Chew why would anyone learn Chinese for the sake of learning another language? He wants to learn Chinese and just let him do. You are nobody to tell him not to. Did he ever mention about learning Chinese using the knowledge of Japanese..? No? So chill out. And talking about standard.. what exactly do you mean? Social status? Pls define your meaning of “standard “thanks
Jacky Chew Do you have a personal grudge against the Chinese language or something? You've said essentially the same thing across multiple comments. No one's forcing you to learn Chinese if you don't want to. Let other people learn Chinese or whatever language they want to. You can argue that the Chinese language may have many fundamental flaws within its structure, but learning a new language (especially one that's the most widely spoken in the world) can be an extremely valuable asset that can open opportunities for many people.
During the Jomon Era (BC8,000-BC300), the Japanese had already the Japanese Language. But it was a speaking language and had no writing systems. During the succeeding Yayoi Era (BC300-AD500), Chinese characters (Kanji) were imported to express the Japanese language in Kanji letter writings. Therefore, one Kanji letter has multiple pronunciations (one akin to the Chinese and the other akin to the Japanese). During the succeeding Asuka and Heian Periods (6th-12th century), Hiragana and Katakana were invented to better express the Japanese language of the time. Many poems, novels, war histories were written during the latter half of the Heian Era and succeeding Kamakura period (12th - 15th century).During the succeeding Edo Period (16th - 19th century) as the literacy rate reached beyond 90%, the pre-modern day Japanese language was formed.
You did't give an example about the same word with same charactors but diffrent meaning. for eg. 大丈夫 CN: da zhang fu - be a great man JP: daijoubu - No problem 勉強(JP,T-CN) 勉强(S-CN) CN: mian qiang - Do something with difficulty or only reached deadline JP: benkyou - Study
By the way . Both of these words . There is some English words of the meaning for Japanese, but doesn't have (or hard to translate to) any words for Chinese. That's beautiful.
大丈夫 refers to the teaching of Meng Zi 孟子. To be a great man. When it was carried to Japan, it referred to the exact same thing, and overtime its usage evolved to meaning no problem, eg, 彼は大丈夫から (because) he is a great man => therefore he has no problems => he is alright. Its also worth mentioning that many Japanese vocabularies are written in Kanji that have nothing to do with the meaning of the words. Eg, 泥棒 thief, kanji meaning mud stick. This was done because the どろぼう can be broken into どろ mud and 棒 stick. Id imagine the reason of doing so is to save space on scripts and such.
oh man, I love that "cat bla fish bla eat blabla", it is so good to understand how does a chinese feel by reading japanese. And also it makes me laugh.
cuteguy498 Well I'm a chinese too ^_^ so for example and for fun this: 鳥インフルエンザにかかった鳥の羽や粉末状になったフンを吸い込んだり for us Chinese it would be like: Bird blah blah blah bird feather blah dust-like blah blah inhale blah blah blah This is somehow getting more and more amusing...
Japanese si definitely a tonal language as well. It doens't have as many tones as Mandarin or Cantonese, and the way they teach it is different, but it still exist. The tonal pronounciation of words with similar syllables can compeltely change the meaning of a word just like in Mandarin. "Hana", written in plain "romaji" could mean either nose or flower, and westerners often can't tell the difference when hearing or pronouncing it.
I speak Chinese and I just unterstand the basic meaning of Japanese words. I'm also interestet in languages, I speak Chinese and German fluently and English, French and Italian I learned in school. I'm going to an exchange year next summer. I'm so exited to learn Japanese or Cantonese😄
For me it is a little bit the other way around. I can read some Chinese because I see characters that I see in Japanese and well, and because I am studying Japanese. Therefore I would understand what 食物 means. In Japanese I see the same characters.
Cantonese and Japanese were the most fun languages I learnt. Good luck with them, both can be difficult, but that only makes them all the more rewarding to learn. :)
as a french native speaker, when I started to learn english, I could recognize a lot of words which seemed to share a comon origin. And like a japanese or a chinese person who tries to learn the language of the other, even though you can guess a certain amount of a text, you also miss the subtleties and can be confused with some words which seems the same but which actually have a different meaning or some words which are not still used in the modern french.
C'était le meme chose avec moi, quand j'ai appris le français au lycée et au fac (Je suis australien). Alors, il faut qu'on fasse l'attention avec les faux amis, je sens que cette idée s'applique envers l'ecriture Chinois et les kanjis du Japon. Maintenant, j'apprends le Japonais je souhaite voyager au Japon cette année pendant le fin de l'été. (Excusez-moi, ma grammaire est mal selon moi.)
Very different though. Chinese and Japanese are completely different. French was spoken by English aristocrats for centuries. They have false cognates but many and many more differences, no one expects to understand the other language by learning the first.
yes, it's true that except some common vocabulary, japanese and chinese are further from each other than it does between french and english when it comes to compare the grammar. Another difference is that in japanese, most of chinese loanwords are used with a very specific way, most of the time in compound words, while that's not the case in english.
words mean one meaning in English,but when you see a word in Chinese,you can just read it and meanings of it could be three or more, even means different in different sentences.your brain should be active to receive this character and search in your mind at the same time.otherwise,you gotta misunderstand many words people said
The way they can read each other's languages without knowing them reminds me of English with any of the Romance languages. For example, most of the -tion ending words in English have the same origin as French and they are usually identical.... if you saw "la grande orchestration" written on a French sign, you'd know exactly what it means, but if you overheard a Frenchman saying it, you probably wouldn't recognize it, since it's pronounced like /lə ɡʁɑ̃ ɔʁʃɛstʁasjɔ̃/
This is irrelevant to your point, but that pronunciation is wrong. The "ch" in this particular word is pronounced "k", and the "d" in "grande" is pronounced in the feminine form (it is also pronounced in liaisons in the masculine form). Also, perhaps in fast or sloppy speech the "a" in "la" could become a schwa, but by default it's not.
Chinese native speaker who can speak Japanese here. Generally Chinese speaker are seldom confused because of the different way the Chinese characters are used, because in Japanese old characters are used, while in Modern Chinese many new ones replace the old ones. For instance, in Japanese "步" is used to represent "walk". In modern Chinese we use "走", but "步" is still used in other walking-related words like "trail"-步道. So guessing the rigth meaning is still pretty simple (except in the "cat bla fish bla food bla bla" case). Also, the more formal the Japanese is, the more Kanji (Chinese characters) it tends to use. So contrary to the case of the Japanese, formal Japanese is easier to understand.
But the japanese kanji also changed to make it easier... I am only half Japanese and when my grandparents send me a letter i am often confused with some of the kanji and have to ask my mother.. Because my grandparents often use "old" kanji which are simplified today and for my mother who is a native spaker and often read books were the kanji hasn´t been changed, its easy to understand the kanji although it was changed. But if you aren´t native speaker and not toooo good with the Kanji its often hard to recognize it...
You're correct, formal language is always easier to understand than informal as formal carried traditional way of expression while informal doesn't and it's always evolving.
We speak Mandarin which is 99% the same as Putonghua (spoken in China). We also speak Taiwanese but it's simply a dialect of Chinese, so.....I think there isn't too much to talk about.
Are you including L2 speakers of Mandarin? Because, you say that %99 of the population speaks Mandarin, but how about Southern Chinese dialects, nobody speaks them? I don't think so...
ali akman Nono, I mean the Chinese we speak (which is spoken by 99.99% of Taiwanese) is 99% the same as Putonghua. As for the Southern Chinese dialects, we do speak them as well, depending on where our ancestors cam from. The biggest one is called Taiwanese, which is understandable for 90% people. But in most cases it's not our mother tongue so most people don't 100% master it.
I'm a Japanese spoker. When I see chinese sentences,I can understand it. But,I sametimes misunderstand meanings. For example; I translated “我去学校”as “I leave school.”,But it actually means “I go to school.”. The reason is that In Japanese,“去“ usually means “leave the point”.
Interesting.去 in words often means to leave or to get rid of in Chinese. Your trying was proper. I used thought 湯 in anime as soup but later i saw people in Spring.湯 in Classical Chinese(kanbun) literatally means hot water...
In Japanese, accent DOES matter. For instance, "hashi" in different accent can mean chopsticks or bridge, while "ame" in different accent can mean rain or candy. The other parts of the video are quite correct. Reference: I'm native Chinese speaker and I can also speak Japanese.
Indeed - but as he says, the tones don't USUALLY give meaning to a word. There are occasions where the pitch helps distinguish two similar sounding words. Also, if you say a word in Japanese with the wrong pitch, you may sound strange and non-native, but you'll usually still be understood.
My girlfriend is Japanese, and she tries to teach me a few words, but doesn't have much success because I'm pretty dense tbh. I can't tell the difference between 2 o'clock and rainbow, or the mushroom and the famous Japanese professional wrestler.
This video is so useful. Other videos are just people from the two countries saying random words to show the differences and similarities, what I really wanted to know was about grammar and characters. Thank you! As an Advanced Japanese student I can understand chinese signboards, but the way mandarin has simplified characters just blows my mind. Also the fact that Chinese is SVO, my heart feels the pain when I remember how confusing was the SOV first time learning Japanese. I'm currently studying for JLPT N1, only when I pass I'll decide if I try studying Mandarin. Both beautiful languages :)
I study and have been fascinated by the Japanese language. I love how artistically written kanjis and kanas are. I'm also quite attracted to the Chinese and Korean languages and writing systems. Asian languages are in most cases connected but at the same time different, which makes them so even more interesting.
'There all connected but different' Thats with all languages, especially if we're talking about by continent, like the fact that everywhere in europe cat is some form of velar plosive, low vowel, dental plosive, and something else English cat Greek gata Spanish gato German katze Russian kot Icelandic köttur
I'm Chinese, been traveling in Japan, it was easy for us to take on transportation cause all most all the location names are wroten in kanji, which is Chinese characters. I even tried to chat with local by writing one by one , and it worked LOL. PS: There's a lot of differences between classical Chinese and modern Chiese. It's much more than 30% of the words we use now are created by Japanese,and It's also true that most of we Chinese don't know that...however it is about politic and complicated to say hhhhhh Really love Japan, people there treated me very kindly ^_^ ❤日本
Many are also unaware of preexisting vocabularies such as Buddhist terminologies which are accepted as regular vocabularies in Japanese and then gained a wider use in China with Japanese influence. 世界 serves an example.
