this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I agree with you about not being able to get hiragana and katakana, but it was very manageable to travel through Japan with no dictionary . I also carried a notebook where I was writing Chinese and showed it to random Japanese people and they almost always got the meaning. Obviously your first example is a bit mean, because you'd know what a Chinese speaker would interpret it like. But this sentence won't exist in the "wild". The second example is a bit easier to get. A lot of assumptions are coming with this "on the fly" translation. For example I played dark souls in Japanese but I don't speak it. It was manageable to play when there were enough Kanji, because of how items were shaped etc. A lot of assumptions but it kinda works
Yeah, I can read Chinese restaurant menus OK (usually; some names are less literal and I have no idea). From what I've seen on the net, I could deal with some navigation.
My sentences are a bit mean by design, but even a lot of signs use grammar like that.
For anyone wondering, the sentence might look like "the cat ate the mouse" but it's actually the opposite (cat was eaten by mouse). More polite japanese grammar indirects things a lot and it can be really rough. For example, official documents, credit card applications, and a lot of signs. I've been in Japan most of a decade and it's still tough
Interesting! Thanks for the insight. I also find it interesting that Japanese sometimes use their own Version of Kanji, neither traditional nor simplified Chinese. Like 楽 vs 樂 vs 乐。 Oftentimes the Kanji use feels "archaic" in contrast to Chinese to me. Not sure how to describe it. Maybe words like 駅? I can't think of a good example from the top of my head but maybe you know what I mean?
Japanese went through its own kanji simplification over time, codified in the postwar period.
Also, some characters were invented at different times, including when Japan was mostly in its sakoku period (no foreigners in/out except at the trading post in Dejima).