注意. This was the word that stuck with me the most during my 6 months time in Japan. 注意(Chūi) in Japanese means caution, and it’s something you see and hear literally everywhere. It’s plastered all over train platforms, doors, gaps, virtually anything you need to be ‘cautious’ of, you’d see the words. The speakers in many places say it too - Chūi kudasai or please be careful. Fast forward a few months and I find myself only knowing the Japanese words even though I’m deep in Mandarin spoken territory outside of Japan. I’m not even trying to think in Japanese. It just happens. Matter of fact, I didn’t know the actual Mandarin way of saying it up until recently.
For context – I’m Chinese Canadian. Born and raised here in Canada, where I only learnt Mandarin through Saturday school (and where I only started to pay attention in my last few years there). While I can “speak” three different Chinese languages: Kaipingnese, Cantonese, and Mandarin – some better than others, it’s only to the point where I’m able to argue with my parents and order food, but absolutely am unable to write nor speak anything complex. I figured that when I started to learn Japanese that knowing some characters would put me at an advantage and truthfully speaking; and at first it totally helped.
The ‘beginner’ honeymoon
The thing is, having an overlap when first learning kanji and already knowing hanzi does actually put you in sort of a starting advantage. I remember my first class and first few kanji words I was doing so well just because I had some knowledge of Chinese and the overlap they shared made me think I was the smartest kid in the class. Especially that initial ‘beginner’ N5 phase when you learn super basic words like 山, 水, 人, 大 (mountain, water, person, big; respectively) where my classmates were doing tons of practice and flashcards while I was slacking because it felt as if I already knew everything. However for written tests, I remember I had amazing grades solely because I was able to piece together the character and (most) pronunciation.
Going off that last little bit there though, one nuanced issue that I had to learn to adapt was where the pronunciations were actually borrowed. An example would be 年 where nen for Japanese and nián for Chinese and if not caught, I would slip the Chinese reading in even if I practice the Japanese repeatedly. There was an unfortunate incident when I said the Chinese reading of 韓国 (South Korea) instead of the Japanese reading and lost marks for my vocal test. What made it even worse was the fact my professor knew the mistake but couldn’t correct me until after the test was over; after nearly 3 years this still haunts me.
Bruce (also a Gravity co-founder) and I biking the Shimanami Kaido
When the meanings start diverging
But as we move away from this ‘honeymoon phase’ of learning, the words now take a sudden divergence in meanings where the kanji could mean different things depending on the context. This is where I started to feel the learning curve of Japanese. Mind you, my Chinese is very intermediate so at this point we are slowly reaching the same vocab knowledge for both languages and it’s where I start to fight over the same characters and their meanings. 生 is shēng in Chinese but sei and nama (and more) in Japanese and while they both have overlap in meaning “life, raw, fresh” colloquially they’re used pretty differently. Often in Japanese it’s used more to describe raw, fresh, live; but Chinese the use case is more toward ‘life’ like birthday, student, living, etc… While the differences exist, I can still say that when I’m reading a piece of text I am not too familiar with in either language, I end up guessing the meaning most of the time and it’s a big toss up if it’s correct or not. Think of it like an educated guess.
Sadly, an educated guess only gets you so far. Toward intermediate Japanese (casual and less formal) one word that I used often was 微妙; ehh or kinda bad. This is more of a drastic difference where the words aren’t at all overlapping and in practice there would still be similarities – regardless, coming across this word I had read it as the Chinese meaning; subtle, delicate, for a long time before I had to drill down the Japanese meaning. And again, this is one of the more bigger differences but in practice there were many instances where I would read the kanji as the hanzi and assumed the meaning was the same or similar when they meant different things.
Surprisingly enough, there were instances where I actually learnt the Japanese kanji first before the Chinese and I’d then run into the same issue where I’d know the meaning and pronunciation for the Japanese writing but not the Chinese writing. I don’t think this is super common since I haven’t met many people trying to learn a new language while still not having mastered the three they already sort of speak.
Why knowing Chinese doesn’t mean what you think it means
As I’ve mentioned before, since I am just mid at Chinese to begin with, this asymmetry in phonetic recall is very much apparent. You’d think that as a Chinese speaker that I’d know the meaning of characters ahead of time. That is not how it works. Outside of my Saturday school for Chinese, the language was picked up through dinner table convos, WeChat messaging, signs from T&T and relatives; which actually extends to all 3 of the Chinese languages I know. On the other hand, Japanese was learnt through an environment where space repetition, textbooks, and speaking drills were the norm which is where the gaps in why some systematically learnt kanji in a formal setting I wouldn’t know in Chinese. I never learnt formal Chinese.
If you’re like me, Chinese speaker thinking about challenging yourself and learning Japanese – or the other way around – having shared logograms are definitely an advantage not only for knowing the word but even writing them, but only at the start. At some point you will run into words like 注意 where you can’t rely on visual pattern recognition but actually needing to treat them as two separate systems that just happen to share some aspects. So, while the initial overlap gets you in the door, you will get confused if you rely on only that.
This is actually why we built Gravity was to handle exactly this kind of cross-language interference instead of pretending the overlap is always a feature and never a bug.
Once you move beyond the intermediate phase, the meanings start to come back together and even the pronunciation is very similar. 民主 is an example of this where all 3 CJK languages share this word in common.
Think of hanzi and kanji as an hourglass where the middle section gets weird but on each end they’re the same.