It is Chinese people who educated Japanese people and help us civilized. Thanks a lot. I hope political mess ends soon and we can cooperate like we used to.
@@toshihiroshimizu3240 I believe that the trend of East Asian cooperation is unstoppable. And that will benefits all of us. Hope that Tokyo Olympic Games can be carried out smoothly next year.
As a native to Hong Kong, I can assure you that Cantonese is indeed have similar pronunciation of Japanese borrowed Chinese words. Cantonese and Japanese is slightly less deviated from early middle Chinese than mandarin, however, when we are studying poem from early china, trying to pronounce them in both Cantonese and mandarin does help to find out which one is more suitable tone.
I think it is worth to note that in Edo/Ming era it is perfectly reasonable for the literate class of two countries to communicate using writing. Ming and Joseon merchants often traded in Edo Japan with this type of communication.
Yes but thats not what everyone thinks, some people think any asian script looks the same so. I think it was just a joke, that guy knows very well that the 2 scripts dont look the same,but theres some people who dont know much about it. Although the thai script comes from the sanskrit (india) the languages are similar when it comes to pronouncuation (thai is a mix of Chinese/Hindi & Vietnamese , also speaking of the words and how its pronounced) the only one thing is that hindi is not a tonal language like Vietnamese/Lao/Thai&chinese is. Ofcourse also the meaning of the words is mainly different (except for some chinese dialects, where a lot of words are very similar to thai words from not only the sound/how its said, but also from the pronounciation ,in those cases the same) Cantonese sounds most&more similar to thai,vietnamese&lao then mandarin. Im Thai&Chinese mixed , i know both languages in speaking writing and reading (and also understand some other chinese dialects but not as fluent as mandarin&cantonese does) since i talk both chinese&thai on a almost dayli basis with family and several other cases where i noticed many similarities of the languages its pretty similar throughout many of years , but besides that ,yes the thai script is different from the chinese script.
Thai,Vietnamese,Japanese,Chinese,Korean languages r very similar with khasi language in north east India people here can't speak Hindi but only English n khasi
@@lyhthegreat Nah, Thais have their own writing systems and alphabets, there are original Thai vocabularies, but many of more complicated ones have derived from Sanskrit & ancient Khmer.
When I was young(er) I thought that Cyrillic system is difficult, but then I noticed Chinese and Japanese (Korean, etc) characters and I was... speechless... Maybe I will ask stupid question now, but do you see Chinese as difficult language to learn for.. Chinese?
It could be easily and naturally learned by 99% students in the school. But we are mostly struggling at English. When I started learning Japanese I have to say that I felt quite comfortable. Just like some English speaker learning German or even like Portuguese learning Spanish.
1:56 I know it says usually, but certain pitch inflections can lead to different meanings in Japanese. For example, the two words 飴 and 雨 (candy and rain). The first is pronounced aME, whereas the second is pronounced Ame.
As a native Chinese speaker who has learnt a bit of Japanese grammar and simple words, I totally agree with the English example of "cat bla fish blah eat bla bla". When I read more complex Japanese sentences rather than simple ones that mean like "I went to school", I basically have tunnel vision on only the kanji and the rest becomes just a bunch of non-understandable jibberish that could also be seen as irrelevant sometimes.
This is a fascinating post, Paul. When my wife and I taught English in Japan (way back in the 80s), we had already studied Chinese for years, but knew very little spoken Japanese. My Japanese colleagues were amazed that we could read a great deal of Japanese, but not know how to say in Japanese what we had just read, although we could tell them in English what the text said. Between Kanji and katakana (easy to learn and about 80% English loan words) we were semi-literate in Japanese, though could hardly speak a word of it. I think if we'd been Chinese, my Japanese mates wouldn't have been so surprised at our familiarity with written characters. We are just average whitey people.
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I LOVE THIS VIDEO! can you do more like this? Like: how similiar are Dutch and German? Or: how similiar are hindi & Hebrew??? I LOVE IT
I was wondering if you mean Mandarin when you use the word "chinese" as a language.
The official dialect of China is Mandarin, also call "Putonghua". More than 70% of the Chinese population speaks Mandarin, but there are also several other major dialects in use in China: Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), Min dialect, Gan dialect, Wu dialect, and Kejia or Hakka dialect.
While the languages spoken in China are numerous, about seven groups are considered as the most important.
Mandarin. Mandarin is the top language among the groups. ...
Wu. On the coastal area in Shanghai, Wu is the Chinese dialect spoken. ...
Yue. ...
Xiang. ...
Min. ...
Gan. ...
Hakka.
Langfocus Why does Japanese language somehow sound more like the Malay or Indonesia language rather than Chinese?
It's great that there are videos like this talking about the differences between Japanese and Chinese but they are much more similar than they are different. The fact of the matter is that Japanese as a written and academic language much like Korean was the result of heavy Chinese influence. I know this is going to come as a shock to most people on this video and probably the video creator as well but Japan's history stems to its Chinese related origins. Sorry to all Meiji Restoration enthusiasts but Japan didn't start because Izanagi and Izanami had tons of god children and then created the Yamato people. It started when Qin court advisor Xu Fu fled China and settled in Japan during the late term of the first Chinese Emperor's reign - the part where he went crazy and wanted all his ministers to help him find the elixir of immortality. This is why you'll find so much of Japanese culture relatable not to modern day China of course but to war-like China back in the era of Qin. As for the rest of its culture much of that is more well known to people on this side of the world. Influence from Buddhist Tang China. That's where most of the yokai and Japan's famous katana and motif of cherry blossoms come from among other things.
So taking that to the language aspect you'll also find that Chinese isn't always SVO and in fact this is a much more modern form of the language. Meanwhile the same or similar Japanese SOV form is present in older forms of Chinese - and Cantonese which many people on this side of the world will point to when talking about older forms of Chinese. For example saying "I am telling you" (SVO in English where I = S, am telling = V, you = O) would be 我对你说 (SOV where 我 = S, 对你 = O, 说 = V) and similarly 私はあなたに話します (私は = S, あなたに = O, 話します = V) You can't say 我说对你. That doesn't make sense. On a side note 对 here holds the same place value as に in this sentence. Like the video suggests in Japan there's inflection where words are changed to add meaning while in Chinese you'd just add a word. BUT this is related in that the particles like に take the place of words. In this case both things mean "directed at" the object. Other particles also have this direct one to one correlation. Meanwhile verb conjugation like the different inflections of verbs in the video's examples are related to the Ainu local grammer structure of which Xu Fu and early Japanese settlers adopted to differentiate themselves from Qin China. Even the term Yamato which is the Japanese word for their people is derived from Chinese and then changed to fit with the more confident Japan of the Meiji Restoration. The bottom line here is the Meiji Restoration changed or hid a ton of what Japan was in order to promote the Dainippon state they were trying to build.
In fact you can get so much more understanding of China from looking at Japanese culture. One of the best places on youtube for this is Gaijin Goomba's channel. He's done a great job of explaining the histories and origins of much of Japan's history so be sure to check him out if you haven't!
actually ，If you want to speak "I went school" in chinese you maybe should say "我去了学校" or "我去学校了"
*Chinese: I am SVO language*
*Japanese: I am SOV language*
*Russian: Hold my vodka. "He went to school" can be:*
*SVO: Он пошёл в школу (lit.: He went to school)*
*SOV: Он в школу пошёл (lit.: He to school went)*
*VSO: Пошёл он в школу (lit.: Went he to school)*
*VOS: Пошёл в школу он (lit. Went to school he)*
*OSV: В школу он пошёл (lit. To school he went)*
*OVS: В школу пошёл он (lit. To school went he)*
*All of these forms are grammatically correct in Russian*
P.S. Even though all of these forms are grammatically correct, some of them are still more preferable and sound more natural in different circumstances and thus may contain slightly different meaning (but English translation would still be the same). SVO and SOV are the most commonly used word orders but in some cases other word orders would seem more natural. Word order can also change the emphasize in your sentence
After some experience of speaking and reading Russian you will automatically chose the most natural word order in any particular case
I wouldn't call Russian word order 100% free, you still need need to learn some rules, but it's definitely much more flexible and much less strict than in English and most of other languages
Noun cases are the best.
Free word order best word order.
@@novvain495 Yeah, true. They are hard to learn for non-native speakers, but if you master them - you can write beautiful sentences. It's also easy to write poems in such languages due to free word order
@@thedamntrain My native language, Romanian has noun cases, but the accusative and Nominative share the same endings, but still you can change the order to SVO (default), VSO and SOV, but since the Dative has different endings, you can put the indirect object where you want.
EG: I gave the boy a book
SVIO= Am dat băiatului o carte
VSIO= (the same as above)
SIOV= Eu băiatului o carte am dat
ISVO= Băiatului am dat o carte
And so on. This does not happen in other romance languages.
Although Russian's case system surpassed romanian's by a lot.
@@novvain495 Yeah, we have six cases in Russian for EVERY situation that can happen in your speach, so there are almost no situations when you can't take one word from the end of a sentence and put it straight to the beginning. You almost always can do it and it will always be grammaticaly correct. Of course, we have most common word orders - SVO and SOV, we usually use them in our speach. So if you say OVS- "В школу пошёл он" - people may be surprised with your unusual and uncommon style of speach, but no one will tell you that this is grammaticaly wrong. People will still understand you, because the meaning of your sentence didn't change. Except for some rare situations, word order doesn't affect meaning. That's why we have a huge amount of poets - Russian is literally created for them. It's pretty useful - if you can't find a rhyme - you can take it from anywhere in the sentence, add to the end and enjoy your rhyme!
actually，in Chinese，we can say:
你吃饭了吗?svo
饭你吃了吗?osv
你饭吃了吗?sov
吃饭了吗你?vos
吃你饭了吗?vso
饭吃了吗你?ovs
LOL
they have a little different but they both mean:have you had your meal?
"Cat bla fish bla food bla bla".
Such articulation and poetry. Brought a tear to my eye.
Indeed
Tears of laughter, no doubt
could be a good haiku poem
I recognise that this is indeed sarcasm. You're welcome, y'all.
When portuguese native speakers hear Italians speaking + the talking hands.
