I think traditional Chinese is easier for Japanese people to read than simplified Chinese, probably because we "imported" Chinese letters a long time ago. But in reality, we don't really understand Chinese except for some simple words. So if you want to communicate with Japanese people, you will have to learn Japanese. So if you want to learn Japanese with me, I will send you some Japanese lessons where I teach you the kind of Japanese that real-life Japanese people speak. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3hYOWAG
The older ladies got the sound reading (onyomi) of kanji perfectly!!! They got amazingly superb knowledge of kanji, compared to other couples. Further more, modern chinese uses simplified chinese characters, which may look vastly different from traditional ones used in Japanese kanji, but the ladies seems to infer from and get them correct. Makes me wonders if they are actual language teachers, or is it elder generations have better knowledge of kanji. Also they speak in sort of Kyoto Kansai ben 8-)
The Chinese kanji knowledge of younger generations is far less good than elders. Because long ago written Japanese was totally purely represented in kanji (same as Korean).
Just to clarify, “rain falls and the ground hardens” (ame futte ji katamaru (雨降って地固まる) is an expression meaning something like “adversity makes us stronger.” You can think of it like after the rain, the ground gets harder/stronger. So the first two thought it was some kind of expression in which a cow gets stuck in the mud!
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I am a Brazilian watching an English video about japanese people trying to understand Chinese. Globalization intensifies
Maybe, it seems to be stupid, but.. I am Yakut who speak russian writing this comment in English to Brazilian after watching an English video about Japanese people trying to understand Chinese.... ~Globalization~
As someone who can understand both Japanese and Chinese, this was really amusing. It was also interesting to see the correlations that Japanese people draw from Chinese characters to Japanese characters. Thank you for the hard work Yuta-san!
Mandarin is a mandatory subject for my college diploma course (which I'll be going starting next month haha). I'm planning to take Japanese next when I start my degree. So I want to ask you: does knowing (a little?) mandarin complicates studying Japanese? Or does it actually makes my Japanese studying a bit easier? Thanks in advance!
I am Japanese, but I enjoyed watching this video.I have never studied Chinese, but secondly, I was able to understand the meaning by looking at the letters.Each kanji used in Japan has its own meaning.Chinese and Japanese have several kanji characters in common.Therefore, even if you don't understand grammar, you can somehow convey your image by looking at kanji. This video is very interesting ☺️(I am using a translator.I'm sorry if there is a sentence that is difficult to understand.)
The guy in brown shirt pronounced the “there’s no school today “ perfectly except the way he said the last word 假 made the sentence a totally different meaning which is “ the school set (on) fire today” in Chinese lol, like, that actually makes sense, logically speaking
The intuitive way of reading Chinese as a Japanese: re-order all the Hanzi, find the same, if not, a similar Kanji, and make it sounds reasonable. The intuitive way of reading Japanese as a Chinese: ignore all the hiragana and katakana, re-order the Kanji, find the same, if not, a similar Hanzi, and make it sounds reasonable.
And fail on both due to Chinese words being very context sensitive and Japanese use kana words to modify the meaning of kanji words a lot. Though it's still better than nothing, just really, really unreliable.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Right, but at least they can understand the topic. There is a good analogy from another channel saying that it is like an English speaking person reading something like this: xxx cat xxxx xxx fish xxx xxxx food. You may guess the meaning by common sense but it is possible when the true meaning is something like: Some cat is actually considered best food for fish.
@@waterspinach3145 At least with CN->JP you have all the words there, just in the wrong order (and sometimes the wrong meaning). With JP->CN it's harder because JP has all these grammar and tenses and word declinations expressed in hiragana, you are leaving half the sentence out.
The first two guys were really putting the effort in trying and it’s awesome. The older ladies really knew their Kanji and can basically guess everything even though it’s simplified Chinese characters.
Im a Chinese descendant living in Canada. One day a Japanese friend of my parents from the local language learning centre came over and only my dad was home, who spoke zero English. Somehow they communicated with only a pen and some paper, and the friend helped with some gardening work together for the better part of a day; all only with Kanji on paper.
The dude with blond hair was the one who said it was impossible, the guy who actually got it almost right just said it was hard. I had a Romanian chess tutor for a few days who only spoke Romani. I don't. Yet whenever he told me something I could understand enough of what he was saying. He was the father of my physics teacher, who was quite surprised that I understood him to the point where I could retell what he was saying and she could confirm that it was correct. Still, I would never claim that I understand Romani. I can't speak a word of it and I could likely only understand because the topic was limited.
I should add, translating that as "There is no school today" is a bit off, since that could be interpreted to mean there is no school today, physically, like the campus has been destroyed. The better translation is "There is no class at school today," or "School is on break today." Literally its "today school (on) break"
I m chinese, and I went to Japan during middle school. I had nearly no english speaking skills. Me and my other Chinese friend got into an accident on a skiing resort near Tokyo. My friend broke his leg, and I was able to communicate with the first responders with only a pen and a paper. My friend was able to make a full recovery afterwards. The thing I noticed was that Japanese can understand some Chinese characters, and chinese can understand some kanji.
I thought it was interesting as well. The comment about if chinese people were insulting them they wouldnt understand was also food for thought.Its like their generation sees the chinese only as people they went to war with and who probably dont like them very much. Whereas the young ones were just like "huh chinese is hard !"
Old New guy well I dont blame the Japanese for being defensive. Every other week, the Korean government is suing their companies for wartime labor and protesting against this and that, racking up the past like the Comfort woman issue, building comfort woman statues in front of embassies and consulates worldwide, and protesting against the use of the Rising Sun flag. Its always in the Japanese media.
@@kageyamareijikun The big problem that Koreans, Chinese etc. have with the Japanese is that the Japanese governments after WWII have never acknowledged or owned up the atrocities of WWII and before, neither have they apologised. Perhaps out of shame they have tried to forget and deny this part of history. Even today a lot of Japanese people are largely ignorant about what their country did in those years. So yes, I do blame them for being defensive and I guess Koreans and Chinese people will need to keep trying to remind their Japanese neighbours. The Japanese are extremely lovely and interesting people but this happens to be a point against them.
Polterpneuma As a Simplified user and mainlander I still find there are too many misunderstandings with simplified characters! Like 干蔬菜. This means “dried vegetables” but could totally be interpreted as “f*ck vegetables” because of the merging of 幹 and 乾 into 干!
olavl well I respect your opinion but I think China's and South Korea's approach to this matter is unhelpful and regrettable. China has toned down a lot recently tho and seems to want to boost Sino-Japan ties. While Korea seems intent on continuing their crusade and trade war. Other countries like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore have stopped talking about WW2 decades ago and enjoy a very positive and mutually beneficial relationship with the Japanese administration. China and SK should move on. Btw Japan has apologised repeatedly. How long do people expect them to keep apologising for the sins of their forefathers? At a certain point its just predatory and raking up old issues for brownie points.
@@cahallo5964 I think the kinda equivelent joke for Chinese users would be to write toilet paper to each other. (手纸 means toilet paper in Chinese and letter in Japanese).
This video is very important. It helps people from abroad to understand how different Asian languages actually are, and so are their cultures. Even Japanese people hardly understand Chinese pronunciation despite having similar ieroghyphs.
Japanese Chinese characters come from ancient Chinese or traditional Chinese characters, which are not the same as the simplified Chinese characters currently used in China, so it is normal to understand, just as Chinese people can't understand many Japanese characters.
日本語、中国語、韓国語、ベトナム語(越南語)発音は似ている言葉がたくさんあるよ Emotion 日本: 感動 ( kandou) 中国: 感动 (gǎndòng) 韓国: 감동 (gamdong,感動） 越南: cảm động (感动、camdong) 理由、結婚、準備なども同じですよ Edited in 2021/08/30: Thanks for many likes. But I just want to share about the relationship of Kanji in East Asia languages. Please not toxic. 我的评论只是想说不同语言汉字之间的关系。不要吵架！
If anybody is curious, the traditional character for noodles is 麵, which was simplified in Japan to 麺. In China, it was simplified to 面, which also means face (i.e. two previously distinct characters got merged together in simplified Chinese). “Library” written using traditional characters is 圖書館, in Japanese 図書館, in simplified characters 图书馆, i.e. 圖 was simplified by having the interior replaced with 冬, the character for winter. Also, some characters are simplified in both China and Japan, e.g. 學 -> 学, some are simplified in both places but differently (see above), and a handful were only simplified in Japan. Though it is true that kanji are overall closer to traditional Chinese characters.
Wow, so well explained. Thank you so much 🤗🤗 I just started learning kanjis (Japanese ones) a week ago. And as a beginner, I wanted to ask you if it would make sense to learn the non-simplified kanjis too? Or are these Kanjis rather outdated and not so common in todays time anymore? And of course you don't have to answer my question if you don't want to. I just thought I would ask because you seem to be someone who has a lot of knowledge about Japanese and Chinese 👏🏻👏🏻
@@violet_cozylife I actually cannot speak any Japanese. So somebody can correct me if I am wrong, but I would assume that basically everything outside of decorative things (like banners etc.) will use Shinjitai, so I would go with that.
@@violet_cozylife Just focus on the Japanese kanji, including Japan-simplified ones for now. Much later, if you want to expand your knowledge to be able to read Traditional Chinese (say, if you want to go to Taiwan or Hong Kong), then you'll already be a bit ahead, just have to modify your existing knowledge a little.
Also Japanese can understand all the traditional characters since they are still used in peoples name, name of place, and are seen here and there. But simplified characters?? Most of them are impossible to understand.
I can speak Chinese, and I found it easier to study Japanese with Chinese background, especially if you know the origins of most characters in classical Chinese, like how 走 now means walk but in olden times it means to run, which is what it means in Japanese now 走る. I also find it interesting that some Kanji use traditional Chinese while others use simplified Chinese and yet a few more use neither. Overall it's really interesting to see the interrelationships :)
I also wondered why Japanese Kanji used some Simplified Chinese characters and other Traditional Chinese characters. From my research, it seems that if Kanji has Traditional Hanzi, then that was ancient Hanzi transferred over from China to Japan in the ancient era. If Kanji has Simplified Hanzi, then actually that was derived from the Japanese simplifiying some Traditional Hanzi, and then that simplified form ended up back in China, as Simplified Hanzi! So basically: Traditional Hanzi goes to Japan and becomes Kanji. Some of the Traditional Hanzi is simplified over the centuries. The simplified Kanji go back to China and becomes Simplified Chinese. That's why it seems like Japanese Kanji is a mix of Traditional and Simplified Hanzi! EDIT: There's been a lot of comments debating this. I just want to clarify that SOME simplified Kanji went back to China and became part of the Simplified Hanzi script. In reality its a lot more complex and there are many different sources/stories behind how the characters in Simplified Hanzi came to be.
But sometimes it maybe no tho, like when in Mandarin characters the characters in it means in some multiple specific meanings and pronounce. *srsly People ald struggling with it. While on the other hand, in Japanese kanji it may turn into another irrelevant multiple meaning and pronounce all the way 360°😂 By this way the native Chinese may suffering of double multiple meaning and pronounce to remember all these kanji 😭 Idk what the hell this is.
Being Chinese, watching this I laughed so many times. I know language barriers are normal and shouldn’t be laughed at, but I almost cried when they mistook beef with ramen for “rain falling and the ground hardens”.
Reminds me when I ordered _ramen_ from a Japanese stall (which is typically fresh) at 1 of my university's canteens & was served something that resembled more like Korean _ramen/ramyon/lamyon_ (which is basically instant noodles)
In most cases, you should have shown traditional Chinese characters to the Japanese for them to better understand the meaning. They understand"牛雜拉麵" better than"牛杂拉面" because they probably know 麵 is for noodles or any food made from wheat, whereas 面 is something related to face.
As an English speaker, this is how I feel reading a language like Swedish or Norwegian. It's got a lot of the Anglo-Saxon roots that English came from so I can kind of piece together meaning from similar words. Even though it's related, German is actually a lot harder to understand because of the agglutination and the words seemed to have evolved more over time than in Swedish or Norwegian.
To share an interesting fact, at 5:23, the cool looking lady asked the question: why is winter （冬） inside of a box in "图”? I have the same question, so I look it up. Apparently, the shape of "冬” is not the same as the character "冬” （winter). The inside of “图” derives from the cursive, caoshu script in Chinese calligraphy, and the “冬” here was originally a simplified, cursive version of "啚”， and so, "圖” became “图” through simplification. Anyway, thank you for making this video. It is very fun and educational.
