Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Kanji)

What Hacker News said

Recommends scaladev · 2021-03 · on “Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms”

>there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining: [this video] [LINK] It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

Cites anilakar · 2020-08 · on “Blissymbols”

You are not the first one who has asked that question. In case you can't watch videos right now, the short answer is "you can guess, but don't expect it to be exactly correct". [this video] [LINK]

Cites moogleii · 2020-10 · on “What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)”

That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan): [this video]

Cites bane · 2024-02 · on “History of Vietnamese Typography”

I've thought about this a little bit and wonder if the result CJK readers have ended up with is the result of a few interesting historic quirks. Assuming that homophones are simply going to exist in the languages, there's probably other alternatives. For example, in the case of modern Korean readers, the Hanja can supposedly used to help clarify the meaning of a homophone where context doesn't provide clarity. But in practice, most Korean readers don't use Hanja enough to remember more than a small percentage of what they learn in school, so they work in effect as an index into a lookup table, where they look the Hanja up in a dictionary, find the definition written in Hangul, and use that t