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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

> Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.

That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.

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You're conflating language with writing. While it is true that Japanese writing is related to Chinese writing, the languages are still from two completely different language families[1]. Anything they have in common is due to exposure, not relatedness.

The argument you're making would be the same as this: "It's easier for an English-speaker to learn Finnish because it uses the Latin alphabet". The only reason that helps is that you don't also have to learn to decipher a new set of squiggles. It doesn't actually help you understand spoken language or speak it.

1: Mandarin is a Sino-Tibetan language, while Japanese is a Japonic language. These two language families are not related in any ancestral way known to modern linguistics.

I'm well aware that both are from different language families, however that doesn't stop the fact that because of the influence of Chinese writing a significant number of japanese words were directly imported from China. They are the words that corresponds to the on-yomi 音読み of the kanjis.

In the same way, English is a West Germanic language whereas French is a Romance language, this doesn't however stop the significant import of French vocabulary in English which likewise is a result of history and of the conquest of England by William the conqueror. This is a bit different because both English and French are the same branch of a bigger family Indo-European, so those two languages are more similar to each other in term of grammar than Chinese and Japanese but the point about vocabulary I think still illustrates the fact that besides vocabulary inherited by a common language, there can also be vocabulary imported due to historical influences between neighbours. In the case of Japanese it's significant because of their adoption of the writing system and the amount of vocabulary that was imported that way..

Another example of what I'm talking about is Korean. There's some dispute about the language family of Korean with some saying that it's also a japonic language, some saying it's a language isolate. However no one would claim that Korean is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Yet, it's well known that 70-80% of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin. This is the same mechanism.

On the other hand, due to both languages being from different language families, the grammar of Japanese and Chinese are totally different and unrelated.

So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead.

Here's the opening of a Latin poem:

   Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa
   perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
   grato Pyrrha sub antro?

Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved:

   What many slender you boy in rose
   soak liquid press odor
   pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave?

Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])

Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.

> Nice example, but quis is cognate with who.

This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other.

Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what:

> [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis.

> [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”)

Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.

You are very wrong, and I know not only because I learned some Japanese (C1 level) and some Chinese (A2), and experimented first hand how easy and helpful it's to transfer vocabulary, but also because I read a lot of the scientific literature on this exact subject. Japanese has 60-70% compound words using morphemes of Chinese origin, and about 60% percent have the same exact meaning in this two languages[1].

Learning vocabulary is also not "the easiest" part of learning a language either, it's one of the most fundamental step of learning a language, which take a massive amount of time. If time can be shelved here (and indeed is in-between Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-Korean, etc. even Vietnamese to Japanese) it can be reinvested elsewhere. Heck, I've seen a Taiwanese girl getting her JLPT N3 after one semester of Japanese study just thanks to the shared vocabulary and characters.

>Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language.

I thought trolling was against the rules here?

[1]松下達彦・陳夢夏・王雪竹・陳林柯（2020）「日中対照漢字語データベースの開発と応用」『日本語教育』177、pp.62-76.

> Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems.

Strongly disagree. Memorizing vocabulary is a huge barrier to learning a foreign language. You need something like 5000 words just to have basic conversational competency, and far more to understand texts about a domain, or slang, or literature.

So, for context, I wrote the comment you replied to as a French who speaks Japanese fluently and has been learning both Cantonese and Mandarin. So I am talking from experience and I completely disagree with you.

First, I disagree that vocabulary is the part that causes by far the least problems, instead in general my approach to learning any language is to first focus on learning the vocabulary. And to counter your latin example, when I was a child, I studied Latin, after my first 6 months of latin, I went to live in Spain for 5 months, when I came back latin was significantly easier than it was before. I could understand a lot more than I could before. The only reason for this was that I know could speak Spanish and could use that to guess words.

Of course this works a lot better on writings that are not poems, in general poems like your example are more difficult to understand without knowing the cultural context around them. If you want to really illustrate your point, try with a text that's not a poem and you will see that knowing the vocabulary does indeed significantly help.

Second, reading is absolutely an essential part of knowing a language. At this point, I really don't even know how to answer to this besides asking for clarification why you would come to this conclusion? I'll just say that I would have loved having the significant advantage Chinese students have when it comes to reading Japanese.

Finally, I was going to make the same points historia_novae about how many words really do have the exact same meaning in written form between Japanese and Chinese. But he expressed that better than I could.

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