2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2020–2021score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN uses it to answer whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese: they can guess a lot, but not reliably.
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.
“That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand” (HN, 2020)
>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.
Entertaining videos on familiar characters with different meanings
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]
Answers whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese
Mostly yes. Japanese people can vaguely infer the meaning of mandarin, given the simplified characters, without prior exposure to the language before: [this video]
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