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Can Japanese People Read Chinese? (Mandarin, Simplified)

That Japanese Man Yuta · 1.6M views · 2020-06-16 · 12:20

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Overview

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, tests how much simplified Chinese a Japanese person can read, working with a Mandarin speaker. The video shows where shared kanji help and where meanings differ.

On Hacker News

HN uses it to answer whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese: they can guess a lot, but not reliably.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2021

Topics

Language & linguistics
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kanjisimplified chinesejapanesewriting systems

What people said

scaladev · 2021-03 · Recommendation

>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: [LINK] [VIDEO] It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

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Tade0 · 2020-10 · Recommendation

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: [VIDEO]

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karmasimida · 2021-02 · Reference

Mostly yes. Japanese people can vaguely infer the meaning of mandarin, given the simplified characters, without prior exposure to the language before: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by That Japanese Man Yuta, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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