I think that what he was saying was, basically, the “winter” inside the box wasn’t actually from the character “winter”. It was actually derived from the simplification of the cursive of the traditional writing, and it was just a coincidence that winter was in the box
@@awax2585 I mean you'd have to learn that many words as well to "just have a beginning of fluency" in English. I know learning the characters is hard (I'm trying my best myself) but if you see the character as a word, it's not as daunting to me. At least especially in Chinese this is the case, it seems.
Foreigners visiting in Japan: just talking in Japanese is fine, don’t show me kanji sentences Japanese visiting in China: just showing kanji sentences is fine, don’t talk to me in Chinese
Yep, I have no trouble to go around Japanese cities as all road names and train station names are in Kanji. I can understand them well. However, it is way efficient to talk English in Japan as Japanese adopt a lot of English pronunciation. PS. I don't speak Japanese.
if you think in a japanese context some of the sentences do make sense, even in mandarin, like 面 in chinese means noodle and face, depending on the context used. The japanese use 面 more for the face meaning, while they use the traditional chinese version 麺 to mean noodle. The thing about chinese is that some word's meaning change depending on the context of the sentence rather than using the individual meaning of each word. Most of the kanji words used do make sense in mandarin too but just not commonly used by the chinese, like instead of using the chinese 放假, the japanese use 休暇 which makes sense since 休 also means rest but the way it is used is not common among the chinese. what is interesting is seeing different japanese people interpret the chinese sentences differently, like they almost got it.
麺 is not traditional Chinese, it's shinjitai. The correct character in traditional Chinese would be 麵. While Japan simplified the left part, simplified Chinese merged it with the character 面.
@@handel1111 indeed hokkien did evolve from middle chinese and it was commonly used during the tang dynasty after all, spreading their influence to Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other SEA countries. Most of the Chinese who migrated to SEA didn't even speak mandarin.
@@JulienCLS (Not a linguistic expert) Cantonese and Hokkien seems be more ancient form of chinese, from Tang dynasty as you said. Modern chinese is actually Mandarin, aka "language of the officials". Since the north have been (currently is still) capital for China for centuries, it is also called "Northern dialect", with heavy influence from northern China. Interestingly, Japanese preserved the Tang style of chinese, keeping many traditional terms. (Ex. 舅姑 is actually parents-in-law in Japanese, not parents' siblings as in Chinese!)
Their reaction surprised me, because I remember once my family went to Tokyo and the shop owner didn’t understand English, so we written in Chinese for the product that we want and they were able to understand the meaning
Hi I'm from Taiwan, when I was in a camp at high school in Japan, a Japanese student on our team wrote 掃除 and showed me and I immediately understood that it was time for cleaning, I was surprised that the kanji was basically the same
Think some colloquial Chinese vocabulary used in Taiwan/ROC is borrowed from Japanese _Kanji_ too? e.g. 'off-service' (for a bus/train) -> 回送 (vs 暂停服务 in more formal Chinese), 'popular' -> 人氣 (vs 受欢迎 in more formal Chinese)
I think that’s why I’ve come to love traditional Chinese. As a Japanese and Chinese learner, it makes me happy how similar Japanese kanji is compared to traditional Chinese and sometimes even the same. I also have an easier time reading traditional compared to simplified for some things. Though writing can be difficult.
We Chinese can read both traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters.So I think it's easier for us to read Japanese.Just like my friends went to Japan, they just don't understand any Japanese, but they can read the kanji.
If you know Chinese, you can often understand the ideas of a sentence written in Japanese! It definitely helps with reading. However, knowing Chinese provides little help for understanding spoken Japanese. Whats interesting is if you know Japanese, Chinese is much easier to learn in general. The meanings of kanji/hanzi characters are similar between both languages, while already knowing the onyomi pronunciation makes remembering Chinese pronunciations much easier. So really, other than mastering that tone based pronunciation system, the only thing left to learn is Chinese's word phrases and relatively loose grammar!
@@frozenhamburgers9925 Yes, it is true. If you already known English and Japanese, learning Chinese would be simpler because Chinese sentences syntax almost same like English, yet Chinese grammar is extremely simple if comparing to English and Japanese. Actually the killing part of Chinese language is the Literary Chinese (文言文). If back to the ancient time, let says back to Qing Dynasty which is hundreds years ago, many native Chinese speakers will be considered as illiterate because we couldn't write in Literary Chinese. :D
No surprise, since the Japanese had been exposed to the Traditional forms for centuries, and the Simplified version was put forward by the People's Republic.
This video is actually sociologically interesting, the two older ladies are the only ones that didn't get the "break" sentence, and they thought the sentence about the japanese flag would be anti war propaganda
I also learned that boys who learned some chinese in school can understand chinese better than the vast majority of japanese people who never learned chinese
Actually, we Chinese also think Japanese is hard to learn. But learning Japanese is way easier for Chinese than other foreigners cause there are many Kanji(Chinese characters) in Japanese.
Yes tru, I started with a hiragana last yr(not consistently and I rem some characters) but I actually feel that I should start with the simple kanji?>>like i was able to interpret 愛 as 爱straightway, and it was in stuck my head immediately.. Though in my country we were taught the simplified Chinese so what do you think? Should I remain with the hiragana or start on kanji-
@@kanaure I recommend you put the furigana in the most important position. I believe you can understand many Kanji because you learned simplified Chinese. But the pronunciation and writing method are very different from Japanese Kanji and simplified(even some traditional) Chinese characters. Chinese is my mother tongue, so when I start learning I just remember the meaning in Japanese to make it easier, however, as more as I learned, I realized that I had better learn more hiragana of Kanji, it will help me more when I really communicate with Japanese. (But when I was in Japan, I was an English student, so I used English much more with my professor and other students, and one of the reason is my Japanese was very poor and it is impolite to use my poor Japanese discuss academic researches.)
Me too lol. I may not speak mandarin but I am Chinese American, as I only speak teochew and a bit of Cantonese and can only understand bits of mandarin. It makes me happy to see Japanese people participate in trying to read Chinese since I love japan and anime lol
a random observation: as a cantonese and mandarin speaker, i feel like onyomi readings of kanji resembles cantonese more than it does mandarin. pretty cool to see you've done one of these videos for both dialects! EDIT: Thank you so much for the replies! They were very educational. Just clarifying, I'm aware there are Chinese dialects that are closer to Japanese than Canto. I merely compared those two because those are the ones I speak, and are the ones Yuta have done videos on. :)
cool observation! i'm no expert but i believe Cantonese is generally more conservative of features from Middle Chinese than standard Mandarin, which could explain why the Cantonese reading of the characters sounds more like what would have been borrowed into Japanese all those centuries ago.
Cantonese is more resembling to Kan’on and Go’on modern Japanese readings of kanji. As a native Mandarin speaker though, I can still definitely tell where an on’yomi reading comes from
@@Mika-kana i wouldn't say any language spoken today is 'older' than any other, it's quite hard to determine the point in time where languages fully diverge from one another and become separate. No language is an island, after all. Mandarin just seems to have undergone more sound changes in the same period of time as Cantonese. I know that the list of sounds that can end a syllable in Mandarin is smaller than in Cantonese (e.g. 'k' and 't' sounds at the end), so I just guess Japanese speakers have more pointers to compare and contrast the Chinese loanwords in their language with Cantonese than Mandarin.
@@altosaxophonie yeah just to add on to this, since possibly the Yuan dynasty Mandarin lost what's called an entering sound which is the glottal stop you hear in other Chinese languages, a sound considered to be a tone (part of the actual four tones). I think only Min languages have preserved all three kinda of entering sound. A lot of the differences between onyomi and Mandarin is that difference in whether there's an inheritance of the entering sound or not
One of the only good thing being a Chinese student in Japan is you have a better proficiency in kanjis compared to other Japanese students; you can flex your vocabularies in essays pretty easily
You need to learn 中文文言文 (Chinese Old Language which is spoken during the dynasty time in China) to understand some Japanese. The Chinese that they speak are called "白话文 " Chinese Modern Language Like "走" (in Chinese pronounce "Zou") means "walking " in Chinese modern language , in Chinese Old Language, it means "running", just like Japanese "走る" or other example like "明日" (in Chinese pronounce "Ming Ri") means "tomorrow", which is the same like Japanese, but in Chinese modern language, they write “明天“
@Jacky Phantom ummm. You dk know that Chinese characters actually ot introduced to Japan through Korea right? Along with the fact that at one point, Japan was solely using Chinese writing before actually changing pronunciations and combining it with heir own language native to the lands to form the basis of Japanese. Kanji does share the same root as Chinese. In fact, if it weren't for ancient Chinese influences, modern Japanese would be completely different.
@@ゼロワンそれが俺の名だ I think he meant it from the way the languages are spoken. The Chinese characters are definitely Chinese in origin (obviously), but the language is unrelated. Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of Chinese (and even then some people advocate that these are two different languages, just with a similar usage of characters), but Japanese is Japanese, influenced by Chinese sure, but it is its own unique language.
Dont need to learn old chinese to understand japanese. If you can speak and read other dialects like cantonese or the wu group etc. You can pretty much understand korean and japanese. I'm wenzhounese and the grammar and vocabulary is way different from modern day mandarin. Wenzhounese use more old vocabulary that isn't used in daily bases in china if you only speak mandarin. Same goes for cantonese. Those languages are older than mandarin so the koreans and japanese picked up sounds from the dialects in the dynasty times.
not really in some cases maybe but they're very different languages, Filipino has many Spanish derived vocabularies but our grammar are very different especially with Spanish conjugation and our ergative-absolutive language that European languages don't posses but since many Filipinos and keen with English, that will probably help as I find English and Spanish more similar than Spanish and Filipino
The reason why the text in Mandarin sounds very different from Japanese eg Japan is Riben vs Nihon or Nippon is because Mandarin has evolved a lot since Old / Middle Chinese. Meanwhile in southern China we have many different Chinese dialects which have better preserved the original Old / Middle Chinese pronunciation of these words. In Hokkien dialect for instance we pronounce 日本 as Jit Pun, 时间 as shigan, 新闻 as shinbun (very similar to Japanese), 学校 as hakkyo (same as Korean), 运动 as undong (again same as Korean), and there are other dialects like Shanghainese which pronounce it nyi pun which is very close to Nippon.
The most simple reason: different region of China has different dialect. Where the Japanese hear the sound is where they will "borrow". They went to Wu region which is shanghai and the jiang su region, and borrowed stuff from there. 吴服 is clothing of the wu region.
Japanese has its native vocabulary and uses many European loanwords too. Kango (Chinese loanwords) is only one piece of the vocabulary and in everyday speech they are used only about 20% of the words so even if they were similar you would not understand too much.
Have you ever tried to read Portuguese? Usually you can get most of what’s being said if you read it (for people who know Spanish) and vice versa from Portuguese to Spanish
@@greenlilac32 exactly, If you know portuguese, even If you don't study spanish you'll catch lots of setences. It's so similar, but idk if the spanish speakers feel the same about portuguese.
As an Spanish I can confirm , I can recognize some words in Italian , and some more in French since it is obligatory to learn it in the province I live , even I’m bad at it. If we go to Portuguese it’s pretty easy to know that they mean by text , but in my opinion they speak to fast to me to understand. But if you have a chance go to Portugal go , it is a very beautiful country!
