Does knowing Chinese help with Japanese? (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Does knowing Chinese help with Japanese?
Tags: Mandarin \| Japanese
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11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

starst
Triglot
Senior Member
China
Joined 5313 days ago
113 posts - 133 votes

Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, English^C2
Studies: French^C1, German, Norwegian

Message 9 of 11

14 April 2010 at 4:23am | IP Logged

qklilx wrote:

Actually it would make the advanced stages far easier. I'm willing to bet the beginning stage would actually be almost as hard for anyone since you'd be learning a lot more native Japanese words at first. Writing would be a cinch though.

Agree! Kana is always a pain for me, no matter how good my Chinese is :(

Anyway, I guess the situation is quite different between native Chinese speakers and non-advanced Chinese learners. Before reaching a certain (high) level in Chinese, I doubt if it can help much except making the characters look a bit familiar. Just like my English doesn't help much when I learn German.
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OneEye
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 6649 days ago
518 posts - 784 votes

Speaks: English*, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French

Message 10 of 11

16 April 2010 at 12:49am | IP Logged

qklilx wrote:

However, knowing Cantonese or Taiwanese would be much more advantageous since they use the same traditional characters that Japanese uses; Mandarin uses the simplified characters, which are sometimes quite different.

Sorry, but this is not accurate. Several points:

1) if something can be written in simplified Chinese, it can be written in traditional Chinese

2) vice versa

3) Japanese makes use of simplified characters, just not always the same ones as in mainland China

4) Cantonese and Taiwanese (and Mandarin) are spoken languages. Yes, they can be written down colloquially, but this is not standard Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based largely on Mandarin, and is virtually identical in both the mainland and in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and anywhere else. Some of the differences between standard Chinese and "dialectal" forms are more true to classical usage, and thus closer to Japanese (食 vs. 吃 for "to eat," for example), and some are new creations made specifically for writing those dialects (for instance, I believe 唔 in Cantonese is one such character, but I'm not completely sure).
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chucknorrisman
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5247 days ago
321 posts - 435 votes

Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish
Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French

Message 11 of 11

16 April 2010 at 1:50am | IP Logged

qklilx wrote:

In terms of vocabulary you'll have an advantage because it's estimated that around 70% of currently used Japanese vocabulary is derived from Chinese languages. Knowing enough Japanese will enable you to hear the occasional, OCCASIONAL word in Chinese. I don't know which Chinese languages this applies to most.

For writing, your biggest hurdle by far would be the Japanese syllabary as you would already have a knowledge of hanzi. However, knowing Cantonese or Taiwanese would be much more advantageous since they use the same traditional characters that Japanese uses; Mandarin uses the simplified characters, which are sometimes quite different. Compounds using Chinese characters in the more advanced stages would be cake because you would often only need to learn a new sound for the same set of characters. This paragraph also applies to learning Korean, and I bet some other Asian languages like Thai as well. But don't quote me except for Korean.

Grammatically you would have no advantage other than the fact that you became accustomed to Chinese, and so learning another grammatical system would be slightly easier to wrap your head around. Possibly.

Culturally the two countries have similarities but honestly I think the linguistic aspect in their cultures is different enough that you won't have a significant number of learning shortcuts.

I don't know if it will help that much with Korean. Most of the Sino-Korean words are not readily recognizable with the Chinese (at least in Mandarin), and Korean uses hanja very rarely, usually only for clarification of homophones.

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