When I was working in Japan my boss told me about when his wife and daughter were travelling in China. One day they had to ask a passerby for directions when someone came up with the bright idea of pulling out a notepad and communicating via kanji. A basic level of mutual understanding was reached, directions were given and received, and everything ended happily.
That sounds like 筆談(conversation in writing) in the history of east Asia. People from China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam had different spoken languages, but they shared the same written characters(kanji/Hanzi), so they could communicate with each other with written words. I've heard that European people did similar things in the history, but in Latin.
@@alextsau that's probably true, vietnam was heavily influenced by china for a thousand years, there are native vietnamese characters based on chinese characters so that chinese people couldn't read.
@@alextsauits like in laos cambodia and thailand that has a border between themselves and in its writing the sketch is very similar as in Korea, Japan and China and historically it is linked even when the Khmer empire existed, these were annexed and culturally similar
I had this experience, my friend a Cantonese speaker , did exactly this, first time in Japan and communication via Han script.
And then they went to Nanjing.....💀
I’m a native Chinese speaker and “Cat blah Fish blah Food blah blah” is a pretty accurate way of describing how I read Japanese texts
You said what I want to say 😀
Yes
我学日语之前也是这样的。遇到全都是片假名、平假名的日语句子不知所措🤣
True…
well it's actually more seemed to have a possible meaning to guess, for example: plane blah blah blah _a character that looks like "take out" but it's actually not_ blah blah blah
8:05
It’s same when Japanese people try to read Chinese. For example...
我愛你 (It means “I love you” in Chinese.)
Japanese people can read 我 and 愛, but can’t read 你, so it’s like...
I love bla
I wonder if Japanese people will read “我爱你” as "My love bla".
wa ta shi (to) ai?
sou de su ga?
i learn japanese recently
actually, japanese don't use the character "你"
so it's like " me love ...what??"
but,since 我愛你 is famous Chinese sentence, almost every japanese understand the meaning and pronounciation.
It's like so many chinese knows the meaning of 愛してる.
@@ぴーあほ Oh, I didn't know 你 is not used in Japanese. Suprised as a one who learns both Japanese and Chinese. I just easily thought all chinese characters would shared of course eventhough I really haven't seen 你 in any Japanese senteces.
As a Chinese who has traveled to Japan, I will answer the last question of the video. I can basically understand road signs, signboards, place names, signs, etc. I can understand 50% of menus and product names. For news, I can guess the topic it discusses.
Why are there not more Chinese people who are bilingual in Japanese, or Japanese people who are bilingual in Chinese? I feel like I never hear about these people. Meanwhile in Europe it's very common to be bilingual or trilingual
@@FffffffffffffffffffffffffffffL In many European countries students learn English + another European language while in (I believe) most countries in Asia students only learn English as one foreign language
@@FffffffffffffffffffffffffffffL There's a similar situation in Brazil but even stranger because all of our neighbours are Spanish speakers, Spanish and Portuguese are quite intelligible, but bilingual Brazilians in Spanish are quite rare. Usually we learn only English as a foreign language, and those ones who want something else go to French.
so you can say bilingual or trilingual ? If we have not choose about langurage.Just like you probably can't understand me now, because I don't even know English
@Yin Enoch well, I think japanese language learners in China are quite hard to get our 助詞 to connect between sentence and sentence on the other hand for us unable to pronounce even learned each pin'in on your simplified 漢字
the visuals are consistent and adds up to the overall appeal. the appeal of being concise yet detailed. its very thought provoking and interesting. love the videos. nothing comes close to Langfocus. its my personal benchmark for linguistic studies and how projects should come out not as close to Paul san but it's definitely a goal.
Thanks. I just try to make good videos about things I’m interested in.
@@Langfocus thank you for the all the content you put out for all of us. the audiovisual narrative and information layout is totally astounding.
actually，most of the chinese from mainland have no trouble reading traditional Chinese characters.😂 I have no idea why we understand it without systemically learning it but that is the fact.
看得懂繁體的大陸小夥伴們舉手🙋🏻
因为小时候会看很多港台翻译的日本动漫，像数码宝贝、神奇宝贝之类的，也会看很多香港电影和台湾的综艺，再加上港台有很多歌手大陆人也很喜欢，因此潜移默化的就学会了大部分会常常用到的繁体字。
繁体完全看的懂，但是不会写
Probably just because the main base structure haven't changed so if someone from China(uses simplified) goes to Taiwan(uses traditional) would have no problem understanding I myself is one of them as well
不过还是看不惯台湾左到右上到下的中国传统写法
Annie L 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈是的 就莫名其妙的能看懂
大陆人都能看懂繁体字，只是不会写
As a native Cantonese Chinese who grew up in Australia, and also speak fluent Japanese, I have to say, this video is BY FAR the most accurate representation of the differences I have ever watched on TH-cam.
Thank you Paul, well done and please keep up the awesome work!
You ROCK dude!
To answer your question, I don't have much difficulty understanding Japanese anymore, but back when I was studying Japanese I just took a guess of the core meaning of the text by looking at the kanji first and then fill up the missing context with hiragana. It's quite convenient I must admit
However, the biggest hurdle is still the kunyomi...Chinese is often represented as onyomi, then there's keigo (OMG)
but hey! speaking English has a huuuuuge advantage! since I could translate most katagana directly =)
I totally agree
James Yan Not a native English speaker？ Only a native Cantonese speaker？
@@DD-oz9tj You can learn english later on =.=
@@ccpmustfall6445 名字很不错
Me: * Finally learns new language *
The native speaker I'm trying to communicate with: "Who are you and why do you want to eat my children"
Say thanks to Duolingo.
I swear that bird is gonna kill me because it's been 4 months since I haven't opened the app. Remember me when i get kidna-
_he didnt took his lessons so i took his life_
Transient Rain I will do my lessons! I swear!
*nani*
But that’s fine some Hong Kong people know English
@Shuriken Master r/woooosh
I am dumb.
Love the progression of the example sentences at the beginning:
私はタバコを吸わない：I don't smoke cigarettes
在室内不能描烟: Basically means "No smoking indoors"
警察: means police
The thai sentence means I'm in jail
Guess he didn't stick to not smoking huh lol.
Ha, funny easter egg for the few that could read them all. I can only read the Japanese one so I totally missed it.
It's 抽烟, not 描烟
Franklin Zhang 不知道那个是啥输入法
It is 抽 not 描
描烟 sounds like depicting a picture of cigarettes lol
My friend and I are Vietnamese, I've been self-studying Japanese for a few years and he just started learning Chinese at university. Sometimes when we are just chilling in Discord (maybe waiting for other friends, or we're about to go to bed) he would type some Chinese sentences he remember from his lessons and I would try to guess the meaning of those, and translate a few words into Sino-Vietnamese if I can. It's very interesting how similar (and different) the three languages are.
Koreans left the chat.
im a Chinese speaker and this "Cat bla fish bla food bla bla" really made my day. LOL
Yeah. I loved this example choice. Lol
I speak Japanese but I like trying to read Chinese websites.... Mission nearly impossible but it's fun!
Matthew Fairbairn As a Chinese speaker trying to read a Japanese website and determine is meaning is hard but fun! Kinda like a puzzle!
me dumb :p ww
Same here 🤣🤣🤣 literally burst out laughing
@@XiaoMof I do this a lot too, but I made sure to get a rudimentary understanding of Japanese grammar and some Japanese-only kanji so I don't run into 大丈夫 and get confused XD
THE CAT WAS EATEN BY A FISH
这只猫被一条鱼吃了。
猫はめっちゃ吃驚した！
The cat was very surprised!
Sharks are fish, so it could happen😂
@@JCLIAO007
這只貓被一條魚吃了。
一條魚把這只貓吃了。
一條魚吃了這隻貓。
魚吃貓
The cat bla eaten bla bla fish
日本人です。
私の母から聞いた話です。昔母がイギリスに留学した時、そこで中華系マレーシア人の友だちができたそうです。基本的にはお互い英語でコミュニケーションを取っていました。でも、母はその頃まだ英語が得意ではなかったため、コミュニケーションが難しかった時もあったそうです。そんな時は、漢字を書いて、筆談で話していたと聞きました。
実際私も子供の頃(もちろん英語は全く理解できなかった頃)、旅行の一環でロンドンのチャイナタウンに行った時、漢字を見てすごく安心したのを覚えています。それまでずっと読めない文字に囲まれていたので、少し読める文字を見た時にほっとしました。
钓鱼岛是中国的！
@@carlliu2552 这里没人说不是，友好交流应当是相互的。
😂@@carlliu2552
@@carlliu2552琉球乃中国之物
傻逼
the thai text in the beginning literally translates to “I am in prison” lmao
LOL
WHAT
hidden message lmao
😂😂😂
He abducted by the CCP
"You thought all Asian languages are the same? Racist!"
Haha, love the comedy in the beginning! LOL!
Феликсов Аарон Денисович that was awesome! 😂
Что???However,I think it's difficult for both Asian and West European to learn Russian.😂😂😂
Yah there's no comedy there. Let's not pretend that language is synonymous with ethnicity
Штоп, сто?
Russia is an Asia country right？So Russian is the Asian language too
Library in
Japanese : 図書館(Toshokan)
Chinese: 图书馆（Túshūguǎn）
Korean:도서관 (Doseogwan)
Everything in
Japanese: 全部(Zenbu)
Chinese:全部(quánbù）
Korean:전부(jeonbu)
Interesting.
This only proves the point on pronunciation similarities because the modern word for library in Chinese is a borrowed word from Japanese. 图书馆 is a Japanese-invented noun reverse adopted in China in 1896.
@@wanxinmike Not true. ‘图书馆’ these three characters are actually Chinese. Do your own research.
@@xxxppp4741 Of course the characters are Chinese. What I'm saying is that the terminology is Japanese. Why don't you do more research instead?
kabigon the pronounciation is determined by the characters in the borrowing country, hence the similarity proved the common roots of the characters. You should check. This TH-camr also said how the pronunciation was determined when it is borrowed
kabigon check 10:41.
This is a great video and it is very educational, thank you for making this! :)
However, for more educational purposes:
1:29 老实 means "Honest", not "Naive". Maybe you can interpretate it as the person is too honest that they become naive, but 老实 means Honest literally.
3:32 Actually, you can add a “了 ( Le )” or “过 ( Guò )” inside to show you have already done that action!