I am Chinese-Canadian, so I speak English, French and Mandarin. Its helpful when traveling. When I was in Europe and going through Italy and Spain, although I didn't speak Spanish or Italian, the words were similar enough to French that I could make a decent guess when reading signs. Same for Japan. I cant read katakana or hiragana at all, but I can get by through looking at their kanji and guessing the meaning from translating the kanji to Chinese. Yay for globalization 🌏🗺💯
“” translating the kanji to Chinese.“” This sounds wrong and misleading... The word "Kanji" literally means "Han Chinese characters", they mostly have the same meaning except for some words Japanese use differently
Chinese and Japanese are from different language families and as such their grammatical structure is very different. However, there is still significant overlap between Chinese and Japanese not only in written script, but also in some pronunciations, and this is quite evident when testing small language snippets. Its probably impossible to have a Chinese and Japanese speaker hold a conversation with each other in their native languages when neither understands the other language, but for very simple phrases (e.g location signs, basic stuff like "I will eat beef noodles today") the meaning can be mostly ascertained. Interestingly, Chinese grammar has significant similarities with English, of all languages. Apparently they are both analytical and "common" languages (no extensive honorific systems), which means they have similar sentence structures. To learn English or Chinese when you is already fluent in one of them is as simple as learning the words and replacing them in the sentence, or so I've heard. The difficulty is Chinese language being tonal (ridiculously hard to pronounce sometimes) and the English language having more exceptions to many of its rules than adherents, leading to a jumbled mess. At 5:30, the woman says "library" in Japanese. Incidentally, it sounds like a very accented way of saying "library" in Chinese, and would probably be understandable to a Chinese speaker. Yet, the woman didn't recognise all the Chinese characters for "library". So this is an example of where ancient Chinese pronunciation that went over to Japan survived the ages, but the meaning of the written characters did not. In other cases, it was the reverse; the same character had the same meaning in Hanzi/Kanji, but the pronunciation is completely different.
actually english grammar has lots in common with mandarin, you do realize that mandarin was created wayy before english. also chinese isn't a language you bozo it's like saying i speak "american" or "british" -_-
Yeah, as someone who has learned both Chinese and Japanese, I can say that Chinese grammar is quite similar to English (it does get quite different at a more advanced level, though), while it feels like Japanese grammar couldn't be more different from English
@@danielantony1882 well, character simplifications are not for a purpose to be "understandable" for foreigners. However, regarding shufa (书法/書法), traditional chinese do look more beautiful. But for daily usage, utility is more important than beauty
English and Chinese both being SVO languages, the spoken language is very easy to learn as an English speaker because of this shared sentence structure, the written language however..very difficult.
@@kanaure Well I used to use HelloChinese, before my friend started learning Japanese (then I switched to learn it with her). I already knew the for pronouns lol. But like, I'll look at some Japanese and be like "oh it's this!" Than it isn't lol. I also have a problem with learning languages that I can't use. Like French and Japanese have no use in German parts of Pennsylvania xD
Japanese person being interviewed: Showing interest, actually trying, grateful for the experience. US person being interviewed: "The heck bro, I dont know man, I need to get a hot-dog"
WhishiWhooshi like dropping atom bombs to completely obliterate literally entire cities with civilians? Or is it about removing citizenship status of people descendants to the other country, stripping them of all their possessions and throwing them in concentration camps. Most countries did horrible things during the war, some more than others, but some at least are cognizant of that, learned and evolved, others became self righteous entitled pricks that are descending into the very same philosophical frame that created the axis, still have concentration camps, kills thousands around the world with drone strikes without judgement or due process or respect to human rights.
WhishiWhooshi most of the time in history, actions of a country are caused by governments. And here in the US, we all know that the government does not speak for us all.
@@LeonardoPostacchini Japan killed around 3.9 million Chinese between 1937-1945 and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women. 5,400,000 Koreans were conscripted for labor and we all know what Unit 731 did.
this is a very good video. AS a chinese I always love japanese food and culture and hold no grudges against japan. I really wish these two countries can be great together, like brothers. We share the closest blood on earth.
I really want to make similar channel like yours. I really love your ideas and they're truly inspiring, especially your commentary about asian accent. They gave me sort of pride in my identity as an asian and as a language enthusiast. I don't know if you know this or not, but your content is truly one of the ways to battle racism towards asian people, especially within the asian itself. There are so many people still argue about which hanzi is better, simplified or traditional, and they became political, and then tore us apart. I will always stand by my view point that there is no better or worse language, simplified chinese created to promote the literacy and traditional chinese still being used to keep the heritage alive. Both has a pretty sweet reason. All dialects are beautiful, I mean, it's part of people' identity. Japanese, korean, vietnamese, chinese, everything, I love you all
My friend is Chinese and I am Japanese. We’re both born in America so we independently study our own languages. When she writes Chinese sentences I can somewhat understand… but not really. It’s a fun guessing game lol
my maternal grandparents speak a dialect of Cantonese that sounds even more similar to Japanese. They were from a smaller rural town in GuangDong, China. There’s theory that Japanese pronunciations of Kanji preserved some pronunciations from China (through Tang dynasty). At the same time, so did some of the more rural areas of China, especially those near the shoreline in Southern China.
I think the last one is better because Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian are similar and related, Persian and Arabic not at all - only the writing system just like Japanese and Chinese. Russian and Kazakh would work or Hebrew and Yiddish.
I feel like Russian and Mongolian would have been a better example. But even then these examples are different to the Japanese and Chinese situation. The chinese characters carry meaning while the arabic and cyrillic scripts only carry sounds.
@Aküma Kazakh is a completely different language that just uses kyrillic writing and a lot of loan words. Being Russian, I can read Kazakh but I don't understand anything :^) Russian-Greek is another example, you can read most of the letters of the Greek alphabet and can understand some loan words (imported to Russian from Greek), but it just doesn't make sense at all. I think that hieroglyphical writing is at advantage here, because in the languages with an alphabet, the letters closely represent pronunciation and not meaning, but in hieroglyphical languages, the characters represent meaning but not pronunciation. That's why you can have one kanji with one meaning, but have multiple completely different pronunciations (Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese)
So when Japanese read Chinese, they read it differently, they translate it differently, they pronounce it differently & they mis/understand it differently. Very interesting
It's not that Kanji have different meanings from Chinese characters. For Chinese people we can always guess the content according to the Kanji in Japanese. The more kanji in a sentence, the easier to guess. Maybe because we only have Chinese characters but Japanese are more used to Hiragana. Some pronunciation of Kanji is similar to that of Chinese, or even more close to dialect pronunciation in some areas of China. When I learn Japanese, can guess the way to pronounce kanji as in 音読みbecause its very similar, originally it came from China since 5th century, but I have to memorize 訓読み.
For example, It’s very apparently for Chinese people that 図書館 is library because it looks almost the same in Chinese. But it seems that Japanese people don’t recognize 图书馆 in the video😂 今天 and 今日 both mean ‘today’ in Chinese while Japanese people only use 今日
When the Chinese characters were imported, it was the era of Middle Chinese. Due to phonological changes, Chinese characters are now pronounced differently in Beijing dialect (standard Mandarin). Those imported into Japanese underwent some phonological changes too, therefore the pronunciation are different. Moreover, due to difference in language structure and semantic shift, it might be a bit tough to interpret the meaning without knowing it before despite knowing some characters.
Many of the common words were actually coined by the Japanese and then borrowed into Chinese and Korean, particularly for Western concepts. 圖書館 is one such example.
I think that would be easier for Chinese people to understand because how most Japanese Kanji is used is based on the adoption of Classical Chinese over a thousand years ago, a written language educated Chinese can read and understand.
It won't be very easy, and here's why: a lot of kanji in Japanese have different meanings than they do in Chinese. An example: 私(watashi) in Japanese means me (first person pronoun), but in Chinese (si) it means "private." It won't be much different than these Japanese people trying to read sentences in Chinese.
@@christinechen4896 Most phrases in Chinese and Japanese mean the same thing, and anything majorly different will be easily understood by Chinese people who are interested in some aspect of Japanese culture, such as 私、應援、會社 etc
@@TheHoodedGravy As someone who speaks Chinese fluently and has studied a little Japanese as a hobby, I completely get the point you're trying to make. But if most phrases in Chinese and Japanese really mean the same thing as you say, then the Japanese people in this video wouldn't struggle so much, either. It's entirely possible that this would be a pretty easy task for some Chinese people; I'm just saying that it shouldn't be assumed to be so easy for everyone.
I don't even know how exactly I ended up here, seeing as I don't understand neither Japanese nor Chinese, but this was an unexpectedly wholesome video!
@@steve00alt70 Yes. But in japan we have kun and on meaning which means the Japanese reading and chinese reading for every *most* kanji. So wouldn't say all kanji
The character for winter in Chinese is 冬, the Chinese translation for library is 图书馆，which translate literally to “an exhibition for books and pictures”, the picture （图）part is just the winter character with a box around it
As a user of Latin alphabet which is pronounced quite similarly all over the world (Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages etc), this looks like pure magic to me when you can use the same characters for two languages and yet pronounce and understand them differently
You can think of it in terms of the Indo-Arabic numbering system: the whole world uses it, and the symbols all mean the same thing, but each number is pronounced drastically differently.
@@ZhangtheGreatA way I also like to ask it to get them to understand it a bit more of it is “how do you pronounce a single “?” in your head when you read it?”. Because everyone understands what a single ? with no context means, it means they are confused, but people like me don’t always pronounce it in their head when they read it because there isn’t really much of an official associated sound. If asked to read it out loud, Americans would probably say it as “huh” or “what” but the point is that it’s a symbol we understand that doesn’t have its own sound as we know it. Another good way to frame it is “It is.” “It is?”. We will all pronounce these two sentences differently whether a “.” Or “?” is used but we can’t actually pronounce the symbol itself
Japanese has hiragana and katakana, Chinese write everything in kanji, that's why simplified characters were introduced to increase the literacy and faster in writing. In fact I learned my Mandarin in traditional kanji, but later in simplified, but actually both are the same, coz simplified are also used in ancient 草書calligraphy. For Japanese pronounciation in Kanji is closer to Minannese 閩南 and Hakka 客家, the South Chinese dialects in Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan it's easier for South Chinese to learn Japanese kanji, bcoz of similar or closer pronunciation. Mandarin is in fact simplified tones used in Beijing or Northern China.
this was just fascinating! i love how in some cases the approximate meaning still can be figured out just by the core meaning of the signs. such a different approach to reading when compared to plain phonetic letter based scripts. really love it!
Just to add on, 杂 (za) by itself simply means [mix, mixture, multi] 牛杂 (niu za) mixture of cow organs 猪杂 (zhu za) mixture of pig organ 杂货 (za huo) mixture of goods ( sold in grocery stores)
A little supplement to it. 杂 = 雜(in traditional chinese character) = 雑(in japanese kanji). And it's a particular way to represent 內臟 which means organ.
@@李家愷-o9w Japanese actually has pitch. It's not really taught until you get to a higher level and rarely makes a difference, but those classic chinese examples of "wrong tone" do exist.
I’m surprised. As a mandarin native, I would say people in this video already have high level of understanding to the s.Chinese, given they have never learned any Chinese language. I thought Japanese might be unable to read any simplified, but they actually can do a little bit by doing some analyses. Maybe this is the power of ideographs and pictographs. 💪
I am surprised by that too. Especially because I, as a European, understand less when reading something in Latin or Greek, although even, I have had Latin and Greek class in school. I always thought that the degree of Classical Chinese influence on Japanese was comparable with the influence of Latin and Greek on European languages, but I guess Japanese had preserved more of its Classical Chinese borrowings? Also, the simplifications of kanji in Chinese and Japanese are apparently not that random either, since these interviewees could still recognize a lot (although sometimes misleadingly, like the charming ladies with their "winter in box" at 5:22 😁)
@@m.koksal3396 Regarding the "winter in a box", I found it very amusing because I have studied Mandarin since young and somehow that has never occurred to me (granted my Mandarin is shit.) Now I am looking at Chinese characters from different angles!
@@seafood_hater I kinda think whoever simplified that just thought inside a library was a cold place, socially and perhaps physically. Not like you're having a party in there.
As a native Shanghainese, I find this jolly fun to watch, lol. I believe that anyone who can read Simplified Chinese knows how to read Traditional Chinese btw, but being able to write them both is another level entirely.
It really depends nowadays. Majority of the people can read Traditional Chinese, but 10 years before one of my high school classmates can't read Traditional Chinese characters at all.
I grew up in America learning only Traditional Chinese in weekend Chinese school and after school Chinese programs, I couldn't read simplify Chinese when I went to China my first few times, now I can read most. I still only write in traditional chinese since I am more used to it.
It depends, If u are a foreigner and u have been learning for a long long time 3-5 years or even more I believe u can read most of the traditional characters, but the most important thing is that u need the feel the language, If someone have been learning for example for a year and know about 1000 hanzi, he wont be able to understand traditional characters, because yet he doesnt feel the language at all. After all it is mostly about guessing the meaning, without deep immersion it can be hard
Funny how languages evolve. Japanese struggle to read Mandarin but Chinese people upon seeing Kanji would still understand the Japanese context. It's like a British person not understanding German words while Germans understand the English word. Garten is german for Garden but it might not register in a British person's head. Same thing here I guess
I'd say that's more because kanji dominates in the nouns and verbs of Japanese, especially verbs, of course. That means a Chinese person reading Japanese is able to pick up the most "important" words, what's in kana would be extra details or grammar like adjectives, adverbs, particles, etc. But a Japanese person sees all kanji so while it's potentially more likely to grasp more words, the words' functions and thus grammar structure are really up to their guesswork and analysis.
