• WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    23 days ago

    I can almost see it if you start with Chinese since you know all the Hanzi/Kanji. I can accept that you eventually get a grip on the sentence structure. But the conjugation? The vocabulary? You could probably say things are warm, big, and intense. You’d know all the family members, a lot of anatomy, and a couple different types of buildings.

    You would never be able to hear the word kimochii. Every time someone asks you how you are - really every 5th word you hear would sound like an innuendo.

      • Kumikommunism [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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        23 days ago

        Japanese kanji are pretty different from hanzi

        No, they are extremely similar. It’s the same system. The hardest hurdle for speakers of other languages is getting used to a different type of word recognition, which Chinese speakers do not have to do. Even the ones that have been simplified differently are very recognizable with a tiny amount of exposure. And the multiple reading thing is way overstated. I usually just see it used as an excuse for not actually reading or listening to the language.