Examples are:
我去了学校 = I went to school
我去学校了 = I have went to school
我去过学校了 = I have already went to school
I went to school. Past tense went
I have gone to school. Past participle tense gone etc.
Jp: 手袋 (glove)
Ch: 手袋 (hand bag)
Jp: 家庭 (household)
Ch: 家庭 (family)
Jp: 迷路 (maze)
Ch: 迷路 (lost (in a place))
Jp: 我慢 (patience)
Ch: 我慢 (I'm slow)
Jp: 大家 (landlord)
Ch: 大家 (everyone)
Jp: 床 (floor)
Ch: 床 (bed)
🆕
Jp: 私 (I)
Ch: 私 (Private)
Jp: 顔 (Face)
Ch: 颜 (Color) *There is a different word*
But, in Japanese
手さげ袋(te sage bukuro)=hand bag!
@@sidu9326 In Chinese, 手提袋 also means hand bag.
Sounds interesting!
Gloves in Chinese : 手套 shǒu tào（shou3 tao4）
I mean, it makes sence
Cause 手means Hand
I'm Chinese, I have no problem reading the text on the cover of Japanese porn.
tiansun li xiao si wo le
Sit down! Chen duxiu
厉害了
陈独秀你坐下
lmfao, (internet slang in English)
I am Chinese, and I am shocked a foreigner can understand both Chinese and Japanese so well. What you said it's all true, especially the part of Chinese people read Japanese: "cat bla bla fish bla bla food", totally agree! Your video just fantastic.
You are also speaking the language of Britain bro, love from India
It's kind of like when an English person tries to read Spanish. Like for the sentence "I call the police" in Spanish would be "
Llamó a la policía". To an english speaker this just looks like blah blah the police.
Also you were surprised how much a foreigner knew Chinese, but I live in the US, you speak better English than some of the native people here. 😂😂😂😂😂
@@少康战情妇-e6i 制杖别在这秀好吗？读不懂英文吧
@@少康战情妇-e6i 他给up主说的，up是加拿大人，用英文没问题啊
japan jackas 你是外国人吧，你这段话语法有问题，根本没法被读懂
The phrase "我去学校" mentioned in video 3:37 in general Chinese means the present tense, which is "I go to school", while "我去了学校" correctly means "I went to school",The character "了" is important.
No
近代的旹候才出现这种鬼东西，白话文没有任何语法变化
尤其是葉聖陶搞的好事😅😅😅
@@loser_CaO 请问我提到的和葉聖陶有什么联系？我不知道这背后的故事，能否大致说一下
@@loser_CaO 但为什么中国大陆几乎所有官话地区都会习惯性在口语里加上“了”，这个推广过程也太快了吧😮，在古籍里一般不会加“了”，我感觉在古籍里会在行为动词前加上“已”比如：“昔人已乘黄鹤去”
@@Earnestboy-bw1jj 你不知道？
Chinese people like me who was educated all the things in simplify Chinese have no trouble to recognize traditional Chinese charaters. it's basically same to us to read, and type, just a little bit hard to hand writting
sylviasummerful Because Chinese is not my native language, I can recognize what traditional characters' simplified counterparts are quite often, but probably not as much as you. How long have you been learning English by the way?
Caleb McCall almost all the Chinese students in my age was force to learn English from middle school. but what we acturally learned from classes are nothing to use. For me, I start to speak English seriously since I met my boyfriend 1 year ago, who is a native American, Chinese blood and learned Japaness before :) He had trouble with learning Chinese between recognize charators and words, he can read some if charator comes individually, but when they are combine together, he always make me laughing :D
It took me 2 weeks to figure out simplified chinese characters, when I was in millitary.
I don't believe you know how to write in bopomofo
繁体字我放在句子里认识百分之99没有问题，拿出来就只能认识七成了。写的话感觉很少
These days, Ariana Grande's tatoo "七輪" is bringing a lot of fuss on the 'net. The Japanese are laughing a lot because it means "barbecue" (precisely, a small barbecue to be placed on the table), but in Mandarin it means "Seven Rings".
「七」means “seven” in both Mandarin and Japanese, the misunderstanding lies on the second character 「輪」, in modern China it means “cycle”, “wheel”, etc. and in Japanese it means “ring”. Japanese people find the tattoo funny because 「七輪」is a brand of barbecue oven in Japanese(imagine someone have a “Seven Eleven” tattoo, seven is ok and so is eleven, but “Seven Eleven” just reminds you of a convenient store). I’m a native Chinese and the first time I saw her tattoo I thought it represented “seven cycles(of life)”, because “seven wheels” sounded too ridiculous.😂😂😂
Wouldn't it need a measure word?
and this is why you don't wanna be edgy and put random "cool meaning" kanji tattoos on your body. unless you're a native of course.
@@sophiajune546 Not in Chinese. It functions as it's own measure word. Really depends on intended meaning though
She could have made it in Chinese, not Japanese
chinese here. when someone hands me a japanese product, i can pretty much read the directions and get an idea what that product is for, and how to use it.
C Park you made my day
C Park u got the point bro
JAVs tend to have Chinese Subtitles. Good for us ^^.
你们这些人讨论了半天，我就想知道你们有没有看过行书，草书还有我的“鬼画符”。大体结构和笔画相似，意思就不会差太远。。。另外，想知道你们看的懂甲骨文的吧。
Minjut Ge 看不懂
Good job,you have explained clearly on the difference and similarity of Chinese and Japanese language,thanks!
I don't speak Japanese but I know Cantonese and mandarin. some times, when I watch videos in Japanese on TH-cam, I can understand like 30 to 40 % of what is being said as there are always some Kanji or Chinese characters on the screen to aid me along the way on my understanding. it helps a lot.
Being Chinese a language very different from English in vocabulary and everything else. Has it been difficult for you to learn English?
@@mariacastaneda77 not very
@@mariacastaneda77 personally , it's still easy to learn English, i think a junior high schools student can communicate fluently if sufficiently exposure are take in our english lessons
There's actually this funny phrase called "大丈夫" which in Chinese meant "Manly man". However in Japanese, it meant "are you okay?". It was extremely confusing when I saw it in japanese text the first time.
also 天地無用 :D
I guess if a man isn't ok, he won't seem so manly anymore.
jonah wu 帝王切开
Khong Kok Wai 大丈夫大丈夫，不大丈夫大丈夫😂
Davin Cher hahaha! That made laugh :D
Thank you ancient chinese people for inventing Kanji(Chinese character).
As a japanese, it's a little bit difficult to learn, but once we acquire it, it's very useful. I'm really appreciating it.
我是日本人。我愛中国。偉大國家。
☮️ peace
a ri ga to gu sei i ma su!!! We love you too...
Anncient japanese language EVOLVED and absorbed many other japanic around. (Japan is NOT always populated by japanese, several aren't japanese, but they are absorbed to the ponit only few dozens live today)
l am Chinese,but l love Japanese.Now l am learning it
Sinian Fang
I love you too, I learned putonghua so I am learning cantonese now. Wish you a good luck.
Great video!
As a Japanese, I can't think of a life without Kanjis.
A sentence made only by Hiragana and Katakana is a literal hell😭
日本人跟慰安妇道歉
im a Japanese learner and I agree kanjis are very important to text
Could I ask if, like, a sentence made only using Kanji could exist?
@@The_OriX_LoLNot in modern japanese.
钓鱼岛是中国的！
I remember that when I was a child, there wasn't a Chinese version of most Nintendo games that existed, so the games my family had were mostly in Japanese (I couldn't read English back to that time). Since my family and I could neither speak Japanese, we guessed the meaning of dialogues by Kanji entirely. That feeling was strange that I didn't understand the meaning of 90% but from those fragmental pieces of Kanji, I can roughly know what I ought to do the next step.
What was the videogame system you were playing?
I heard early videogames couldn't handle kanji, so they used kana (with spaces).
@@VieiraFi 8 bits couldn't, but 16 bits could (not every kanji but at least a sufficent amount)
pokemon
So you could see like :step 1 blah blah blah jump blah blah blah
@@BabySonicGT I believe communist China made everyone believe Chinese isn’t related to Japanese. Even the internet follows this propaganda. Even China got rid of characters recently that is now exclusive to Koreans and Japanese. The guy is good here but he was brainwashed.
as a Chinese, like you said, I can read the sentence in your example just like cat bla fish bla eat bla bla
Hongjin Yang hahaha
7:40 "The cat plans to eat fish.
The cat was eaten by a fish."
Poor cat 😂 something went wrong with his planning.
It was a big fish.
Pedro Schmitz fish like a shark or something
Yeah unfortunately sometimes even this situation might happen😄
Still a better story than Twilight.
For a moment I thought i must have misheard😂
I speak beginner-intermediate Japanese and referring to your 8:20 part, I also had the same experience when I went to Taiwan. I speak pretty much zero Mandarin/Chinese but I survived due to my Kanji knowledge, at least I can order food and use the MRT. 😂 The fact that Japanese Kanji is based from Traditional Chinese which is used in Taiwan (and also HK) is super helpful too!
中国大陆在1956年之前一直以来都是使用繁体字，后面为了减少文盲，才开始推行简体字，但是香港、澳门、台湾还是保留的繁体字的使用
This is a very under appreciated channel.
yup
Your understanding of the difference between Japanese and Chinese are quite right and I appreciate the way you explain it based on your vast knowledge about language. One addition is that japanese way of pronouncing Chinese characters are quite different as you explained but Japanese, especially high ranked people before Meiji reformation could read Chinese perfectly by some technique called Kanbun, even though phonetic way is Japanese but could understand the meaning of Chinese sentences. Kanbun is still taught in high school, especially studying Chinese Poems. Thank you.
Hi Mr, just wondering if I may ask, why would Japanese school teach Chinese Poems?
Chinese shcool also teach western poems, and japanese article
Because it's classical literature .We also learn about western civilization. Knowledge belongs to the human race.
why not ? In Korea, higher education still remains studying of Chinese literature and writting system. This language had influenced Korean and Japanese for centuries. It's just so resourceful to learn, and it's a treasure of the entire mankind.
In Western schools, many Eastern topics are briefly touched upon or adapted. China acts much like Rome does in the West, so in school it kind of seems like learning one's roots.
As a Chinese who speaks Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese and Japanese (and many other languages), I want to say that Japanese pronunciation is closer to Shanghainese than Cantonese.