If they have experimented with Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified, I would believe the participants would have much less trouble discerning the characters. Of course, Traditional Chinese is not widely used in Mainland China.
@@kevinsinger2 I saw traditional chinese everywhere when I was in mainland china. Shop sign boards, restaurant menu, building name (xxx library, xxx train station, etc.)
it depends. japanese uses a lot of characters that are more traditional than simplified chinese. plus chinese would have no idea about the grammar, which almost all in hiragana. without grammar they would have no idea. they could probably pick out some nouns and verbs, but have no idea whats going on with them.
@@dotmerah6713 明天我要乘新干线去东京旅行；Tomorrow, I will travel to Tokyo by Shinkansen. I think that most Chinese can grasp the core meaning of this Japanese sentence. Some Chinese do not know 私 means 我, and they may think that 私 means "personally" or "privately".
lol this is interesting! I can see that they are basically guessing the meaning from the Kanji that they can recognise. Lol this is actually the same for a Chinese native speaker. When I try to understand the instructions writen in Japanese on a product, Im actually reading the Kanji to assume the general meaning😂😂
This is so interesting, when I remember growing up as an African , we used to think Chinese, Koreans and Japanese could easily read and understand each other linguistically but when I grew up, I realized the differences! It’s hilarious watching this presentation now!
1000 years ago that was the case. They all read classical chinese. In japan, there were two types of literature/poetry; hanshu (chinese poems) and waka (japanese songs). hanshu were all written in classical chinese while waka was written in japanese form. Japan's oldest and most official historical records, the nihon shoki was also written in classical chinese
@@ysf-d9i documentations in Korea and Vietnam were written in chinese characters in the history, before they created own scripts. Not sure what was in Japan.
This is amazing! The ladies (older) did so well! Honestly I was unaware of how comprehensible the characters were. Even if they didn't know exactly, they could make decent educated guesses. Thx for the new knowledge lol
wow. im russian and im marveling how they are able to read a set of those lines and dots. and they stare at this papers and then like "yeeeah, rameeen, how did not i recognize it before?"
Чувак, я прожил 5 лет в Китае и говорю на 普通话 (мандарине) и скажу читать иероглифы не сильно сложно, они легко запоминаются (есть система по котрой они учатся), японцы сами используют 汉子 хандзи, но назвают кандзи, то есть им читать иероглифы было трудно только потому что киты используют упрощённую 简体字 иероглифику, а японцы традиционную 繁体字, честно ожидал от японцев большего, но по воспоминаниям об учебе им реально даже тяжелее давался китайский чем нашим ребятам.
Chinese viewer : loves the comparison and understanding. Trying to understand the Japanese point of view of the simplified text Westerner : those old women were cool My favourite was the tempura comment as I remember years ago asking a Japanese friend sitting outside a Japanese restaurant, what does that Japanese text say? I recognised the 天 character and it read "tempura" and wondered why they would say the term "sky" in a food dish. Made sense after I understood onyomi..
![[TH] 2024 PMGC League | Survival Stage วันที่ 1 | PUBG MOBILE Global Championship](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FVFT-PFwU80/mqdefault.jpg)
I think traditional Chinese is easier for Japanese people to read than simplified Chinese, probably because we "imported" Chinese letters a long time ago.
But in reality, we don't really understand Chinese except for some simple words. So if you want to communicate with Japanese people, you will have to learn Japanese.
So if you want to learn Japanese with me, I will send you some Japanese lessons where I teach you the kind of Japanese that real-life Japanese people speak. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3hYOWAG
That Japanese Man Yuta very fun video. The way your interviewees pronounced the Chinese sentences cracked me up haha
You always have great ways to pivot the subject of a video to encourage people to join your email list 👍
I agree, Japanese is more similar to traditional Chinese than simplified Chinese.
Does old lady on the left have a boyfriend?
@JustABulletBill What?! Who says that? They're not even related!
The two older women's reactions were most endearing, they really seemed interested in understanding the meanings.
The older ladies got the sound reading (onyomi) of kanji perfectly!!! They got amazingly superb knowledge of kanji, compared to other couples. Further more, modern chinese uses simplified chinese characters, which may look vastly different from traditional ones used in Japanese kanji, but the ladies seems to infer from and get them correct.
Makes me wonders if they are actual language teachers, or is it elder generations have better knowledge of kanji.
Also they speak in sort of Kyoto Kansai ben 8-)
Unlike the younger generation, they probably grew up when Sino Japanese relations were good
@@curumipon7089 Like, during the Tang dynasty? XD
The Chinese kanji knowledge of younger generations is far less good than elders. Because long ago written Japanese was totally purely represented in kanji (same as Korean).
Adrian Jeong You’re right, but that was definitely not the case when those two women were young. Kana characters were introduced very long ago.
Those two older ladies were so stylish!!
acammtt where’re you from?
@acammtt I was going to say, when I visited Japan, the Japanese people had much more style than compared to us Americans.
True! But I would rather say they are kinda formidable...
Ikr....They were so slick in their answers and came off as super wise to me
Lesbian couple
I loved how seriously and professionally the two ladies took the challenge. Very admirable and charming.
it’s also funny how they immediately think of the war when their flag is brought up 😂
@@troy5094 that's how every japanese citizen should think lol, good for them
and the one in green is so fine
too pro
yes i love them
Just to clarify, “rain falls and the ground hardens” (ame futte ji katamaru (雨降って地固まる) is an expression meaning something like “adversity makes us stronger.” You can think of it like after the rain, the ground gets harder/stronger. So the first two thought it was some kind of expression in which a cow gets stuck in the mud!
I am a Brazilian watching an English video about japanese people trying to understand Chinese.
Globalization intensifies
No sweat, President Trump will roll it back... 😏
Me too and I'm an Arab 😂😂😂🌚😑
哈哈哈 有趣
I'm Peruvian
Maybe, it seems to be stupid, but..
I am Yakut who speak russian writing this comment in English to Brazilian after watching an English video about Japanese people trying to understand Chinese....
~Globalization~
As someone who can understand both Japanese and Chinese, this was really amusing. It was also interesting to see the correlations that Japanese people draw from Chinese characters to Japanese characters. Thank you for the hard work Yuta-san!
same here dude
Mandarin is a mandatory subject for my college diploma course (which I'll be going starting next month haha). I'm planning to take Japanese next when I start my degree. So I want to ask you: does knowing (a little?) mandarin complicates studying Japanese? Or does it actually makes my Japanese studying a bit easier? Thanks in advance!
@@jadespidey friend said it helped when learning kanji, and the stroke orders are the same 99.99 percent of the time
@@jadespidey Definitely a great help for learning Japanese. For English native, the Chinese characters are almost the hardest part, so do the Kanji.
Oooh I see! That's great then. Thanks!!
1:58 *_"To kidnap a cow and dye your face?"_*
That's kinda scary lol
Sounds like something an ancient Celtic person would do.
To kidnap a cow and dye your face crimson with its bl00d
@@van-hieuvo8208 i just realized that there's no kanji for ramen..its just katakana
@@lyhthegreat ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8B%89%E9%BA%BA Wikipedia disagrees... but I don't see people use it either
You never done this? It's a common hobby in China
4:30 he said "今天学校放火"?
哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
Haha it's a good typo.
*_-testing-_*
敌在教务处！
哈哈哈哈多少学生的梦
I like how the older ladies were trying to learn as they interpreted. Just their general attitude towards learning is somewhat inspiring
Lol nice name
@@euomu lol, right back at you
Which country are you from ?
@@gintoki9986 I'm from Canada. Most of the older people in my country aren't as interested in learning as the two in this video are
The aunties (older ladies) looks cool.
the one on the left was such a badass
Ikr?! Oml.
@Fahim Ali I'm not sure why you're tagging me here?
And smart as hell
Yeah they look smart and probably read a lot of books
"Kidnap a cow to dye your face."
- Ancient Chinese proverb
Confusius said:
I see you're a man of culture. I live by that proverb daily.
Lol sounds realistic
Rain falls ground hardens
Forest of rain something something
I am Japanese, but I enjoyed watching this video.I have never studied Chinese, but secondly, I was able to understand the meaning by looking at the letters.Each kanji used in Japan has its own meaning.Chinese and Japanese have several kanji characters in common.Therefore, even if you don't understand grammar, you can somehow convey your image by looking at kanji.
This video is very interesting ☺️(I am using a translator.I'm sorry if there is a sentence that is difficult to understand.)
I am chinese,My thoughts are the same as yours
That two middle age ladies were so adorable. Especially when the one of them said: "Stop pointing mic at me" 🤣
Came here just to say that. I like that some of the interviews involves different age groups
I would watch a whole talk show with these two. Starring the lady on the left, with the lady on the right as a sidekick.
"But you talk a lot!"
@@_qualiaa uP
the tension was real
The guy in brown shirt pronounced the “there’s no school today “ perfectly except the way he said the last word 假 made the sentence a totally different meaning which is “ the school set (on) fire today” in Chinese lol, like, that actually makes sense, logically speaking
and that's why tonal languages will stay scary for me to learn lmao
Freaking hell, for me was perfect, what was the diference that made the meaning so diferent?
@Zenytram Searom
今天=today
学校=school
放假=(is) on break, in recess
He said 放火，which means to set on fire
Oh my god 😂😂😂
@@balderhuybreghs8827 LMAO TRUE
The intuitive way of reading Chinese as a Japanese: re-order all the Hanzi, find the same, if not, a similar Kanji, and make it sounds reasonable.
The intuitive way of reading Japanese as a Chinese: ignore all the hiragana and katakana, re-order the Kanji, find the same, if not, a similar Hanzi, and make it sounds reasonable.
And fail on both due to Chinese words being very context sensitive and Japanese use kana words to modify the meaning of kanji words a lot. Though it's still better than nothing, just really, really unreliable.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Right, but at least they can understand the topic. There is a good analogy from another channel saying that it is like an English speaking person reading something like this: xxx cat xxxx xxx fish xxx xxxx food. You may guess the meaning by common sense but it is possible when the true meaning is something like: Some cat is actually considered best food for fish.
@@waterspinach3145 At least with CN->JP you have all the words there, just in the wrong order (and sometimes the wrong meaning). With JP->CN it's harder because JP has all these grammar and tenses and word declinations expressed in hiragana, you are leaving half the sentence out.
As a Chinese.. yea the 2nd one is pretty accurate 😅
Formal Japanese written language is easier to understand than the everyday written piece for Chinese
The first two guys were really putting the effort in trying and it’s awesome. The older ladies really knew their Kanji and can basically guess everything even though it’s simplified Chinese characters.
Im a Chinese descendant living in Canada. One day a Japanese friend of my parents from the local language learning centre came over and only my dad was home, who spoke zero English. Somehow they communicated with only a pen and some paper, and the friend helped with some gardening work together for the better part of a day; all only with Kanji on paper.
Would love to see the paper XD
I wonder how hard it was on their hands XD
Those two languages are different. Barely communicable.
@@scottleo8363 guessing 🤔 😄 I mean 愛 and ai in chinese both are the same they both mean love lol
@@scottleo8363 Japanese have many borrowed word from Chinese. They are pronounced differently by are often written with the same kanji characters.
I’m Chinese and looking at their analysis of the words I think they all make sense 😂
well, to be fair, NO ONE, I MEAN NO ONE sounded like that Translator when we speak Mandarin in China. except for the Chinese official broadcasters.
Don yang ye same with dictionary voice for almost every language
Can relate
@@catmeme4life220 translator has a Beijing accent
Corona Virus I know your confusion but that is not Beijing. That is just too official. Sounded like who will speak on a propaganda broadcast.
2:42 dude literally gets almost the whole sentence meaning straight and then says Chinese is impossible wtf
Yes, lol he probably did well on kanji tests in school
The dude with blond hair was the one who said it was impossible, the guy who actually got it almost right just said it was hard.
I had a Romanian chess tutor for a few days who only spoke Romani. I don't. Yet whenever he told me something I could understand enough of what he was saying. He was the father of my physics teacher, who was quite surprised that I understood him to the point where I could retell what he was saying and she could confirm that it was correct.
