I was watching a comedy the other day and realized that this is still a thing: Some people do not know that in general Chinese and Japanese people do not understand each other if they speak their own native languages.

A lot of people may already know that the Japanese writing system consists of kanji(Chinese characters) and kana(Hiragana, Katakana). The kana was simplified from kanji, which might give the impression that Chinese and Japanese languages are very close, but actually Japanese as a language does not have a genetic relationship with Chinese. This means that Japanese is NOT descended from Chinese. But still what does this even mean?

Let’s take some examples. Italian and Spanish are descended from Latin, Swedish and Norwegian are descended from north germanic languages . So people from the same language families can sometimes understand each other because some word spellings and pronunciations are similar. Since Japanese does not a have genetic relationship with Chinese language so we simply can’t understand each other by listening.

For example this kanji word “簡単”, in Japanese is pronounced as “kan tan”, in mandarin “Jian dan” and in cantonese “gan daan”. The pronunciation of warning “警告” in Japanese is “keikoku”, in Mandarin it is “Jing gao” and in cantonese is “geng kou”. As you can see that they sound different from each other.

However some may ask if a Chinese speaker can read the kanji characters in Japanese and understand the meaning of it. This can definitely happen. The reason behind it is that up until 1185 of Heian period a large amount of kanji (Chinese characters) was used in Japanese, though only the meanings and not the sound of it. Over time the language was evolved, but a lot of meanings of the characters remain same or similar.

For example “絶対” means absoluteness, unconditional in both languages. “旅行” means travel and trip, and “音楽” means music. Some words however has changed meanings to some degree. “告訴” in Japanese would mean “complaint and accusation”, in Chinese it would mean “to tell”.

The modern Japanese, which begins from Edo period (from 1603), started to borrow words from Europe, for example pan (en:“bread”) and tabako (en:“tobacco”) are originally from Portuguese. Until the end of self-imposed isolation in 1853 the large amount of loanwords had increased significantly.

After 1945 modern Japanese became the standard language, seeing use in most official communications. A sentence in Japanese today is usually composed of both kanji and kana. The question is how much a Chinese speaker can understand of a Japanese sentence. Let’s give an example on this.

If you go to a yakitori place you might have seen this sentence. “アルコールの誤飲を防止ため、「ソフトドリンク」にストローを挿して提供させて頂いております”. As a Chinese speaker who does not know Japanese, they would understand “誤飲”= accidental drinking, “防止” = to prevent, “挿” = insert and “提供” = provide. The Chinese speaker could guess that it means: in order to prevent the accidental drinking, something is provided.

The whole meaning of this sentence is “In order to prevent accidental drinking of alcohol, soft drinks has been provided with a straw inserted”. The important part of this sentence: soft drink “ソフトドリンク” and straw “ストロー” is in katakana, and is unrecognized by Chinese speakers that do not speak Japanese. In this context, when I say “Chinese speaker”, I mean people who can speak either “Mandarin” or “Cantonese” or both.

So what do you think? Does this sound interesting to you? If you would you like to discuss more with me, reach me through twitter @humlelu.