That's reasonable! They face Shanghai, not Canton!
I’m a bit curious if Japanese is closer to Hokkien (福建話，閩南語）
I ’ｍ a Japanese. I think, it's not an accidental matter. According to an old Chinese history book(三国志魏書第三十巻東夷伝烏丸鮮卑東夷伝倭人条) 、ancient Japanese had very similar culture and customs to that of old southern Chinese kingdoms(呉or越). A Japanese ethnologist Prof. Kenzaburo Torigoe analyzed that such ancient Japanese people (or what are called “Yayoi-jin”弥生人) were originally emigrants from Lower Yangtze area and Japanese nation’s name in character”倭”was supposedly came from the kingdom’s name”越”.
I agree. I would say when a Chinese tries to learn/speak Japanese. Shanghai dialect speakers tend to have the closest pronunciation right off the bat. Cantonese is a lot more nasally and isn't as close to Japanese in comparison.
@@ganjer63 Of course. The closer geographically the closer the language and customs.
I'm a native speaker of both, and wow this summary is amazingly accurate! Thanks Paul, you made my day!
Maybe just one comment about the tone: I think the Japanese language is somehow tonic, not in a linguistic sense (they still get the meaning) but there is certainly a natural tone for each word/sentence (... and yes some are pretty picky about it). There are also a few cases where you can only differentiate the words by tone (e.g. kaki: 柿/persimmon (accent on "ki") vs 牡蠣/oyster (accent on "ka") e.g. hashi: 橋/bridge (accent on "shi") vs 箸/chop sticks (accent on "ha")) but they are indeed super rare.
Yeah, there is something in Japanese called pitch accent (高低アクセント), which is technically part of the word, and a different accent can indicate that it’s a different word with a different meaning. But in context they almost never cause confusion. Like, if I say I’m going to eat an あめ and I use the pitch accent for “rain”, you’ll still know that I mean “candy”.
And of course, the pitch accents differ depending on the region. I often discuss certain words with my Japanese wife and her parents, and there’s often a debate over which accent is correct, or whether a certain accent is standard or dialectal, etc.
Take the word 勉強 as an example
Japanese: study
Chinese: forcing oneself / reluctant
I mean those are basically the same words
大丈夫
Japanese：(it’s) fine / okay
Chinese: big husband or big grown-up man
别勉强自己了
Or "barely" in Chinese
@@yz293 ye I was pretty shocked when I was in my weeb phase trying to type japanese with romaji and the word is completely different meaning in Chinese
How similar are Japanese and Chinese...
Me: *HARD*
Actually, he should have mentioned some Chinese dialects rather than only Mandarin. Shanghainese is the dialect that most similar to Japanese. Cantonese, Fujianese, and Hokkien are also more similar to Japanese than Mandarin.
Remember, Chinese is not just a single language.
@@RC-sc5li Late but Hokkien and Fujianese are basically the same I am from Fujian and I just call it Hokkien more specifically I am from Fuzhou there isn't really a closest language(still debated) but I personally believe Hokkien is the closest
@@RC-sc5li "Cantonese and Hokkien are more similar to Japanese than Mandarin"
That's just not true... If anything Cantonese is more similar to Vietnamese than Japanese
@@johndoe5346 粵語 閩南語和國語具有親屬關係
In my opinion I think Chinese is harderr
I feel so proud of myself for getting all four of the questions right at the beginning.
same lol
myowncomputerstuff I failed the last one, thought it was sanskrit not Thai.
Dibe_007 A good trick to distinguish a South Asian language like Sanskrit is to look for a continuous horizontal line, with most of the character features being below the lines (not above, like Arabic).
For example
Hindi: क्या हाल है?
Nepali: तिमीलाई कस्तो छ?
Punjabi: ਤੁਸੀ ਕਿਵੇਂ ਹੋ?
To quickly point out Thai, notice the many tiny circles on the characters (often referred to as "heads"), not all fonts include the heads on the characters, but if they do, you can be sure it is Thai. Without the heads, it may be easier to mix up with other Southeast Asian abugidas like Lao and Khmer.
myowncomputerstuff oh thanks
i did lose confidence when it was the two kanji tho. i need to study more.
The meaning of “I went to school “, usually expressed in Chinese is “我去过学校了” or “我去了学校”. “I have gone to school “ usually express in Chinese is “我已经去过学校了”.
“我去过学校了”和“我已经去过学校了”是相同意思的，都是“l have gone to shool ”。“我去学校了”更符合“l went to shool"
@@peoplestreamoffish3258 我去过学校了更好，native Chinese speaker here
To say "I went to school" in Chinese, you would say:
我去了學校。
(wǒ qù le xuéxiào)
With the character "了 (le)", indicating the complete past of the action.
Ohh I thought it dis characters
学校
for school I guess thats is traditional then and the other is simplifed. Even in Japanese we use the 学校
@@foxtail7363 actually some of the Japanese words are borrowed to create simplified Chinese
@@foxtail7363 you're right its 学校 but he right it in complicated character
我去過學校 aslo works well
Finally there is an answer to that part, I don’t think he understand how Chinese work completely but he has some good points.
as a japanese I could say that I can understand almost 60〜70% of chinese text.
In many cases, simplified chinese character confuses me but I strangely like to guess what that mystery kanji initially was lol
This is because Chinese characters used to be written in many ways, for example, the country, it can be written into 国、圀、國、囻、囯 in the past. Smplified Chinese 国 is just one of its forms, is not created by the CCP.
For the same, the Dragon 龙， can be also written in 龙龒龍竜 in the ancient Chinese... maybe the 竜 is most popular than 龙龒龍 in Tang Dynasty...
At the same time the cross in 渋 is very ugly and confusing for native Chinese speakers, no matter mainland China, Taiwan or Hong Kong
Cause it's a strange simplification out of nowhere,
Similar examples like the three dots upon 桜
@@蔡徐坤油管分坤 some of them picked form exists before, but many of simplified words are just made up and nonsense. the worst thing is to simplified some completely different words into a single character just because they pronounce the same. Like 發髮are totally not related, but they are all simplified to 发
简体字大部分来自草书体
I'm from Japan and speak Japanese Thai and Chinese. I think that your remark that Chinese has no tense is not correct. Chinese actually has some tenses like 去了(went) 去过(have gone) 去着 (have just gone) as Thai has some tenses like ไปแล้ว (went) เคยไป (have gone) เพิ่งไป (have just gone) . They are grammatically corresponding but their meanings are slightly different, though.
As Suki L.P mentioned in this comment, Chinese has a complicated tense system. (So is Thai, actually.) The idea about time is different from English so it is often difficult to translate to English as simple one-to-one relation. Anyways they do have tense systems.
にほんごは better than ちゆうごくご （すみません, わたしの けえたい doesn't have the small letter thingy)
Depends on how you define tense. From what I understand as an applied linguist, tense in a narrow sense refers to the series of inflections one can add to the infinitive form of a word to render it meanings of something happened in the past. 去了, 去过, 去着 all denote something happened in the past that is correct. But notice when you construct these expressions you actually add an additional word to 去 instead of adding something to the word 去 itself. It is true that you can easily describe something that happened in the past easily in Chinese. But that definition to tenses, I wouldn't say there are tenses in Chinese.
It's the same as that there is not future tense in English. You use "will" or "would" or "may" etc. to express the meaning that something is going to happen instead of adding an inflection to the infinitive form of the word to achieve the same effect, like you could do with the past tense (eg. walk (present tense) -> walk-ed (past tense).
Get it?
yeah， he missed the chinese words for tense. In chinese these words are 副词。
@@helen6627 I don't blame him (well maybe I do), another lay person attempting to claim he knows more than a linguist in the realm of linguistics/the study of languages.
The phenomenon of "returned loan words" is so interesting to me. Especially as a native English speaker learning Japanese, and seeing words like "waifu" and "karaoke" that have made their way back to English as a Japanified version of the original English word.
Karaoke is english word? :/
@@lpi3 karaoke comes from the Japanese word 'karappo', which means empty, and 'okesutura', which is a loan word from the English "orchestra".
@@augustawind69 Thank you, I didn't know that. The greek origin of 'orchestra' makes this phenomenon even more impressive. I don't have any doubts that there is karaoke in Greece :) This means that word made interesting journey :)
"the cat was eaten by a fish" - paul 2016
con mèo ăn cá
Well it is possible if it was a pirranha
CloudQuake ! Why not, when a shark can eat a man (Shark is a fish too).
Large catfish can swallow a cat.
Gaming Corrupt Tiếng Việt!
As a native Chinese speaker, the examples of pronunciation you just mention"家庭" and "死亡" are very similar to us. Even though the western alphabets look like different.
家庭 in Cantonese (ga ten) is more similar to Japanese (ka tei) than Mandarin (Jia ting)
bc there is a pattern of sound changes. 死亡 in cantonese is sei mong so ei becomes i and the ng sound wilk become a long vowel of o (nearly no exception).
m in chinese changes to b in japanese too
I'm Japanese. When I look at Chinese text, I feel I can understand almost all of the meaning. But it would be often totally wrong after getting it. This is because there're so many words that have the same kanji but completely different meaning between Chinese and Japanese. For instance, "大丈夫" means "It's OK" in Japanese, but "full-fledged man" in Chinese. Sorry for my poor English.
Lorosa'e Very interesting,when I look at Japanese text,I often only get a general idea.The more kanji ,the more details I get.
@Jacky Chew
Dude, do you have a problem with Japanese using Kanji? You've written who knows how many comments that basically say the same thing: that Japanese might as well abandon the use of Kanji. It comes off as ridiculous and insecure.
Lorosa'e your English is no poor!
You're right. But when I was in Tokyo I would not be lost since I can understand the meaning of the road signs. I'm a Chinese.
Quadronnn, do you think koreans are ridiculous and insecure? They did exactly that.
You saying it comes off as ridiculous and insecure comes off as ridiculous and insecure, by the way.
I remember I was hanging out with my Asian friends, and we did this experiment. I would whisper something to my Chinese Malaysian friend adn she would write it, and then my Japanese friend would read it and say it loud back in English. Most of the time the meaning was intact.
The video has deep knowledge.
Even I, a Japanese, learned so much.
Thank you! I’m glad to hear that. 見て下さってあろがとうございます。🙇♂️
我中国人，多学
I felt the same when I watched his video about Russian.