Still, I would never claim that I understand Romani. I can't speak a word of it and I could likely only understand because the topic was limited.
I am foreigner who can speak Japanese and that kanji is not that hard, like beginner level
I should add, translating that as "There is no school today" is a bit off, since that could be interpreted to mean there is no school today, physically, like the campus has been destroyed. The better translation is "There is no class at school today," or "School is on break today."
Literally its "today school (on) break"
Cottidae romanian*, romani is the language of the rom people and it’s an indo iranic language, Romanian is Latin instead
I m chinese, and I went to Japan during middle school. I had nearly no english speaking skills. Me and my other Chinese friend got into an accident on a skiing resort near Tokyo. My friend broke his leg, and I was able to communicate with the first responders with only a pen and a paper. My friend was able to make a full recovery afterwards. The thing I noticed was that Japanese can understand some Chinese characters, and chinese can understand some kanji.
そうか、何せ英語のコメントを書きましたか？
@@You_already1这是什么意思
@@璇叶-d5n 豆奶的意思，你懂。
@@You_already1 什么玩意。中国人不骗中国人。我还真初中的时候去日本滑雪然后用笔写中文和日本人交流了。。。
@@mikeyangyang8816 嗯，你好棒棒睇。
It seems a lot like English speakers trying to read German. Some things make perfect sense and others are completely unintelligible
ah this and Norwegian.
Krankenhaus
It's way more than that. The characters can be exactly the same but read totally differently.
@@azazellon Einkaufswagen
@@alinafazilova9173 nani
When the old people see a Chinese message about the Japanese flag, they immediately think it's about the war lol.
I thought it was interesting as well. The comment about if chinese people were insulting them they wouldnt understand was also food for thought.Its like their generation sees the chinese only as people they went to war with and who probably dont like them very much. Whereas the young ones were just like "huh chinese is hard !"
Old New guy well I dont blame the Japanese for being defensive. Every other week, the Korean government is suing their companies for wartime labor and protesting against this and that, racking up the past like the Comfort woman issue, building comfort woman statues in front of embassies and consulates worldwide, and protesting against the use of the Rising Sun flag. Its always in the Japanese media.
@@kageyamareijikun The big problem that Koreans, Chinese etc. have with the Japanese is that the Japanese governments after WWII have never acknowledged or owned up the atrocities of WWII and before, neither have they apologised. Perhaps out of shame they have tried to forget and deny this part of history. Even today a lot of Japanese people are largely ignorant about what their country did in those years. So yes, I do blame them for being defensive and I guess Koreans and Chinese people will need to keep trying to remind their Japanese neighbours. The Japanese are extremely lovely and interesting people but this happens to be a point against them.
Polterpneuma As a Simplified user and mainlander I still find there are too many misunderstandings with simplified characters! Like 干蔬菜. This means “dried vegetables” but could totally be interpreted as “f*ck vegetables” because of the merging of 幹 and 乾 into 干!
olavl well I respect your opinion but I think China's and South Korea's approach to this matter is unhelpful and regrettable. China has toned down a lot recently tho and seems to want to boost Sino-Japan ties. While Korea seems intent on continuing their crusade and trade war. Other countries like Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore have stopped talking about WW2 decades ago and enjoy a very positive and mutually beneficial relationship with the Japanese administration. China and SK should move on. Btw Japan has apologised repeatedly. How long do people expect them to keep apologising for the sins of their forefathers? At a certain point its just predatory and raking up old issues for brownie points.
I'm the opposite
I use Chinese to try and understand japanese lines sometimes
Just try not to eat faces and it's ok
@@cahallo5964 I think the kinda equivelent joke for Chinese users would be to write toilet paper to each other. (手纸 means toilet paper in Chinese and letter in Japanese).
Yeah thats pretty much how average Chinese tries to understand Japanese lol.
@@FlameRat_YehLon 手纸is tissue, 厕所纸 is toilet paper. Get your facts straight. ^^
@@cahallo5964 what's the reference here?
This video is very important. It helps people from abroad to understand how different Asian languages actually are, and so are their cultures. Even Japanese people hardly understand Chinese pronunciation despite having similar ieroghyphs.
Japanese Chinese characters come from ancient Chinese or traditional Chinese characters, which are not the same as the simplified Chinese characters currently used in China, so it is normal to understand, just as Chinese people can't understand many Japanese characters.
The two older women were great
I feel wisdom from them
I’m gaining brain cells from hearing them speak
日本語、中国語、韓国語、ベトナム語(越南語)発音は似ている言葉がたくさんあるよ
Emotion
日本: 感動 ( kandou)
中国: 感动 (gǎndòng)
韓国: 감동 (gamdong,感動）
越南: cảm động (感动、camdong)
理由、結婚、準備なども同じですよ
Edited in 2021/08/30:
Thanks for many likes. But I just want to share about the relationship of Kanji in East Asia languages. Please not toxic.
我的评论只是想说不同语言汉字之间的关系。不要吵架！
似ている理由ってなんですか？
ペコ 古代から漢字表記を使って、どんどん漢字文化圏が形成した
我们都是一家人，东亚友好👬
@@Rain-bu9sl 对啦
今の日本や他の国の言葉に英語の単語が混じってるのと同じだよ
漢語が周辺の国の言葉に混じってる
If anybody is curious, the traditional character for noodles is 麵, which was simplified in Japan to 麺. In China, it was simplified to 面, which also means face (i.e. two previously distinct characters got merged together in simplified Chinese).
“Library” written using traditional characters is 圖書館, in Japanese 図書館, in simplified characters 图书馆, i.e. 圖 was simplified by having the interior replaced with 冬, the character for winter.
Also, some characters are simplified in both China and Japan, e.g. 學 -> 学, some are simplified in both places but differently (see above), and a handful were only simplified in Japan. Though it is true that kanji are overall closer to traditional Chinese characters.
Wow, so well explained. Thank you so much 🤗🤗 I just started learning kanjis (Japanese ones) a week ago. And as a beginner, I wanted to ask you if it would make sense to learn the non-simplified kanjis too? Or are these Kanjis rather outdated and not so common in todays time anymore? And of course you don't have to answer my question if you don't want to. I just thought I would ask because you seem to be someone who has a lot of knowledge about Japanese and Chinese 👏🏻👏🏻
@@violet_cozylife I actually cannot speak any Japanese. So somebody can correct me if I am wrong, but I would assume that basically everything outside of decorative things (like banners etc.) will use Shinjitai, so I would go with that.
@@violet_cozylife Just focus on the Japanese kanji, including Japan-simplified ones for now. Much later, if you want to expand your knowledge to be able to read Traditional Chinese (say, if you want to go to Taiwan or Hong Kong), then you'll already be a bit ahead, just have to modify your existing knowledge a little.
@@uamdbro r u right. The merge is quite common in Simplified Chinese. Not a fan, personally.
Also Japanese can understand all the traditional characters since they are still used in peoples name, name of place, and are seen here and there. But simplified characters?? Most of them are impossible to understand.
I can speak Chinese, and I found it easier to study Japanese with Chinese background, especially if you know the origins of most characters in classical Chinese, like how 走 now means walk but in olden times it means to run, which is what it means in Japanese now 走る. I also find it interesting that some Kanji use traditional Chinese while others use simplified Chinese and yet a few more use neither. Overall it's really interesting to see the interrelationships :)
I also wondered why Japanese Kanji used some Simplified Chinese characters and other Traditional Chinese characters. From my research, it seems that if Kanji has Traditional Hanzi, then that was ancient Hanzi transferred over from China to Japan in the ancient era. If Kanji has Simplified Hanzi, then actually that was derived from the Japanese simplifiying some Traditional Hanzi, and then that simplified form ended up back in China, as Simplified Hanzi!
So basically:
Traditional Hanzi goes to Japan and becomes Kanji. Some of the Traditional Hanzi is simplified over the centuries. The simplified Kanji go back to China and becomes Simplified Chinese. That's why it seems like Japanese Kanji is a mix of Traditional and Simplified Hanzi!
EDIT: There's been a lot of comments debating this. I just want to clarify that SOME simplified Kanji went back to China and became part of the Simplified Hanzi script. In reality its a lot more complex and there are many different sources/stories behind how the characters in Simplified Hanzi came to be.
But sometimes it maybe no tho, like when in Mandarin characters the characters in it means in some multiple specific meanings and pronounce. *srsly People ald struggling with it.
While on the other hand, in Japanese kanji it may turn into another irrelevant multiple meaning and pronounce all the way 360°😂
By this way the native Chinese may suffering of double multiple meaning and pronounce to remember all these kanji 😭
Idk what the hell this is.
行 means walk, 走 means fast walking or slow running
@@apple-on5pq 走在中国古语中是快走的意思
@@apple-on5pq 歩く？
4:30 he actually said 今天学校放火 in mandarin which means: The school set on fire today! 😂
But have to say his pronunciation is quite good among others.
I heard... More like huan hou.. But yeah.. it can also sound like what you said too.xD
lol
这个人说出了我一直想做但是不敢做的事😂😂
今天学校爆炸lol
Being Chinese, watching this I laughed so many times. I know language barriers are normal and shouldn’t be laughed at, but I almost cried when they mistook beef with ramen for “rain falling and the ground hardens”.
and "kidnap a cow to dye your face"
Reminds me when I ordered _ramen_ from a Japanese stall (which is typically fresh) at 1 of my university's canteens & was served something that resembled more like Korean _ramen/ramyon/lamyon_ (which is basically instant noodles)
是的我也看乐了，神他妈雨滴打到地面上hhhhh
@@Elias_Harrison that even sounds perfectly reasonable if does not put kanji character into words.
True but let’s be real. Chinese guessing a Japanese sentence could be more brutal lmao
In most cases, you should have shown traditional Chinese characters to the Japanese for them to better understand the meaning. They understand"牛雜拉麵" better than"牛杂拉面" because they probably know 麵 is for noodles or any food made from wheat, whereas 面 is something related to face.
You are right
As an English speaker, this is how I feel reading a language like Swedish or Norwegian. It's got a lot of the Anglo-Saxon roots that English came from so I can kind of piece together meaning from similar words. Even though it's related, German is actually a lot harder to understand because of the agglutination and the words seemed to have evolved more over time than in Swedish or Norwegian.
To share an interesting fact, at 5:23, the cool looking lady asked the question: why is winter （冬） inside of a box in "图”? I have the same question, so I look it up. Apparently, the shape of "冬” is not the same as the character "冬” （winter). The inside of “图” derives from the cursive, caoshu script in Chinese calligraphy, and the “冬” here was originally a simplified, cursive version of "啚”， and so, "圖” became “图” through simplification. Anyway, thank you for making this video. It is very fun and educational.
图=図=圖
书=書
馆=館
圕=图书馆=図書館=圖書館
とても面白い
I think that what he was saying was, basically, the “winter” inside the box wasn’t actually from the character “winter”. It was actually derived from the simplification of the cursive of the traditional writing, and it was just a coincidence that winter was in the box
Oh, ok, that makes sense, just like the whole writing system.
Brb, gotta learn 2000 characters just to have a beginning of fluency ...
@@awax2585 I mean you'd have to learn that many words as well to "just have a beginning of fluency" in English. I know learning the characters is hard (I'm trying my best myself) but if you see the character as a word, it's not as daunting to me. At least especially in Chinese this is the case, it seems.
The "cool looking" lady is my favourite in this video!
Foreigners visiting in Japan: just talking in Japanese is fine, don’t show me kanji sentences
Japanese visiting in China: just showing kanji sentences is fine, don’t talk to me in Chinese
Chinese people visiting Japan have an easier time reading Japanese than hearing it, too. Some of the kanji is understandable in a similar way.
letao12 Yep, I can pretty much get by just fine by reading the Kanji. Speaking however is a completely different story.
Yep, I have no trouble to go around Japanese cities as all road names and train station names are in Kanji. I can understand them well. However, it is way efficient to talk English in Japan as Japanese adopt a lot of English pronunciation.
PS. I don't speak Japanese.
