Can a Chinese person read Japanese and vice versa?

Question

How similar are the Kanji characters between the 2 languages? Is it possible to write Japanese in all Kanji without using Hiragana, Katakana and Romanji? If yes, would a Chinese person be able to read it? As such, would a Japanese person be able to read Chinese if they had sufficient enduction in Kanji?

Answer 1

There are some similarities, but not 100% are they completely similar. There are many "Chinese-only" or "Japanese-only" kanji in existence. In my Japanese class is a Taiwanese boy and though he is very good at kanji, he still has to memorize the Japanese pronounciations (which are more often used) and often new meanings because not always does his Chinese kanji correspond in meaning to the Japanese kanji.

No, it's not. Also, romaji is not a true form of the Japanese writing. It's just for learners whose own alpahbets do not make it possible to understand Japanese in the beginning with out it. Okurigana (hiragana added onto a kanji to let the reader know its specific meaning) are important when reading Japanese. And while the Japanese could make new kanji or continuously adopt more and more kanji to support foreign words, it is much easier for them to just use katakana.

If they worked hard and were extremely well-educated on the Chinese meanings of their 1,945 "most common" kanji, they might get a small gist of it.

Answer 2

Japanese uses about 2000 Chinese characters and many of them are exactly the same as in Chinese. Furthermore, Japanese words are usually written using two chinese kanji characters (the example vocabulary words in a Japanese Kanji dictionary are usually two characters) and I believe that Chinese people would understand most of the words. I can read several hundred Japanese Kanji and can pretty much understand a Chinese menu and get the basic meaning of a few words in some newspaper articles in Chinese. The Chinese, however , use more than twice as many characters as the Japanese ( and there are thousands more which are not used much) so there are lots of Chinese characters that Japanese speakers would not know. Also, in forming the standard "Joyo Kanji", the Japanese government implemented the simplification of many characters, so the original Chinese characters have many more strokes and look different in those cases.

Without hiragana and katakana one could not adequately write Japanese. If you see only the Kanji, the meaning of nouns and concepts might still be clear, but the true meaning of sentences could easily be lost. I believe a Japanese person would not have a difficult time learning to read Chinese. It would mostly be a matter of learning more Kanji. I have heard that Chinese grammar is very logical.

Answer 3

It is true that Kanji are Chinese characters, so a Chinese person would recognize those characters. However, the Japanese writing system contains characters from other alphabets, and text written in Japanese contains characters from all the alphabets intermixed. As a result, a Chinese speaker probably wouldn't understand Japanese writing very well.

A Japanese person reading Chinese would recognize many of the characters, but it's likely that some of them have changed in meaning since the characters were borrowed into Japanese. In addition, Chinese and Japanese have very different word order. So a Japanese person might be able to guess at the meaning once in a while, but probably wouldn't understand very well at all.

Answer 4

There are 1800 kanji words which have been imported or borrowed from the Chinese language. So actually in simple conversation the Japanese will be able to understand the writings in Chinese language. But the Chinese will not be able to undertand an article in the Japanese language because they mix the kanji with Japanese writings. The Japanese pronounce the same characters differently from the Chinese. For example,
日本人 means "Japanese" in both languages, but the Japanese will read the characters as "ni hon jin" while the Chinese Mandarin will read it as "ri ben ren"[or: 'ruh bun run"].

Answer 5

I don't think it's possible to write all in Japanese because there are only around 2000 kanji characters. You need a mixture of kana and kanji. Also, not all kanji words are the same as chinese characters, alot of them differs slightly, and they are adapted from traditional chinese, while people in china learn simplified chinese. (but both set of characters look similiar so you can actually guess) A japanese will not be able to read chinese. If i'm not wrong, there are millions of chinese characters.

Answer 6

To some extent. A Chinese person would be able to understand many nouns and verbs in Japanse as they are usually written in kanji. A Japanese person would recognize most kanjis in traditional Chinese (simplified characters used in mainland China are a bit tricky) but their meaings may not necessarily be the same. Example: In Japanese 手紙 (hand-paper) means letter (as in letter-opener), but I've heard that in Chinese it's toilet paper.

Generally speaking, both can tell a funeral notice from wedding invitation or an essay in fine art from an article on genetics, but probably not much more.

Answer 7

My answer to this question is : Hardly they can understand by guessing the Kanji or characters between the 2 languages

I'm a Chinese and I speak / read / write both Chinese (Cantonese & Mandarin) and Japanese. Some kanji characters for Japanese mean totally different to Chinese meaning, so Chinese can't really 100% understand Japanese by guessing with the meaning of kanji in Japanese language, likewise, Japanese can't understand Chinese 100% by reading the Chinese character.

For example,

- 質問, in Japanese it means "question", in Chinese it means "confront", totally different, however, kanji like "問題" which also means "question or problem" in both Chinese & Japanese.
- 勉強, in Japanese it means "study, learning", in Chinese it means "force to or being forced to do so", while kajin like "學習" which means "study, learning" in both Chinese & Japanese
- 覺悟, in Japanese it means "make up someone's mind or decided to do so", in Chinese it means "feel sorry to what someone has done wrongly and would never repeat the mistake again", totally different.
- 大丈夫, in Japanese it means "being alright, well being" but in Chinese it means "men with integrity", totally different as well.

The 4 examples up there would be very tricky if either Japanese or Chinese to guess the meaning of sentenses base on the kanji.

That's about the written part and when come to the conversation part no Chinese nor Japanese can communicate to each other with their own languages because the two languages sound very different.

Answer 8

If you know Japanese, it will be easier to learn Mandarin. If all Japanese could be written in Kanji, I guess the Chinese could read it because the Japanese took the written system from The Chinese.

Answer 9

i believe no.. The hiragana mixed with kanji definitely makes a difference. But sometimes it is possible. I think that the sentences are complete different.

Answer 10

NO, well...supposedly from my parents, the japanese ppl copied some from the chinese and i don't understand it at all (don't understand much of chinese either...) so i doubt it unless they studied it and stuff. Luckily, english only has 26 letters in the alphabet!