Why is your name AA
Franz Xaver Flötze
我日本人、我学多事
I am Japanese. I very much enjoyed the video. I can probably understand 50% of what is written in Chinese. It took some time to be used to simplified Chinese, though.
But native Chinese don't seem to have any trouble reading both, I wonder why, quite curious.
@@jayeden3532 有很多关键词都有汉字，如果有些用平假名写就不好认了，得专门学习了
确实如此
Jay E
Japanese people need to learn how the characters are simplified in China. Chinese People probably have some exposure to the traditional characters, so they may have an easier time grasping the core meanings.
@@jayeden3532 Maybe traditional Chinese is in the DNA of every Chinese. LOL
Japanese and Korean words borrowed from Chinese sound similarly. But original words in both languages are quite different. This is also interesting.
true
and Vietnamese does the same
the meaning of some Chinese characters have been changed today, compared with the acient time
The way you explained and elaborated is so detailed and professional.
One small mistake: the word "歴史"(history) derives from Chinese and is borrowed into Japanese, instead the opposite mentioned in the video
Correctly speaking "史" was the traditional expression for history in China. According from Wiki, '史' is commonly used in China and the use of '歴史' is barely found. But, by chance, a Chinese book with "歴史" in title (歴史網鑑補 by 袁黄 of 明) were imported to Japan, (maybe) widely read by the intelligentsia and then the usage had spread. Afterword, it was also used as the translation of the 'history', and then the usage imported back to China. As far as the video concerns "歴史" as the translation of the western idea of 'history', it's not much wrong.
It is the same for the word, '共和' (republic). Japanese translator back then took this word from a period in 周 dynasty when two ministers governed together without monarch. It can be said the word was 'borrowed' from China, but the usage was 'invented' in Japan.
@@ryotakus.1560 The western books were first translated by Japanese and spreaded into Asian cultures, true. That means Japanese chose the corresponding characters for western terms. But I would not say these are new terms at all. For example, history is not a new term at all in Chinese or Japanese culture, right? They were using one character 史 or 歴 in different contexts all the time for over 2000 years. I am sure, the ancient Chinese would have no problem understanding the term "歴史" however they didn't write in that wasterful manner most of the time because of expensive writing materials. The same as "'共和", it is a good choice of characters and word, but it is not creating new word or new idea at all. I think Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji is so similar, it doesn't make sense to really say whether a word is translated to Kanji or to Hanzi. Between Hanzi and Kanji, there is no import or export possible because people can read them as one language, if there is, it is just boring political patriotism.
@@ryotakus.1560 Why is history a western idea?
@@种花-t9f history in western is from greek word historie
meanwhile asia have tons "history" words
历史, kasaysayan, 歴史, sejarah, 역사, etc
I go to school 我去学校
I went to school 我去 了 学校
Mark Luo lol quite true tho
It should be 我上过学校 but those work too
right
I can see that the difference between those two sentences is the use of “le” which is the particle of Completion which you simply inserted into the middle of the sentence.
Eh... If you use"I went to school" to express "I got education (those years)", it's much better to say 我上过学.
As a native speaker of Chinese, personally I suggest that 我去学校 lay more emphasis on the action of going from home to school.
I'm studying Japanese. I'm still at a fairly beginner level but I do know a lot of N5 & N4 kanji. When I went to the local Chinese market, I picked up a newspaper in Chinese and was able to get the basics of an article. I even asked the lady behind the counter if I was correct. Turns out for most of it, I was.
Killing two birds with one stone eh
i once read a technical manual for Japanese world war 2 Zero fighter when I was working in DC during my college summer break; to my surprise, it was almost entirely written in Chinese (although the sentence construction was kind of like reading Chinese old text). I was in China with my parents during my early teens so I had no problem reading the manual. My friend, who were pretty fluent in Japanese, couldn’t make out what the manual was saying, and we read later in US navy documents that their Japanese experts had great difficulty understanding it as well. One part I remember clearly even today was the engine start sequence, which contained many words my Japanese speaking friend told me she had never studied. Apparently it was written in a prewar technical Japanese to assert elite status of engineering department (almost like writing a manual entirely in Latin to show how educated you are.
The fact that Japanese was a lot more complicated and kanji-heavy pre-1946 probably also contributed to that lol
Japan is a subsidiary of China in the Tang Dynasty and has studied Chinese culture for many years
Chinese old text っていうのは、日本でいう漢文のことを言うてるんかな？
@@adzumahaya I think it means classical Chinese，the Chinese before the 20th century
@@fluckyu7 like 文言文？
As a Chinese teacher I could tell you it is not 100% correct. We use "了“ to indicate something happen in the past. I went to school is 我去学校了 / 我去了学校。 Where to place the "了” could be very tricky. It is depends on what the second part of the sentence might be. Putting the "了“ before school (the subject) normally dedicates you want to explain what has happened after you went to school. If your sentence ends at I went to school, you normally put the “了” right after the subject “school” . However, you could also use ”了“ with future tense sentences, such as things are about to happen. Such as It is about to rain, I am about to arrive, and etc. My students found it very hard to master ”了“, and I totally agree with them.
Professional
要下雨了
既然您特意强调了自己是汉语老师，我就必须得登个号更正一下。您能分清“我去过学校”和“我去了学校”的区别吗？前者很明显是表示过去发生了什么事，而后者表示过去发生的动作已经完成了。“我养过花”和“我养了花”，哪一个表示的是过去的状态？哪一个表示对现在的影响？完成了完成了，“了”这个字很明显是完成时的标志好不好。I have gone to school/I have been to school 我去学校了/我去了学校，这么翻译一一对应，有什么问题？您说这个“了”也可以表示将来要发生的事情，好啊没错，英语中不是有个将来完成时么？I will have finished the work/我就要完成了，有没有问题？
人们只是平常说话习惯加个“了”，是不是过去时还得看有没有“过”好吧。继续说“我去了学校”，完整的表达可以是“我去过了学校”，不是吗？“过”这个字才真正指代过去时。使用“了”是出于习惯，不代表完成时就是过去时。本人阅历可能不够，但是“过”和“了”的用法还是能分清的。希望您在教授外国学生的时候，能更严谨认真一点。
Suki L.P He was showing us who know English if we saw 7 cans we'd know it means 7 and nothing else, I'm sure 😑.
结尾的字其实是。只不过懒人把它写成。
The thai word in this video 0.27 mean "I'm in jail" lol
MrPob Pob do you make that bubbles in the latters when you write it??
魏振雄 你要 A cup还是B cup有没有C cup?
Ahmad Al_shanqeety Formally, Yes. You could ignore them when you write fast or for some artistic intention like font designing and we still recognize the letter fine. But it's informal. They said Thai letters are invented for carving in stone first. The bubble which we call the letter's "head" is always where you start to write the letter. Because it's where you punch a dot first before starting to punch stroke away from that point. But the writing in late 600-800 years are mostly by heat iron write on dried palm leaves book, The fonts are evovle from dot to circular starting point.
ใช่ อยู่ดีๆขึ้นมาว่า ผมอยู่ในคุก โคตรตกใจ 55555
我在监狱 ，太可笑了，ตลกมากครับ ผมนี่ยืนขึ้นเลย
8:50 This is my favourite part about the Chinese language. As a bookworm it's pretty extreme. There are plenty of words I'd not know how to pronounce but can get by understanding them in a text well enough. It's probably mind boggling to people who've never learnt such a language. Maybe it's controversial, but to me Chinese is a written language first, and a spoken language second.
i speak japanese, and oftentimes at work i'm asked to translate something that turns out to be in chinese. the experience ends well for no one involved.
Kirigiri Kyouko they see same characters(kanji,hanja,hanzi,Chinese characters),and then they turn to you
interesting experience
I myself as a native Chinese speaker had similar experience when using google translate to tranlate Japanese Kanji and it just deteced it as Chinese and spitted out the same characters in return. So I now always translate them into English.
they used to abandon kanji after WW2 but then they give up
by the way, for example,
the sketch contest in school . and
jizz in the mouth contest is same pronounced in japanese
cat bla fish bla food bla bla
it was brilliant! ))
I laughed so hard when I heard that
cat blyat fish blyat food blyat blyat
+Don Carlo I hear exactly such convos on the street every day.
LOOOOOL
I’m simply amazed to see around me how many non-Japanese speak Japanese fluently after they’ve put in only a few 100 hours of studying it... It took me full three decades to become able to speak and write English. I’m Japanese. And the beauty of the Chinese language always charms me greatly.
As someone who is studying Japanese since 3 years now I can assure you that unless you’re Korean, Chinese or Taiwanese it will take a long, long time to learn Japanese as a Westerner.
I‘m now at the point where I can fluently read NHK Easy articles or play Ace Attorney (a Visual Novel) on my Switch ( tho I have to look up words for every sentence)
Honestly I think it‘ll take me many more years to understand anime or something like that^^
On a related note, your English is great👍
@@luxy9530 how long have you been studying? I'm 5 months in and Did rtk and the first 2 tango decks and I'm moving of from NHK easy article's since their too easy
I don't think it is the case haha. I have studied Japanese for about 6 years to get to a shaky N2 level. That's more than a few hundred hours. But tbf I'm a terrible lazy student. I do know people that have done it faster but generally it takes at least 3 years to get to a comfortable level as far as I can see.
Congrats~!
@@luxy9530 I understood anime growing up as a kid cuz I was brought up that way its only the super hard stuff I dont get, haha I find reading is way way harder I spent years and years of work, it surprises me that I see so many people who haven't grown up with Japanese can use so many kanji many that I do not know and those who havent necessarily spent as long as me, however I often see really bad grammar structures in use. Unless they are very advanced in which they might use certain structures that I tend not to. I also see people writing Japanese in english structures or using too many pronouns when those don't matter so much in Japanese. I know people who learn Japanese without the kanji though purely for speaking or even just write almost everything in hiragana.
I’ve been learning Japanese for the past few months and let me tell you, it was a huge confidence boost when I could immediately recognize which was Chinese or Japanese, I also relatively understood a handful of examples from memory!
これ日本人が見ても面白いな
两个日本人看见脸上开心？纯自行理解的，是这个意思嘛？
外国人視点で自分の国を見るのって面白いよな(笑)
@@我的小鹿在哪里 ¿Por qué respondes en Chino a una pregunta en Japonés?