When you go to japan but there is no subtitles
-Kenjo - I’m Japanese
if you think in a japanese context some of the sentences do make sense, even in mandarin, like 面 in chinese means noodle and face, depending on the context used. The japanese use 面 more for the face meaning, while they use the traditional chinese version 麺 to mean noodle. The thing about chinese is that some word's meaning change depending on the context of the sentence rather than using the individual meaning of each word. Most of the kanji words used do make sense in mandarin too but just not commonly used by the chinese, like instead of using the chinese 放假, the japanese use 休暇 which makes sense since 休 also means rest but the way it is used is not common among the chinese. what is interesting is seeing different japanese people interpret the chinese sentences differently, like they almost got it.
麺 is not traditional Chinese, it's shinjitai. The correct character in traditional Chinese would be 麵. While Japan simplified the left part, simplified Chinese merged it with the character 面.
Hokkien is much closer to Japanese and Korean. It’s the language that descended from Middle Chinese which greatly influenced Japanese and Korean
@@handel1111 indeed hokkien did evolve from middle chinese and it was commonly used during the tang dynasty after all, spreading their influence to Japan, Korea, Vietnam and other SEA countries. Most of the Chinese who migrated to SEA didn't even speak mandarin.
@@cestakou357 oh ok. Didn't see.
@@JulienCLS (Not a linguistic expert) Cantonese and Hokkien seems be more ancient form of chinese, from Tang dynasty as you said.
Modern chinese is actually Mandarin, aka "language of the officials". Since the north have been (currently is still) capital for China for centuries, it is also called "Northern dialect", with heavy influence from northern China.
Interestingly, Japanese preserved the Tang style of chinese, keeping many traditional terms. (Ex. 舅姑 is actually parents-in-law in Japanese, not parents' siblings as in Chinese!)
Their reaction surprised me, because I remember once my family went to Tokyo and the shop owner didn’t understand English, so we written in Chinese for the product that we want and they were able to understand the meaning
That one dude was all like, "yeah, I know Chinese, what up."
On the second sentence, he prounced the madarin like "the school is starting a fire today"
@@sasionx4785 OMG hAhHa IKR
@@sasionx4785 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@sasionx4785 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈啊哈哈哈
What part please?
日本の方：中国語は漢字ばかりで難しい。
中国の方：日本語は漢字以外にも平仮名と片仮名が混ざっていますので難しい。
ｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ
kirin KIM intriguing phenomena ! let me express that in traditional Chinese:日本方面：中文漢字難 中國方面：日文漢字以外平假名和片假名難
我竟然看懂了。。。太神奇了
😂看懂了
看不懂平假名和片假名 我也能看懂这句话哈哈哈
ha , I can understand : 私**懂 ：P
If the Chinese characters is written in Traditional Chinese characters, I think Japanese people can more understand...(拉面 = 拉麵)（太阳 = 太陽）
yea, because they use the traditional chinese languages instead
日语的汉字词组是古汉语，繁体古汉语最容易认
@@giadabengua5667 No, traditional is used in Macao and Taiwan as well.
@@Freshie55 For some reason, Singapore uses simplified Chinese
@@giadabengua5667 Mandarin is spoken in Taiwan, but they use Traditional Chinese characters.
以前的华人看日语只读中文（かんじ）
错 我现在看日语还是只读中文
例如：
字：私は魚が嫌いだ
他们：私…鱼…嫌…
沒錯～～～😁
君日本语本当下脚
*宅 intensifies*
Hi I'm from Taiwan, when I was in a camp at high school in Japan, a Japanese student on our team wrote 掃除 and showed me and I immediately understood that it was time for cleaning, I was surprised that the kanji was basically the same
that's cool :o
awsome ! :D
did Japanese were friendly with you? :0
@@TakittyLove Yeah
Think some colloquial Chinese vocabulary used in Taiwan/ROC is borrowed from Japanese _Kanji_ too? e.g. 'off-service' (for a bus/train) -> 回送 (vs 暂停服务 in more formal Chinese), 'popular' -> 人氣 (vs 受欢迎 in more formal Chinese)
I think that’s why I’ve come to love traditional Chinese. As a Japanese and Chinese learner, it makes me happy how similar Japanese kanji is compared to traditional Chinese and sometimes even the same. I also have an easier time reading traditional compared to simplified for some things. Though writing can be difficult.
We Chinese can read both traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters.So I think it's easier for us to read Japanese.Just like my friends went to Japan, they just don't understand any Japanese, but they can read the kanji.
If you know Chinese, you can often understand the ideas of a sentence written in Japanese! It definitely helps with reading. However, knowing Chinese provides little help for understanding spoken Japanese. Whats interesting is if you know Japanese, Chinese is much easier to learn in general. The meanings of kanji/hanzi characters are similar between both languages, while already knowing the onyomi pronunciation makes remembering Chinese pronunciations much easier. So really, other than mastering that tone based pronunciation system, the only thing left to learn is Chinese's word phrases and relatively loose grammar!
@@frozenhamburgers9925 Yes, it is true. If you already known English and Japanese, learning Chinese would be simpler because Chinese sentences syntax almost same like English, yet Chinese grammar is extremely simple if comparing to English and Japanese.
Actually the killing part of Chinese language is the Literary Chinese (文言文). If back to the ancient time, let says back to Qing Dynasty which is hundreds years ago, many native Chinese speakers will be considered as illiterate because we couldn't write in Literary Chinese. :D
@@kokkeonglee8990 穿越回去也不怕，清朝的文盲率至少90%，大多数人连字都不认识，更别说作文章了。
Разве в Китае не запрещен ютуб? (Я не знаю как я здесь оказался)
@@zhan-daus5497 Не,не совсем,много китаец могут смотреть видео через Ютуб
Traditional Chinese: 圖書館 象徵 太陽
Simplified Chinese: 图书馆 象征 太阳
Maybe Traditional Chinese is easier for Japanese to understand than Simplified Chinese.
No surprise, since the Japanese had been exposed to the Traditional forms for centuries, and the Simplified version was put forward by the People's Republic.
As a Turkish who can speak both Japanese and Mandarin, I really enjoyed the video❤️ thank you
This video is actually sociologically interesting, the two older ladies are the only ones that didn't get the "break" sentence, and they thought the sentence about the japanese flag would be anti war propaganda
i thought the same thing, it’s really interesting
But, why they were worried if it was an anti war propaganda?
They were also able to understand things the younger Japanese didn't.
Many Japanese believe that Chinese and Korean hate Japanese flag
I also learned that boys who learned some chinese in school can understand chinese better than the vast majority of japanese people who never learned chinese
Actually, we Chinese also think Japanese is hard to learn. But learning Japanese is way easier for Chinese than other foreigners cause there are many Kanji(Chinese characters) in Japanese.
Yes tru, I started with a hiragana last yr(not consistently and I rem some characters) but I actually feel that I should start with the simple kanji?>>like i was able to interpret 愛 as 爱straightway, and it was in stuck my head immediately.. Though in my country we were taught the simplified Chinese so what do you think? Should I remain with the hiragana or start on kanji-
@@kanaure I recommend you put the furigana in the most important position. I believe you can understand many Kanji because you learned simplified Chinese. But the pronunciation and writing method are very different from Japanese Kanji and simplified(even some traditional) Chinese characters. Chinese is my mother tongue, so when I start learning I just remember the meaning in Japanese to make it easier, however, as more as I learned, I realized that I had better learn more hiragana of Kanji, it will help me more when I really communicate with Japanese. (But when I was in Japan, I was an English student, so I used English much more with my professor and other students, and one of the reason is my Japanese was very poor and it is impolite to use my poor Japanese discuss academic researches.)
I agree！As a Chinese ，I think Japanese grammar is really hard to learn.
as overseas chinese, I also agree
I not really learning japanese, but intepreting the kanji's meaning somewhat not really hard
去旅游都能看懂，😂
as a chinese, this video really makes my day :3
Me too lol. I may not speak mandarin but I am Chinese American, as I only speak teochew and a bit of Cantonese and can only understand bits of mandarin. It makes me happy to see Japanese people participate in trying to read Chinese since I love japan and anime lol
ぃんえ-どの SG？
as a brazilian who doesn't speak neither japanese nor chinese I find this so interesting
It's sad, but most of us don't even know how to read, write or speak in our own language.
@@blaeckingceorl4161 what's language in Brazil?
@Smoked Bear portuguÊs
@@zygnus9481 Português, not portugués, as spelled by our friend.
@@blaeckingceorl4161 Portuguese
a random observation: as a cantonese and mandarin speaker, i feel like onyomi readings of kanji resembles cantonese more than it does mandarin. pretty cool to see you've done one of these videos for both dialects!
EDIT: Thank you so much for the replies! They were very educational. Just clarifying, I'm aware there are Chinese dialects that are closer to Japanese than Canto. I merely compared those two because those are the ones I speak, and are the ones Yuta have done videos on. :)
cool observation! i'm no expert but i believe Cantonese is generally more conservative of features from Middle Chinese than standard Mandarin, which could explain why the Cantonese reading of the characters sounds more like what would have been borrowed into Japanese all those centuries ago.
Wow that’s interesting, is Cantonese older than Mandarin?
Cantonese is more resembling to Kan’on and Go’on modern Japanese readings of kanji. As a native Mandarin speaker though, I can still definitely tell where an on’yomi reading comes from
@@Mika-kana i wouldn't say any language spoken today is 'older' than any other, it's quite hard to determine the point in time where languages fully diverge from one another and become separate. No language is an island, after all. Mandarin just seems to have undergone more sound changes in the same period of time as Cantonese. I know that the list of sounds that can end a syllable in Mandarin is smaller than in Cantonese (e.g. 'k' and 't' sounds at the end), so I just guess Japanese speakers have more pointers to compare and contrast the Chinese loanwords in their language with Cantonese than Mandarin.
@@altosaxophonie yeah just to add on to this, since possibly the Yuan dynasty Mandarin lost what's called an entering sound which is the glottal stop you hear in other Chinese languages, a sound considered to be a tone (part of the actual four tones). I think only Min languages have preserved all three kinda of entering sound. A lot of the differences between onyomi and Mandarin is that difference in whether there's an inheritance of the entering sound or not
It's amazing how far these languages have diverged from each other yet how much similarity there still remains. Great video!
This is so gratifying as a Chinese learning Japanese. I like the hilarious translations of some phrases in kanji/hanzi between the two languages.
I wanna confrim something, Japanese uses the word kanji ..hanzi because it came from the han era or dynasty.
..don;t know how to forum a question so..
@@GremoriaParadise Yes, Kanji is how you pronounce Hanzi in Japanese
One of the only good thing being a Chinese student in Japan is you have a better proficiency in kanjis compared to other Japanese students; you can flex your vocabularies in essays pretty easily
You need to learn 中文文言文 (Chinese Old Language which is spoken during the dynasty time in China) to understand some Japanese. The Chinese that they speak are called "白话文 " Chinese Modern Language
Like "走" (in Chinese pronounce "Zou") means "walking " in Chinese modern language , in Chinese Old Language, it means "running", just like Japanese "走る"
or other example like
"明日" (in Chinese pronounce "Ming Ri") means "tomorrow", which is the same like Japanese, but in Chinese modern language, they write “明天“
@Jacky Phantom ummm. You dk know that Chinese characters actually ot introduced to Japan through Korea right? Along with the fact that at one point, Japan was solely using Chinese writing before actually changing pronunciations and combining it with heir own language native to the lands to form the basis of Japanese. Kanji does share the same root as Chinese. In fact, if it weren't for ancient Chinese influences, modern Japanese would be completely different.
@@ゼロワンそれが俺の名だ I think he meant it from the way the languages are spoken. The Chinese characters are definitely Chinese in origin (obviously), but the language is unrelated. Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects of Chinese (and even then some people advocate that these are two different languages, just with a similar usage of characters), but Japanese is Japanese, influenced by Chinese sure, but it is its own unique language.
走 still means running in hokkien
Dont need to learn old chinese to understand japanese. If you can speak and read other dialects like cantonese or the wu group etc. You can pretty much understand korean and japanese. I'm wenzhounese and the grammar and vocabulary is way different from modern day mandarin. Wenzhounese use more old vocabulary that isn't used in daily bases in china if you only speak mandarin. Same goes for cantonese. Those languages are older than mandarin so the koreans and japanese picked up sounds from the dialects in the dynasty times.
@@xXxSkyViperxXx 走
This is like filipinos trying to read and understand spanish
Relatable and Accurate
lol true
Here in Peru there were just one colonisation, from Spain. I am fine with that, otherwise our culture were broke.
