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Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Mandarin, Simplified)

Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Mandarin, Simplified) on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2020–2021.

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, tests how much simplified Chinese a Japanese person can read, working with a Mandarin speaker. The video shows where shared kanji help and where meanings differ.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN uses it to answer whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese: they can guess a lot, but not reliably.

people recommended it
2
separate months
2
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2020–2021
“That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand”
— Tade0, Oct 2020, in “What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

scaladevMar 2021Recommends

>there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining: [link] ▶ this video It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

in “Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms” · View on HN

Tade0Oct 2020Recommends

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: ▶ this video

in “What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)” · View on HN

karmasimidaFeb 2021Cites it

Mostly yes. Japanese people can vaguely infer the meaning of mandarin, given the simplified characters, without prior exposure to the language before: ▶ this video

in “With 777 Kanji, 90% Coverage of Kanji in the Wild” · View on HN

anilakarAug 2020Cites it

You are not the first one who has asked that question. In case you can't watch videos right now, the short answer is "you can guess, but don't expect it to be exactly correct". [link] ▶ this video

in “Blissymbols” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Language & linguisticskanjisimplified chinesejapanesewriting systems