@@我的小鹿在哪里 不是即使是日本人看这个也很有意思的
雅咩爹 You know?🤣
Sounds like the role of Chinese words in Japanese is very much like French words in English. In a way also the writing, since so many French words are recognizable to an English speaker in print, but are pronounced very differently, e.g. point, centre
other examples: différence, correction, alphabet, and many other nouns that end with 'tion'
I like your idea. But I would say, by writing e.g. vocabularies there are more similar/identical words between the Chinese/Japanese languages. While in English and French, the similarities are less recognizable by the pronunciation, but only by writing.
Sorta. Except English is really close to French both being Hindo-European. With English being helpful for learning French and vice-versa, it is not just that the 60% of the complicated words in English are romance/French-derived. It is also that French often uses similar grammar to English to express things.
I am going to do something
Je vais faire quelque chose
Where is my cat?
Où est ma chatte? (Yep, in Alice the cat was female).
The French are tolerant of lovers
Les Français sont tolérants des amoureux
There is no such luxury in the Sino-Japanese pair.
:)
Common ancestry may still mean fairly different grammar. Russian vs English (both "derived" from PIE over the ages) makes a good example. Languages do share a lot of Swadesh in simple words -- but use different basic constructs. Like, Russian is notorious for lack of use of modal verbs. There is totally no "to be" and "to have" in modern Russian, up to the point "I have something" in Russian being expressed with something like "At mine, there is" (у меня есть).
Actually I would say french words in english still sound very similar cause mostly the word origin both from latin. Chinese and Japanese loanwords as well as the pronounciation differ more from each other.
8:52
汉字系统在中国正是起到了这么一个作用：即使是中国存在很多不同的发音方式（大量的方言），但是使用同一套汉字系统书写出的文字资料可以很容易的表意与传播。
换句话说，汉字系统可以帮助执不同语言者相互传递信息。
Yes
No
所以秦始皇伟大的一点就是车同轨书同文啊
@@cathys2307 正相反，这正是秦皇对吾族后世残暴的要点。
@@lumingguo7228 有利有弊吧
The video is far more informative (and interesting) then I was expecting
I’m glad to hear that!
I've heard some native English speakers take "than" for "then" because they remember by sound and this is my first time to see "then" is really used instead of "than"
"The cat was eaten by a fish" broke my focus
You know shark is a fish too
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️💀
'cat bla fish bla food bla bla' cracked me up XD
I speak japanese, and thinking on learning chinese. this video encourages me to do that. thanx!
Wow！你现在汉语学得怎么样啦？
：）
Jacky Chew that doesn’t give u the excuse of not learning Chinese
Jacky Chew why would anyone learn Chinese for the sake of learning another language? He wants to learn Chinese and just let him do. You are nobody to tell him not to. Did he ever mention about learning Chinese using the knowledge of Japanese..? No? So chill out. And talking about standard.. what exactly do you mean? Social status? Pls define your meaning of “standard “thanks
Diq＠ディック btw are you from Malaysia ?
Jacky Chew Do you have a personal grudge against the Chinese language or something? You've said essentially the same thing across multiple comments. No one's forcing you to learn Chinese if you don't want to. Let other people learn Chinese or whatever language they want to. You can argue that the Chinese language may have many fundamental flaws within its structure, but learning a new language (especially one that's the most widely spoken in the world) can be an extremely valuable asset that can open opportunities for many people.
During the Jomon Era (BC8,000-BC300), the Japanese had already the Japanese Language. But it was a speaking language and had no writing systems. During the succeeding Yayoi Era (BC300-AD500), Chinese characters (Kanji) were imported to express the Japanese language in Kanji letter writings. Therefore, one Kanji letter has multiple pronunciations (one akin to the Chinese and the other akin to the Japanese). During the succeeding Asuka and Heian Periods (6th-12th century), Hiragana and Katakana were invented to better express the Japanese language of the time. Many poems, novels, war histories were written during the latter half of the Heian Era and succeeding Kamakura period (12th - 15th century).During the succeeding Edo Period (16th - 19th century) as the literacy rate reached beyond 90%, the pre-modern day Japanese language was formed.
Jomom Language is not Japonic Language. Yayoi is ancestor of Japonic Language Family
You did't give an example about the same word with same charactors but diffrent meaning.
for eg.
大丈夫
CN: da zhang fu - be a great man
JP: daijoubu - No problem
勉強(JP,T-CN) 勉强(S-CN)
CN: mian qiang - Do something with difficulty or only reached deadline
JP: benkyou - Study
By the way . Both of these words . There is some English words of the meaning for Japanese, but doesn't have (or hard to translate to) any words for Chinese. That's beautiful.
China: name something diffcult to do
Japan: Study
While in Cantonese, 勉強 means impose upon or force
面白 真面目 金玉滿堂
大丈夫 refers to the teaching of Meng Zi 孟子. To be a great man. When it was carried to Japan, it referred to the exact same thing, and overtime its usage evolved to meaning no problem, eg, 彼は大丈夫から (because) he is a great man => therefore he has no problems => he is alright.
Its also worth mentioning that many Japanese vocabularies are written in Kanji that have nothing to do with the meaning of the words. Eg, 泥棒 thief, kanji meaning mud stick. This was done because the どろぼう can be broken into どろ mud and 棒 stick. Id imagine the reason of doing so is to save space on scripts and such.
Hi! I'm Japanese. I love Chinese cuz I love Chinese charactors!
I love Japan because of your food and culture. Everything is decent
Qian Liu me too.
Hi! I am chinese and I love japan because of the delicate food culture and imaginative animes.
你的名字很好听，in Chinese is called"gong xia you xi"，很美
hi，我是中国人，希望中日韩友好发展，不要被政治搞得互相敌视
oh man, I love that "cat bla fish bla eat blabla", it is so good to understand how does a chinese feel by reading japanese. And also it makes me laugh.
I know, it's extremely funny, but it's true!
+Harmony Lucis as a chinese, i wNNA say its true!haha
cuteguy498 Well I'm a chinese too ^_^
so for example and for fun this:
鳥インフルエンザにかかった鳥の羽や粉末状になったフンを吸い込んだり
for us Chinese it would be like: Bird blah blah blah bird feather blah dust-like blah blah inhale blah blah blah
This is somehow getting more and more amusing...
He Yiqun I lol'ed there too.
That sounds like some cool bird drug you taking
Japanese si definitely a tonal language as well. It doens't have as many tones as Mandarin or Cantonese, and the way they teach it is different, but it still exist. The tonal pronounciation of words with similar syllables can compeltely change the meaning of a word just like in Mandarin. "Hana", written in plain "romaji" could mean either nose or flower, and westerners often can't tell the difference when hearing or pronouncing it.
I speak Chinese and I just unterstand the basic meaning of Japanese words.
I'm also interestet in languages, I speak Chinese and German fluently and English, French and Italian I learned in school. I'm going to an exchange year next summer. I'm so exited to learn Japanese or Cantonese😄
Your parents must be proud!
For me it is a little bit the other way around. I can read some Chinese because I see characters that I see in Japanese and well, and because I am studying Japanese. Therefore I would understand what 食物 means. In Japanese I see the same characters.
That's interesting👍
Cantonese and Japanese were the most fun languages I learnt. Good luck with them, both can be difficult, but that only makes them all the more rewarding to learn. :)
Alexander Matthews In the meantime I was watching TH-cam videos about Cantonese. 6 tones! And how go I get them into my brains?
*_"Cat blah fish blah food blah blah"_*
Basically how I read in general sometimes
you are Japanese?
I've watched plenty of your videos, but haven't hit the sub button until now. Keep up the good work!
+jbtom321 Thanks! Welcome to the tribe! :)
You are smart
Stoopd
Osum
Same here!
as a french native speaker, when I started to learn english, I could recognize a lot of words which seemed to share a comon origin. And like a japanese or a chinese person who tries to learn the language of the other, even though you can guess a certain amount of a text, you also miss the subtleties and can be confused with some words which seems the same but which actually have a different meaning or some words which are not still used in the modern french.
C'était le meme chose avec moi, quand j'ai appris le français au lycée et au fac (Je suis australien). Alors, il faut qu'on fasse l'attention avec les faux amis, je sens que cette idée s'applique envers l'ecriture Chinois et les kanjis du Japon. Maintenant, j'apprends le Japonais je souhaite voyager au Japon cette année pendant le fin de l'été. (Excusez-moi, ma grammaire est mal selon moi.)
Very different though. Chinese and Japanese are completely different. French was spoken by English aristocrats for centuries. They have false cognates but many and many more differences, no one expects to understand the other language by learning the first.
yes, it's true that except some common vocabulary, japanese and chinese are further from each other than it does between french and english when it comes to compare the grammar. Another difference is that in japanese, most of chinese loanwords are used with a very specific way, most of the time in compound words, while that's not the case in english.
words mean one meaning in English,but when you see a word in Chinese,you can just read it and meanings of it could be three or more, even means different in different sentences.your brain should be active to receive this character and search in your mind at the same time.otherwise,you gotta misunderstand many words people said
Me correct at thai
him: "What you think all asian letters are the same?"
me: 👁👄👁
👁👄👁
👁👄👁
ᜑᜑᜑᜑᜑᜑ ᜈᜃᜃᜆᜏ᜵ ᜇᜒ ᜈᜋᜈ᜔ ᜃᜐᜒ ᜎᜑᜆ᜔ ᜃᜋᜒᜅ᜔ ᜋᜅ ᜀᜐ᜔ᜌᜈᜓ ᜀᜌ᜔ ᜄᜈᜓᜈ᜔ ᜋᜄ᜔ᜐᜓᜎᜆ᜔ ᜁᜑ᜔ 🙄
Me whos Thai :👁👄👁
I mean, I didn’t know it was Thai, but I knew for sure that it wasn’t Chinese or Japanese
The way they can read each other's languages without knowing them reminds me of English with any of the Romance languages. For example, most of the -tion ending words in English have the same origin as French and they are usually identical.... if you saw "la grande orchestration" written on a French sign, you'd know exactly what it means, but if you overheard a Frenchman saying it, you probably wouldn't recognize it, since it's pronounced like /lə ɡʁɑ̃ ɔʁʃɛstʁasjɔ̃/
Well said
This is irrelevant to your point, but that pronunciation is wrong. The "ch" in this particular word is pronounced "k", and the "d" in "grande" is pronounced in the feminine form (it is also pronounced in liaisons in the masculine form). Also, perhaps in fast or sloppy speech the "a" in "la" could become a schwa, but by default it's not.