Also Spanish people understanding portuguese and Italian
not really
in some cases maybe
but they're very different languages, Filipino has many Spanish derived vocabularies but our grammar are very different especially with Spanish conjugation and our ergative-absolutive language that European languages don't posses
but since many Filipinos and keen with English, that will probably help as I find English and Spanish more similar than Spanish and Filipino
the aunties (elder ladies ) in this vidoe are so adorable 💓 togather they look like sisters or best friends IDK 😅
Why would you try and assume the relationship between them? Their relationship could be anything, and it's enough to just say they are nice together.
palm tree because they look like good friends.
They r lesbian
The reason why the text in Mandarin sounds very different from Japanese eg Japan is Riben vs Nihon or Nippon is because Mandarin has evolved a lot since Old / Middle Chinese. Meanwhile in southern China we have many different Chinese dialects which have better preserved the original Old / Middle Chinese pronunciation of these words. In Hokkien dialect for instance we pronounce 日本 as Jit Pun, 时间 as shigan, 新闻 as shinbun (very similar to Japanese), 学校 as hakkyo (same as Korean), 运动 as undong (again same as Korean), and there are other dialects like Shanghainese which pronounce it nyi pun which is very close to Nippon.
The most simple reason: different region of China has different dialect. Where the Japanese hear the sound is where they will "borrow". They went to Wu region which is shanghai and the jiang su region, and borrowed stuff from there. 吴服 is clothing of the wu region.
Japanese has its native vocabulary and uses many European loanwords too. Kango (Chinese loanwords) is only one piece of the vocabulary and in everyday speech they are used only about 20% of the words so even if they were similar you would not understand too much.
1:32 The lady with the scarf is so elegant. I like how she expresses herself.
It's like a Spanish person trying to identify words in French or Romanian, some are the same and another are strange.
Have you ever tried to read Portuguese? Usually you can get most of what’s being said if you read it (for people who know Spanish) and vice versa from Portuguese to Spanish
@@greenlilac32I feel like it's more easier for portuguese speakers though
Blue Diamond how bout spanish to italian/italian to spanish???
@@greenlilac32 exactly, If you know portuguese, even If you don't study spanish you'll catch lots of setences. It's so similar, but idk if the spanish speakers feel the same about portuguese.
As an Spanish I can confirm , I can recognize some words in Italian , and some more in French since it is obligatory to learn it in the province I live , even I’m bad at it.
If we go to Portuguese it’s pretty easy to know that they mean by text , but in my opinion they speak to fast to me to understand. But if you have a chance go to Portugal go , it is a very beautiful country!
I am Chinese-Canadian, so I speak English, French and Mandarin. Its helpful when traveling. When I was in Europe and going through Italy and Spain, although I didn't speak Spanish or Italian, the words were similar enough to French that I could make a decent guess when reading signs. Same for Japan. I cant read katakana or hiragana at all, but I can get by through looking at their kanji and guessing the meaning from translating the kanji to Chinese.
Yay for globalization 🌏🗺💯
kanji and chinese symbols are beatiful i hope to one day understand them
@@Gigachad-mc5qz Kanji and Chinese symbols are the same, Kanji means Han Characters, Han is the Chinese people.
“” translating the kanji to Chinese.“” This sounds wrong and misleading... The word "Kanji" literally means "Han Chinese characters", they mostly have the same meaning except for some words Japanese use differently
but for Korean language, it's impossible
If I am also studying Japanese. Should I start with simplified or traditional Chinese?
Chinese and Japanese are from different language families and as such their grammatical structure is very different. However, there is still significant overlap between Chinese and Japanese not only in written script, but also in some pronunciations, and this is quite evident when testing small language snippets. Its probably impossible to have a Chinese and Japanese speaker hold a conversation with each other in their native languages when neither understands the other language, but for very simple phrases (e.g location signs, basic stuff like "I will eat beef noodles today") the meaning can be mostly ascertained. Interestingly, Chinese grammar has significant similarities with English, of all languages. Apparently they are both analytical and "common" languages (no extensive honorific systems), which means they have similar sentence structures. To learn English or Chinese when you is already fluent in one of them is as simple as learning the words and replacing them in the sentence, or so I've heard. The difficulty is Chinese language being tonal (ridiculously hard to pronounce sometimes) and the English language having more exceptions to many of its rules than adherents, leading to a jumbled mess.
At 5:30, the woman says "library" in Japanese. Incidentally, it sounds like a very accented way of saying "library" in Chinese, and would probably be understandable to a Chinese speaker. Yet, the woman didn't recognise all the Chinese characters for "library". So this is an example of where ancient Chinese pronunciation that went over to Japan survived the ages, but the meaning of the written characters did not. In other cases, it was the reverse; the same character had the same meaning in Hanzi/Kanji, but the pronunciation is completely different.
actually english grammar has lots in common with mandarin, you do realize that mandarin was created wayy before english. also chinese isn't a language you bozo it's like saying i speak "american" or "british" -_-
Yeah, as someone who has learned both Chinese and Japanese, I can say that Chinese grammar is quite similar to English (it does get quite different at a more advanced level, though), while it feels like Japanese grammar couldn't be more different from English
I think 圖書館 looks extra ugly in simplified Chinese. If it was in traditional, they'd be perfectly understandable.
@@danielantony1882 well, character simplifications are not for a purpose to be "understandable" for foreigners. However, regarding shufa (书法/書法), traditional chinese do look more beautiful. But for daily usage, utility is more important than beauty
English and Chinese both being SVO languages, the spoken language is very easy to learn as an English speaker because of this shared sentence structure, the written language however..very difficult.
I used to try to learn Mandarin before switching to Japanese. Now I'm just confused in both languages 😅
@@kanaure Well I used to use HelloChinese, before my friend started learning Japanese (then I switched to learn it with her). I already knew the for pronouns lol. But like, I'll look at some Japanese and be like "oh it's this!" Than it isn't lol. I also have a problem with learning languages that I can't use. Like French and Japanese have no use in German parts of Pennsylvania xD
Some japanese words are similar to chinese. The word yes is the same for chinese and japanese
I still remember during my first ever flight, Japanese flight attendants communicated with me by writing Kanji’s, man they were like angels
men! THAT's so cool! :D you didn't even need speak. Cool ! xD
@@leoyoung6689 Liuqiu is Ryūkyū in Japanese and Rūchū in Okinawan.
@@leoyoung6689 They should be referred to by their local name, not by their modern Mandarin name.
Ohh! That happened to me too! so nice, but im Mexican so i didn't catch a thing
Japanese are mostly kind unlike Koreans
Japanese person being interviewed: Showing interest, actually trying, grateful for the experience.
US person being interviewed: "The heck bro, I dont know man, I need to get a hot-dog"
japanese people are so nice dmsisdje
@@bl6elynn
They're trying to hide those WW2 war crimes.
WhishiWhooshi like dropping atom bombs to completely obliterate literally entire cities with civilians? Or is it about removing citizenship status of people descendants to the other country, stripping them of all their possessions and throwing them in concentration camps.
Most countries did horrible things during the war, some more than others, but some at least are cognizant of that, learned and evolved, others became self righteous entitled pricks that are descending into the very same philosophical frame that created the axis, still have concentration camps, kills thousands around the world with drone strikes without judgement or due process or respect to human rights.
WhishiWhooshi most of the time in history, actions of a country are caused by governments. And here in the US, we all know that the government does not speak for us all.
@@LeonardoPostacchini
Japan killed around 3.9 million Chinese between 1937-1945 and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women. 5,400,000 Koreans were conscripted for labor and we all know what Unit 731 did.
2:31 This is in fact also a correct way to interpret this sentence. Well done
That two ladies have very good kanji knowledge and logic. They could pronounce almost every character(even in simplified form). Respect.
Simplified Chinese looks pretty dam similar. Most characters aren’t changed.
this is a very good video. AS a chinese I always love japanese food and culture and hold no grudges against japan. I really wish these two countries can be great together, like brothers. We share the closest blood on earth.
日本は蒙古斑があります
ワイも日中友好を願うで
thank you,l am chinese,I like japan.I want to learn japanese.
I really want to make similar channel like yours. I really love your ideas and they're truly inspiring, especially your commentary about asian accent. They gave me sort of pride in my identity as an asian and as a language enthusiast. I don't know if you know this or not, but your content is truly one of the ways to battle racism towards asian people, especially within the asian itself. There are so many people still argue about which hanzi is better, simplified or traditional, and they became political, and then tore us apart. I will always stand by my view point that there is no better or worse language, simplified chinese created to promote the literacy and traditional chinese still being used to keep the heritage alive. Both has a pretty sweet reason. All dialects are beautiful, I mean, it's part of people' identity. Japanese, korean, vietnamese, chinese, everything, I love you all
My friend is Chinese and I am Japanese. We’re both born in America so we independently study our own languages. When she writes Chinese sentences I can somewhat understand… but not really. It’s a fun guessing game lol
my maternal grandparents speak a dialect of Cantonese that sounds even more similar to Japanese. They were from a smaller rural town in GuangDong, China. There’s theory that Japanese pronunciations of Kanji preserved some pronunciations from China (through Tang dynasty). At the same time, so did some of the more rural areas of China, especially those near the shoreline in Southern China.
It's something like Russians trying to read and understand Bulgarian or Serbian, or a Persian trying to read and understand Arabic.
I think the last one is better because Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian are similar and related, Persian and Arabic not at all - only the writing system just like Japanese and Chinese.
Russian and Kazakh would work or Hebrew and Yiddish.
I feel like Russian and Mongolian would have been a better example. But even then these examples are different to the Japanese and Chinese situation. The chinese characters carry meaning while the arabic and cyrillic scripts only carry sounds.
I speak Arabic and whenever I try to read something in Persian I feel like I'm having a stroke
Well, Russian and Eastern Slavic is really similar. I as Serb can understand let‘s say 80% of all written,
@Aküma Kazakh is a completely different language that just uses kyrillic writing and a lot of loan words. Being Russian, I can read Kazakh but I don't understand anything :^) Russian-Greek is another example, you can read most of the letters of the Greek alphabet and can understand some loan words (imported to Russian from Greek), but it just doesn't make sense at all.
I think that hieroglyphical writing is at advantage here, because in the languages with an alphabet, the letters closely represent pronunciation and not meaning, but in hieroglyphical languages, the characters represent meaning but not pronunciation. That's why you can have one kanji with one meaning, but have multiple completely different pronunciations (Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese)
So when Japanese read Chinese, they read it differently, they translate it differently, they pronounce it differently & they mis/understand it differently. Very interesting
So profound i feel great about that
and then A War Started 😂
It's not that Kanji have different meanings from Chinese characters. For Chinese people we can always guess the content according to the Kanji in Japanese. The more kanji in a sentence, the easier to guess. Maybe because we only have Chinese characters but Japanese are more used to Hiragana. Some pronunciation of Kanji is similar to that of Chinese, or even more close to dialect pronunciation in some areas of China. When I learn Japanese, can guess the way to pronounce kanji as in 音読みbecause its very similar, originally it came from China since 5th century, but I have to memorize 訓読み.
For example, It’s very apparently for Chinese people that 図書館 is library because it looks almost the same in Chinese. But it seems that Japanese people don’t recognize 图书馆 in the video😂 今天 and 今日 both mean ‘today’ in Chinese while Japanese people only use 今日
When the Chinese characters were imported, it was the era of Middle Chinese. Due to phonological changes, Chinese characters are now pronounced differently in Beijing dialect (standard Mandarin). Those imported into Japanese underwent some phonological changes too, therefore the pronunciation are different. Moreover, due to difference in language structure and semantic shift, it might be a bit tough to interpret the meaning without knowing it before despite knowing some characters.
Many of the common words were actually coined by the Japanese and then borrowed into Chinese and Korean,
particularly for Western concepts. 圖書館 is one such example.
图书馆这个词符合中国人的翻译
这是繁体字是中国的
图书馆有两种，一种是繁体字另一种是简体字。台湾香港类的都是使用繁体字的，我们是一国两制，所以有点区别@user-cf8wz3xc7o
It would be interesting to see the reverse: chinese people trying to guess a sentence written in kanji.
I think that would be easier for Chinese people to understand because how most Japanese Kanji is used is based on the adoption of Classical Chinese over a thousand years ago, a written language educated Chinese can read and understand.
it will be easy
It won't be very easy, and here's why: a lot of kanji in Japanese have different meanings than they do in Chinese. An example: 私(watashi) in Japanese means me (first person pronoun), but in Chinese (si) it means "private." It won't be much different than these Japanese people trying to read sentences in Chinese.
