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Old 11-08-2014, 05:17 AM
 
Location: Taipei
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I know the examples you gave aren't faux-amis, I was saying that there are way more faux-amis than the same meaning ones.
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Old 11-08-2014, 08:52 AM
 
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Originally Posted by lepillow View Post
That's quite a big thing to shrug off nonchalantly and abruptly, I'd say.
they are just words. Borrowed words don't mean the languages are close. Grammatical similarities are far more important.

If you ask a Chinese how much Japanese he may understand without learning the language (or vice versa), it is literally zero. That's how close they are.
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Old 11-08-2014, 08:53 AM
 
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Originally Posted by Greysholic View Post
I know the examples you gave aren't faux-amis, I was saying that there are way more faux-amis than the same meaning ones.
for example the Japanese word for "letter" literally means "toilet paper" in Chinese
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Old 11-08-2014, 08:56 AM
 
Location: Taipei
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Originally Posted by botticelli View Post
for example the Japanese word for "letter" literally means "toilet paper" in Chinese
Yeah there are like gazillions of them. The first thing that came to my mind is 大丈夫, which means "manly man" in Chinese, and "it's no big deal" in Japanese, lol.
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Old 11-08-2014, 09:22 AM
 
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Originally Posted by botticelli View Post
Japanese still use tons of Chinese characters and in most case they mean the same thing.

however the similarity stops here. The two languages have nothing in common otherwise, let it be grammar, or morphology or syntax.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lepillow View Post
That's quite a big thing to shrug off nonchalantly and abruptly, I'd say.
But it's not debatable and so there is no need to belabor the fact. There is no disputing that Chinese and Japanese are utterly unrelated languages. They are completely different, almost polar opposites, in phonology, morphology, and syntax.

The presence of Chinese loanwords in Japanese and vice versa does not make the languages related or mutually intelligible, any more than the presence of English loanwords in Japanese (and vice versa) makes those two languages related or mutually intelligible.
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Old 11-09-2014, 02:55 AM
 
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Originally Posted by saibot View Post
But it's not debatable and so there is no need to belabor the fact. There is no disputing that Chinese and Japanese are utterly unrelated languages. They are completely different, almost polar opposites, in phonology, morphology, and syntax.

The presence of Chinese loanwords in Japanese and vice versa does not make the languages related or mutually intelligible, any more than the presence of English loanwords in Japanese (and vice versa) makes those two languages related or mutually intelligible.
English speakers cannot read ANY Japanese even if all words are English loanwords. They may understand some if they listen to it.
Chinese speakers can read SOME Japanese if there are a lot of Chinese loanwords. They cannot understand the oral language, except for a few words that happen to sound quite similar in Chinese.

A highly literate Japanese and a highly literate Chinese can communicate more efficiently than ordinary people, because they both have vocabulary of classic Chinese.
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Old 11-09-2014, 03:23 AM
 
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The spoken languages are completely different. They belong to different language families. Chinese is a tonal language, and Japanese isn't. Chinese grammar is more similar to English grammar than Japanese.


There are more similarities with the written language, because Japanese (and Korean) use Chinese characters, which are ideographs (meaning that each character means something).

Japanese people can read Chinese and get the gist of the content, because Chinese characters are ideographs. The Chinese use far more characters in their writing than the Japanese and Koreans, so Japanese can't read the whole thing. But they can scan through a document and get a general idea of what it says by the characters they do know. In fact, classical learning in Japan did involve reading Chinese texts.

It doesn't work as well the other way, though. I've known a few Chinese living in Japan, and they say that Chinese can not read Japanese without studying it first. Although kanji (the Japanese term for Chinese characters) is used in Japanese, it is not always used in its ideographic form. In other words, it does not always represent a meaning like it does in Chinese. Sometimes it is used to represent a sound instead.

Hence the Japanese can look at characters in Chinese and know what they mean (even if they can't pronounce them), Chinese can't do the same with Japanese because sometimes the character is used to represent a sound instead of a meaning. Even when used for meaning, sometimes the meaning is altered depending on the characters it is combined with. Chinese who want to read Japanese need to learn how Chinese characters are used in Japanese, because they are not always used the same way.
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Old 11-09-2014, 03:28 AM
 
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BTW, I studied Japanese in Japan for a couple years, and there were Chinese students in my class. I, an American, scored higher on a test of Chinese characters used in Japanese than the Chinese students.
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Old 11-09-2014, 11:12 AM
 
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All good points, tlarnla, and in line with what everyone I know says about both languages. Japanese say Chinese is difficult because there is no kana, every little thing is written in Chinese characters, while Japanese is not. Chinese say Japanese is difficult because of the extensive use of hiragana for grammar markers. By the way, Korean (in the ROK) has almost phased out the use of hanja and instead replaced it with 한글. They learn hanja, but they don't really use it outside of purely academic fields like Korean history. 99% of the population will not use and forget much of the hanja they learned in school. They don't need them, especially since Korean has a much larger "sound inventory" than Japanese and Chinese do.
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Old 11-09-2014, 01:56 PM
 
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Originally Posted by theunbrainwashed View Post
All good points, tlarnla, and in line with what everyone I know says about both languages. Japanese say Chinese is difficult because there is no kana, every little thing is written in Chinese characters, while Japanese is not. Chinese say Japanese is difficult because of the extensive use of hiragana for grammar markers. By the way, Korean (in the ROK) has almost phased out the use of hanja and instead replaced it with 한글. They learn hanja, but they don't really use it outside of purely academic fields like Korean history. 99% of the population will not use and forget much of the hanja they learned in school. They don't need them, especially since Korean has a much larger "sound inventory" than Japanese and Chinese do.
The phonology of Korean is actually more simple than that of Chinese on average, especially because Chinese has tones. There are many homophones in Korean.
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