Chinese native speaker who can speak Japanese here.
Generally Chinese speaker are seldom confused because of the different way the Chinese characters are used, because in Japanese old characters are used, while in Modern Chinese many new ones replace the old ones. For instance, in Japanese "步" is used to represent "walk". In modern Chinese we use "走", but "步" is still used in other walking-related words like "trail"-步道. So guessing the rigth meaning is still pretty simple (except in the "cat bla fish bla food bla bla" case).
Also, the more formal the Japanese is, the more Kanji (Chinese characters) it tends to use. So contrary to the case of the Japanese, formal Japanese is easier to understand.
But the japanese kanji also changed to make it easier... I am only half Japanese and when my grandparents send me a letter i am often confused with some of the kanji and have to ask my mother.. Because my grandparents often use "old" kanji which are simplified today and for my mother who is a native spaker and often read books were the kanji hasn´t been changed, its easy to understand the kanji although it was changed. But if you aren´t native speaker and not toooo good with the Kanji its often hard to recognize it...
You're correct, formal language is always easier to understand than informal as formal carried traditional way of expression while informal doesn't and it's always evolving.
southern dialects still use the old words
Very detailed video. Loved it!
Can you make a seperate video about the Chinese languages about differences and similarities about them?
Yeah!
I want him to do video on the languages of Taiwan
We speak Mandarin which is 99% the same as Putonghua (spoken in China). We also speak Taiwanese but it's simply a dialect of Chinese, so.....I think there isn't too much to talk about.
Are you including L2 speakers of Mandarin? Because, you say that %99 of the population speaks Mandarin, but how about Southern Chinese dialects, nobody speaks them? I don't think so...
ali akman Nono, I mean the Chinese we speak (which is spoken by 99.99% of Taiwanese) is 99% the same as Putonghua. As for the Southern Chinese dialects, we do speak them as well, depending on where our ancestors cam from. The biggest one is called Taiwanese, which is understandable for 90% people. But in most cases it's not our mother tongue so most people don't 100% master it.
I'm a Japanese spoker.
When I see chinese sentences,I can understand it.
But,I sametimes misunderstand meanings.
For example;
I translated “我去学校”as “I leave school.”,But it actually means “I go to school.”.
The reason is that In Japanese,“去“ usually means “leave the point”.
Interesting.去 in words often means to leave or to get rid of in Chinese. Your trying was proper. I used thought 湯 in anime as soup but later i saw people in Spring.湯 in Classical Chinese(kanbun) literatally means hot water...
Actually 去 means "leave" in Classical Chinese too.
In Japanese, accent DOES matter. For instance, "hashi" in different accent can mean chopsticks or bridge, while "ame" in different accent can mean rain or candy.
The other parts of the video are quite correct.
Reference: I'm native Chinese speaker and I can also speak Japanese.
same here. the tones of his japanese are not accurate. if he can get the tones right he would sound much more native.
Bo Gao damn, I always thought that depended on the context and not the accent. Learned a new thing today :D
It doesn't matter that much if you get the accent wrong as long as you form your sentence so it can be understood by context.
Indeed - but as he says, the tones don't USUALLY give meaning to a word. There are occasions where the pitch helps distinguish two similar sounding words. Also, if you say a word in Japanese with the wrong pitch, you may sound strange and non-native, but you'll usually still be understood.
My girlfriend is Japanese, and she tries to teach me a few words, but doesn't have much success because I'm pretty dense tbh. I can't tell the difference between 2 o'clock and rainbow, or the mushroom and the famous Japanese professional wrestler.
This video is so useful. Other videos are just people from the two countries saying random words to show the differences and similarities, what I really wanted to know was about grammar and characters. Thank you!
As an Advanced Japanese student I can understand chinese signboards, but the way mandarin has simplified characters just blows my mind. Also the fact that Chinese is SVO, my heart feels the pain when I remember how confusing was the SOV first time learning Japanese.
I'm currently studying for JLPT N1, only when I pass I'll decide if I try studying Mandarin. Both beautiful languages :)
I study and have been fascinated by the Japanese language. I love how artistically written kanjis and kanas are. I'm also quite attracted to the Chinese and Korean languages and writing systems. Asian languages are in most cases connected but at the same time different, which makes them so even more interesting.
"asian" you mean mongoloid?
'There all connected but different'
Thats with all languages, especially if we're talking about by continent, like the fact that everywhere in europe cat is some form of velar plosive, low vowel, dental plosive, and something else
English cat
Greek gata
Spanish gato
German katze
Russian kot
Icelandic köttur
Korean is too boring...
China shares cultural similarities with neighboring countries such as Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and others.
I'm Chinese, been traveling in Japan, it was easy for us to take on transportation cause all most all the location names are wroten in kanji, which is Chinese characters. I even tried to chat with local by writing one by one , and it worked LOL.
PS: There's a lot of differences between classical Chinese and modern Chiese. It's much more than 30% of the words we use now are created by Japanese,and It's also true that most of we Chinese don't know that...however it is about politic and complicated to say hhhhhh
Really love Japan, people there treated me very kindly ^_^
❤日本
我不认为和制汉语的占比能达到甚至超过30%，虽然确实有很多和制汉语，具体可以参照上海辞书出版社1982年的汉语外来词词典（不过我确实也非常喜欢日本的一些东西）
😞😞eyes and ears of a fiber😞
Many are also unaware of preexisting vocabularies such as Buddhist terminologies which are accepted as regular vocabularies in Japanese and then gained a wider use in China with Japanese influence. 世界 serves an example.
It is Chinese people who educated Japanese people and help us civilized. Thanks a lot. I hope political mess ends soon and we can cooperate like we used to.
@@toshihiroshimizu3240 I believe that the trend of East Asian cooperation is unstoppable. And that will benefits all of us. Hope that Tokyo Olympic Games can be carried out smoothly next year.
As a native to Hong Kong, I can assure you that Cantonese is indeed have similar pronunciation of Japanese borrowed Chinese words.
Cantonese and Japanese is slightly less deviated from early middle Chinese than mandarin, however, when we are studying poem from early china, trying to pronounce them in both Cantonese and mandarin does help to find out which one is more suitable tone.
I think it is worth to note that in Edo/Ming era it is perfectly reasonable for the literate class of two countries to communicate using writing. Ming and Joseon merchants often traded in Edo Japan with this type of communication.
Totally wrong.
Sino-Japan culture communicate since Wei.
Japanese Emperor was called 亲魏倭王 by Wei Emperor
@@seltainc1715 The two are not mutually exclusive? I didn't say that contact only started in the 1600's.
@@Kavino Ming dynasty Sino-Japan two countries have some war because Ming cut off the commercial and culture communication.
@@Kavino Kanji, Chinese character was imported to Japan almost AD400-500
0:26 Thai doesn't look anything close to Japanese or Chinese. Thai abugida remind of languages of the Indian Subcontinent.
Yes but thats not what everyone thinks, some people think any asian script looks the same so.
I think it was just a joke, that guy knows very well that the 2 scripts dont look the same,but
theres some people who dont know much about it.
Although the thai script comes from the sanskrit (india) the languages are similar when it comes
to pronouncuation (thai is a mix of Chinese/Hindi & Vietnamese , also speaking of the words and
how its pronounced) the only one thing is that hindi is not a tonal language like Vietnamese/Lao/Thai&chinese is.
Ofcourse also the meaning of the words is mainly different (except for some chinese dialects, where a lot
of words are very similar to thai words from not only the sound/how its said, but also from the pronounciation ,in those cases
the same) Cantonese sounds most&more similar to thai,vietnamese&lao then mandarin.
Im Thai&Chinese mixed , i know both languages in speaking writing and reading (and also understand some
other chinese dialects but not as fluent as mandarin&cantonese does) since i talk both chinese&thai
on a almost dayli basis with family and several other cases where i noticed many similarities of the languages
its pretty similar throughout many of years , but besides that ,yes the thai script is different from the chinese script.
Thai,Vietnamese,Japanese,Chinese,Korean languages r very similar with khasi language in north east India people here can't speak Hindi but only English n khasi
I know that a lot of words came from China,about 10%.and about 60%from Indian.I read books,because I am studying Thai language.
@@nmi3176 so thai language is similar to indian writing?
@@lyhthegreat Nah, Thais have their own writing systems and alphabets, there are original Thai vocabularies, but many of more complicated ones have derived from Sanskrit & ancient Khmer.
I was watching this being very informed and not expecting to laugh, then the bla bla part happened and I died.
he did that right) that's exactly how we Chinese feel when we read Japanese..
Haobin Song yep 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
When I was young(er) I thought that Cyrillic system is difficult, but then I noticed Chinese and Japanese (Korean, etc) characters and I was... speechless... Maybe I will ask stupid question now, but do you see Chinese as difficult language to learn for.. Chinese?
It could be easily and naturally learned by 99% students in the school. But we are mostly struggling at English. When I started learning Japanese I have to say that I felt quite comfortable. Just like some English speaker learning German or even like Portuguese learning Spanish.
Do you mean archeology?
1:56 I know it says usually, but certain pitch inflections can lead to different meanings in Japanese. For example, the two words 飴 and 雨 (candy and rain). The first is pronounced aME, whereas the second is pronounced Ame.
As a native Chinese speaker who has learnt a bit of Japanese grammar and simple words, I totally agree with the English example of "cat bla fish blah eat bla bla".
When I read more complex Japanese sentences rather than simple ones that mean like "I went to school", I basically have tunnel vision on only the kanji and the rest becomes just a bunch of non-understandable jibberish that could also be seen as irrelevant sometimes.
This is a fascinating post, Paul. When my wife and I taught English in Japan (way back in the 80s), we had already studied Chinese for years, but knew very little spoken Japanese. My Japanese colleagues were amazed that we could read a great deal of Japanese, but not know how to say in Japanese what we had just read, although we could tell them in English what the text said. Between Kanji and katakana (easy to learn and about 80% English loan words) we were semi-literate in Japanese, though could hardly speak a word of it. I think if we'd been Chinese, my Japanese mates wouldn't have been so surprised at our familiarity with written characters. We are just average whitey people.