@@christinechen4896 Most phrases in Chinese and Japanese mean the same thing, and anything majorly different will be easily understood by Chinese people who are interested in some aspect of Japanese culture, such as 私、應援、會社 etc
@@TheHoodedGravy As someone who speaks Chinese fluently and has studied a little Japanese as a hobby, I completely get the point you're trying to make. But if most phrases in Chinese and Japanese really mean the same thing as you say, then the Japanese people in this video wouldn't struggle so much, either. It's entirely possible that this would be a pretty easy task for some Chinese people; I'm just saying that it shouldn't be assumed to be so easy for everyone.
I don't even know how exactly I ended up here, seeing as I don't understand neither Japanese nor Chinese, but this was an unexpectedly wholesome video!
Both languages are not similar
@@BJVA85 who said they were? 🤔
@@BJVA85 the kanji r
@@steve00alt70 Yes. But in japan we have kun and on meaning which means the Japanese reading and chinese reading for every *most* kanji. So wouldn't say all kanji
@@BJVA85 no one said they were. stop projecting.
This is what it's like trying to learn Kanji lmao. "What is 'winter' inside of a box?" Incredible.
It’s because it’s completely different in Japanese 图 and 図
The character for winter in Chinese is 冬, the Chinese translation for library is 图书馆，which translate literally to “an exhibition for books and pictures”, the picture （图）part is just the winter character with a box around it
As a user of Latin alphabet which is pronounced quite similarly all over the world (Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages etc), this looks like pure magic to me when you can use the same characters for two languages and yet pronounce and understand them differently
You can think of it in terms of the Indo-Arabic numbering system: the whole world uses it, and the symbols all mean the same thing, but each number is pronounced drastically differently.
@@ZhangtheGreatA way I also like to ask it to get them to understand it a bit more of it is “how do you pronounce a single “?” in your head when you read it?”. Because everyone understands what a single ? with no context means, it means they are confused, but people like me don’t always pronounce it in their head when they read it because there isn’t really much of an official associated sound. If asked to read it out loud, Americans would probably say it as “huh” or “what” but the point is that it’s a symbol we understand that doesn’t have its own sound as we know it. Another good way to frame it is “It is.” “It is?”. We will all pronounce these two sentences differently whether a “.” Or “?” is used but we can’t actually pronounce the symbol itself
As a Japanese and Chinese speaker, this was soooooo fun!!!
I would love to do these kind of videos too!!! ^^
The first two guys are very wholesome FRICK IT EVERYONE IS WHOLESOME
As someone who can speak both Chinese and Japanese I found this video hilarious! Great job!
Awesome your Japanese must be better than mine.
I would like to speak Chinese and Japanese but It's impossible 😢
i cant read Chinese i know how to speak cantonese though and knows as much kanji as a japanese person
No dislikes makes me happy to see this content gets what it deserves.
I click the dislike
@@aidahoe2946 dickhead
@@aidahoe2946 r/madlad
jinxed it
@Mr Doggo chaotic good
The two ladies at 3:01: *Kon Ten Gakkō Hōka*
I decree this a new language.
I will call it *Chuugokunese* .
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Chinese
McDucky, that’s interesting...
what new language? They just read every letter in onyomi!
@@shihouneon yeah but they also removed all the hiragana that makes up the grammar
@@shihouneon oooo I just learned a new term from you.
Japanese has hiragana and katakana, Chinese write everything in kanji, that's why simplified characters were introduced to increase the literacy and faster in writing. In fact I learned my Mandarin in traditional kanji, but later in simplified, but actually both are the same, coz simplified are also used in ancient 草書calligraphy. For Japanese pronounciation in Kanji is closer to Minannese 閩南 and Hakka 客家, the South Chinese dialects in Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan it's easier for South Chinese to learn Japanese kanji, bcoz of similar or closer pronunciation. Mandarin is in fact simplified tones used in Beijing or Northern China.
你说的很对，我记得有一位闽南大爷去日本用闽南方言跟日本的保安可以交流，虽然不是特别清晰明了但大体意思可以传达。
@@hydez9610 啊？真的吗
Only in japan is it called kanji, it is called hanzi in china
wow
@@TH-lu9du Indonesian
I would love to see more videos like this. It really brings grasp of bridging the language with a challenging middle ground.
1:30 Wow, the woman on the left sounds so dignified. I stan. She looks like she'd be the big boss at a fashion magazine. 😳
I came to the comments to see if anyone else noticed that... She would be some awesome anime boss ...
A japanese anna wintour
yes her voice is so niceee
She was hell of Stylish , she's aging well
I thought I was the only one! I also stan
インタビューのマダム2人組ちょっと好き
二人组合？
this was just fascinating! i love how in some cases the approximate meaning still can be figured out just by the core meaning of the signs. such a different approach to reading when compared to plain phonetic letter based scripts. really love it!
牛杂 is not exclusively intestines. The 杂 means assorted innards, so includes other visceral organs like kidneys and liver.
agree, 杂 simply means "assorted" or "mixture of" ， it can be anything (different parts)
杂 doesn't mean 「心臓」
牛杂 means a combination of beef from different parts: heart, intestines, normal beef etc.
Exactly right
Just to add on, 杂 (za) by itself simply means [mix, mixture, multi]
牛杂 (niu za) mixture of cow organs
猪杂 (zhu za) mixture of pig organ
杂货 (za huo) mixture of goods ( sold in grocery stores)
A little supplement to it. 杂 = 雜(in traditional chinese character) = 雑(in japanese kanji). And it's a particular way to represent 內臟 which means organ.
@vnetenv2 no.... pls tell me your not a chinese...
神他妈的心脏。杂は雑のである。いろんな内臓を入れているものだけです
Both the ladies can actually tone Chinese really well?
of course no, japanese isn't tonal
Gyu so ramen i think it's similar with chinese
@@李家愷-o9w Japanese actually has pitch. It's not really taught until you get to a higher level and rarely makes a difference, but those classic chinese examples of "wrong tone" do exist.
@@xoreign the pitch accent and contour tones are completely different things.
I’m surprised. As a mandarin native, I would say people in this video already have high level of understanding to the s.Chinese, given they have never learned any Chinese language. I thought Japanese might be unable to read any simplified, but they actually can do a little bit by doing some analyses. Maybe this is the power of ideographs and pictographs. 💪
I am surprised by that too. Especially because I, as a European, understand less when reading something in Latin or Greek, although even, I have had Latin and Greek class in school. I always thought that the degree of Classical Chinese influence on Japanese was comparable with the influence of Latin and Greek on European languages, but I guess Japanese had preserved more of its Classical Chinese borrowings? Also, the simplifications of kanji in Chinese and Japanese are apparently not that random either, since these interviewees could still recognize a lot (although sometimes misleadingly, like the charming ladies with their "winter in box" at 5:22 😁)
@@m.koksal3396 Regarding the "winter in a box", I found it very amusing because I have studied Mandarin since young and somehow that has never occurred to me (granted my Mandarin is shit.) Now I am looking at Chinese characters from different angles!
@@m.koksal3396 even 新字体(shinjitai) sounds like Chinese, Cantonese specifically.
@@seafood_hater I kinda think whoever simplified that just thought inside a library was a cold place, socially and perhaps physically. Not like you're having a party in there.
@@Drownedinblood HAHA You've quite an imagination! XD
As a native Shanghainese, I find this jolly fun to watch, lol. I believe that anyone who can read Simplified Chinese knows how to read Traditional Chinese btw, but being able to write them both is another level entirely.
It really depends nowadays. Majority of the people can read Traditional Chinese, but 10 years before one of my high school classmates can't read Traditional Chinese characters at all.
I grew up in America learning only Traditional Chinese in weekend Chinese school and after school Chinese programs, I couldn't read simplify Chinese when I went to China my first few times, now I can read most. I still only write in traditional chinese since I am more used to it.
It depends, If u are a foreigner and u have been learning for a long long time 3-5 years or even more I believe u can read most of the traditional characters, but the most important thing is that u need the feel the language, If someone have been learning for example for a year and know about 1000 hanzi, he wont be able to understand traditional characters, because yet he doesnt feel the language at all. After all it is mostly about guessing the meaning, without deep immersion it can be hard
I can agree with you. As simplified Chinese user, I can read both traditionnal Chinese and japanese Chineses characters. Some what ability from genre.
1:30 why is her voice so soothing, i've fallen in love. i want her to read me a book now
Yes please, my lady
Right? She was my favorite one. So cool and commanding.
Yeah such a cool lady.
Funny how languages evolve. Japanese struggle to read Mandarin but Chinese people upon seeing Kanji would still understand the Japanese context. It's like a British person not understanding German words while Germans understand the English word. Garten is german for Garden but it might not register in a British person's head. Same thing here I guess
I'd say that's more because kanji dominates in the nouns and verbs of Japanese, especially verbs, of course. That means a Chinese person reading Japanese is able to pick up the most "important" words, what's in kana would be extra details or grammar like adjectives, adverbs, particles, etc. But a Japanese person sees all kanji so while it's potentially more likely to grasp more words, the words' functions and thus grammar structure are really up to their guesswork and analysis.
If they have experimented with Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified, I would believe the participants would have much less trouble discerning the characters. Of course, Traditional Chinese is not widely used in Mainland China.
@@kevinsinger2 I saw traditional chinese everywhere when I was in mainland china. Shop sign boards, restaurant menu, building name (xxx library, xxx train station, etc.)
it depends. japanese uses a lot of characters that are more traditional than simplified chinese. plus chinese would have no idea about the grammar, which almost all in hiragana. without grammar they would have no idea. they could probably pick out some nouns and verbs, but have no idea whats going on with them.
@@dotmerah6713 明天我要乘新干线去东京旅行；Tomorrow, I will travel to Tokyo by Shinkansen. I think that most Chinese can grasp the core meaning of this Japanese sentence. Some Chinese do not know 私 means 我, and they may think that 私 means "personally" or "privately".
lol this is interesting! I can see that they are basically guessing the meaning from the Kanji that they can recognise. Lol this is actually the same for a Chinese native speaker. When I try to understand the instructions writen in Japanese on a product, Im actually reading the Kanji to assume the general meaning😂😂
This is so interesting, when I remember growing up as an African , we used to think Chinese, Koreans and Japanese could easily read and understand each other linguistically but when I grew up, I realized the differences! It’s hilarious watching this presentation now!
1000 years ago that was the case. They all read classical chinese. In japan, there were two types of literature/poetry; hanshu (chinese poems) and waka (japanese songs). hanshu were all written in classical chinese while waka was written in japanese form.
Japan's oldest and most official historical records, the nihon shoki was also written in classical chinese
@@ysf-d9i documentations in Korea and Vietnam were written in chinese characters in the history, before they created own scripts. Not sure what was in Japan.
This is amazing! The ladies (older) did so well! Honestly I was unaware of how comprehensible the characters were. Even if they didn't know exactly, they could make decent educated guesses. Thx for the new knowledge lol
I speak Japanese and with a japanese mind that made no sense
wow. im russian and im marveling how they are able to read a set of those lines and dots.
and they stare at this papers and then like "yeeeah, rameeen, how did not i recognize it before?"
Well, haven't you just written a set of lines and dots?
Чувак, я прожил 5 лет в Китае и говорю на 普通话 (мандарине) и скажу читать иероглифы не сильно сложно, они легко запоминаются (есть система по котрой они учатся), японцы сами используют 汉子 хандзи, но назвают кандзи, то есть им читать иероглифы было трудно только потому что киты используют упрощённую 简体字 иероглифику, а японцы традиционную 繁体字, честно ожидал от японцев большего, но по воспоминаниям об учебе им реально даже тяжелее давался китайский чем нашим ребятам.
@@Mugen88888 No offence, but Russian looks very "english" and like a paint to me. So are Arabics.
@@DanteEhome 🤗😂
Education
It's fascinating to learn these things about other cultures. Thank you for the video Yuta!
Chinese viewer : loves the comparison and understanding. Trying to understand the Japanese point of view of the simplified text
Westerner : those old women were cool
My favourite was the tempura comment as I remember years ago asking a Japanese friend sitting outside a Japanese restaurant, what does that Japanese text say? I recognised the 天 character and it read "tempura" and wondered why they would say the term "sky" in a food dish. Made sense after I understood onyomi..