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Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Mandarin, Simplified)

Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Mandarin, Simplified)

That Japanese Man Yuta
2 HN recommenders · discussed 2020–2021
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About this video

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 it appears in the archive

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

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

Tade0 · 2020-10 · rec

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: [VIDEO]

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scaladev · 2021-03 · rec

>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] [VIDEO] It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

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anilakar · 2020-08 · reference

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] [VIDEO]

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karmasimida · 2021-02 · reference

Mostly yes. Japanese people can vaguely infer the meaning of mandarin, given the simplified characters, without prior exposure to the language before: [VIDEO]

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