Source
r/ChineseLanguage•
fapslator

Crash course with previous experience in Japanese

Hi everybody

I got accepted for an internship stay in a non-profit organization in Chongqing this summer. While the whole work environment will be English, I'd like to at least get some knowledge of the language spoken there, so I won't be too lost.

What would be a good tool to at least get some basic phrases with some understandable pronunciation?

While I know that the languages are too different to compare, but is there a way to use my knowledge of the Kanji (the Japanese version of the Hanzi) to enable some rudimentary communication with people who don't speak English?

Thank you in advance!

Posted Apr 15, 2012, 8:57 PM UTC

710
wisty•

What would be a good tool to at least get some basic phrases with some understandable pronunciation?

You need audio. Unless you are an IPA guru, you won't "get" pinyin without lots of listening. IIRC, Japanese has ~12 initial sounds, and ~5 finals. Chinese has 21 initial sounds, and 35 finals, times four tones (so it's more like 140 finals). And pinyin is hard for beginners. Youtube has plenty of stuff. If you don't figure out pinyin ... you won't be comprehensible at all.

Your Kanji will be useful for reading and writing, it's close enough that you can make a good guess. I wouldn't use it too much for writing (unless you can pass it off as Traditional Chinese), because some Chinese go off on crazy rants about how evil Japan is if you give them any excuse.

3
lordnikkon•

the average chinese who does not speak any english is not going to know the difference between japanese kanji and traditional chinese. You can try writing in kanji and chinese people will probably understand at least some of it. The differences between kanji and traditional chinese are not as great as between traditional and simplified chinese

4
Qw3rtyP0iuy•

There are quite a few difference between Japanese Kanji and traditional Chinese. You can usually see the characters thrown up on Japanese restaurants here. A Chinese person could certainly tell. It'd be like slipping in "Gotta go to the loo" into American English.

1
lordnikkon•

There are some differences but most chinese dont know traditional chinese either so if you wrote some japense kanji they would not know if it is japense or chinese. If you only know simplified chinese you can usually figure out or guess what a traditional character is. That is why a lot of chinese say they can read traditional but cant write it, when they read the traditional they are just guessing what the corresponding simplified character is. If they saw a japanese kanji they would do the same.

1
Qw3rtyP0iuy•

Every educated Chinese I met knows all of the traditional Chinese radicals. I'm not speaking out of my ass, I'm speaking from the point of view of Chinese people I've brought to Japan and the Japanese community I met in China. It's very obvious when you write a few strokes that aren't one of the traditional Chinese radicals. In half of high school curricula (non-science route), 3 years Classical Chinese is mandatory, which heavily focuses on Chinese radicals.

I'm not arguing with you. I'm telling you. I've studied Chinese for maybe 3 years and Japanese characters jump out at me as strange. It's not complex. It's child's play.

1
[deleted]•

Chinese grammar has yet to as thoroughly described as Japanese. It seems like teaching Japanese really did have a rad start on Chinese (my theory is thr the west started to learn Japanese around te bubble, but only really cared about learning Chinese much much later, so large scale development of curricula came much later for Chinese - pure uneducated guesswork) and it also seem like a lot of school books has the attitude that Chinese grammar is simple, so there's no reason to go in depth.

This was the bigger thing for me when changing. Don't start off with something like Rosetta stone before you have a grasp of grammar or you're gonna end up superimposing Japanese grammar onto the Chinese - and trust me, it won't fit.

I've found schaums outline to e a very good source of grammar, but it requires a fairly broad Chinese vocabulary before starting (600-800 words, I would say) so you really have to start with a normal textbook before this one.

Tones are difficult, but not as difficult as they are made outto be. BBC has a great tone quiz for beginners, I learn a lot using that. I find pronounciation of initial+final much more difficult than tones an you will need help with that.

2
Escendo•

I would recommend a book. Or perhaps the internet. Both of these things are excellent tools for helping one learn basic Chinese phrases.

As for whether or not your Japanese skills will help you communicate with people who do not speak English, you will have to wait and see for yourself. Although I have found that my English speaking skills have not helped me communicate with people who do not speak English; I can't imagine Japanese skills faring much better. All the same, you never know what will turn out.

Best of luck to you in your travels. Stay safe.

1
kinggimped•

I would recommend a book with an audio CD (I used a set of books called "My Chinese Classroom"), so you can hear spoken Chinese. Japanese won't help you speak Chinese too much since their language is atonal and phonetic (an absolute doddle to pronounce compared with Mandarin, really).

Kanji will help you a little, but Japanese uses the traditional character set rather than simplified, and even then it will only help you know a rough meaning of a character, it won't help with knowing how to pronounce it.

My advice would be to learn pinyin, buy a book with an audio CD or find a site that has phrases with audio recorded from a native speaker. I'd say it's quite important to have a good tonal foundation, it'll help you a lot further down the line. I wrote a post with some useful daily Chinese phrases a while back, maybe it'll be helpful to you.

I also came into Mandarin with 2 years of experience in learning Japanese, sad to say that it didn't really help at all. Mandarin is a different beast: many things that in Japanese were complicated are infinitely more easy in Mandarin, and vice versa. Knowledge of kanji may help you in a few select situations and with reading some signs, but not really when communicating with Chinese people.

1
Qw3rtyP0iuy•

Having stayed in Chinatown with Chinese in Yokohama and brought Japanese friends to China, I can say that the benefit of speaking a little Japanese. Study the language like everyone else, sometimes you'll go "Oh, I already know that character!"

1