How Similar Are Chinese and Japanese? | Tokyo

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1. chinese do have high pitch and low pitch
2. Lol, I like that you didn't even try to speak Chinese yourself in the examples.
3. can you do a video on Cantonese and Mandarin?
4. I feel so proud of myself for getting all four of the questions right at the beginning.
5. Such a GREAT video! Just answer the very last Q, as a native Chinese Speaker I could understand most Japanese instructions, titles, names and kinda things that are used "formally". And for that cat bla fish bla eat blabla one... Sorry cat, I didn't realize that you were eaten by the fish.
6. You did amazing job !
7. Very nice video , thumbs up! Only one small intervention, I went to school is not translated 我去学校，it is 我去上学 it may be translated like this in a specific context but this is not the formal way of saying it。
8. As far as I know, the Chinese you are referring to in this video is actually Mandarin, which is very modern (with a short history). In older China, there were many many Chinese (actually they still exist nowadays, but Mandarin is a standard language). We Hong Kong people speaks Cantonese, which is one of the Chinese as well. Cantonese has a much longer history than Mandarin. For the example of "teacher", "honest" and "old fashioned", the pronunciation in Cantonese is totally different. The reason why they sounds familiar in Mandarin because the creators wanted to make Chinese simple for everyone to learn. It happens in the writing system as well. The simplified Chinese has trimmed away many meaningful parts in word characters. A good example is "love". To love someone you need a heart. "Love" in traditional Chinese is 愛 (with a heart), where in simplified Chinese is 爱 (no heart). The reason why I share this here is to arose the interest of everyone around the world to know Traditional Chinese. It is being terminated by the China government graduatually.
9. To be honest, ancient Chinese is more likely to be an SOV structure. And I think that is the reason why Japanese is SOV, too. After the 1840s, Chinese changed so much to what it is like nowadays. Scholars thought an SVO structure is more convenient for farmers or workers to learn to write.
10. 好吧
11. Same sh*t
12. 可以啦
13. the more kanji is used in a Japanese text, the more I can understand. If you have knowledge of classical Chinese 文言文 or old Chinese 古文, to grasp the meaning of japanese sentences with much kanji is easier , e.g. 走 in classical Chinese denotes to run, in Japanese the meaning was preserved. In modern Chinese though it means to go. In the past when people from China, Korea or Japan met, they could understand each other by writing, the closer to 文言文 the text was, the better the understanding. It is a pity that young Japanese loose interest in writing kanji. Whenever I tried to communicate through only kanji with Japanese young people, the intention was not very welcome :-(
14. honestly I don't like tonal language, because it is so confusing
15. 真有趣
16. As a Chinese living in mainland China, I and people around me almost have no problem reading traditional characters in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while I would feel puzzled about some Japanese characters which seem to be very strange.
17. learning Japanese will be much easier for me
18. nice channel, just subscribed. I'm a Chinese learning Japanese. even reading would be challenging for me most times because you only make sense of the nouns, which means you have no idea of the time, intention or other factors that matter for you to connect them for the substantial meaning of it. plus so many kanjis are quite confusing for me for they never appear in Chinese context.
19. Not even fucking close
20. Chinese and Japanese are two different languages. Japan has learnt to use the Chinese characters in their language since Ancient times.