Why Chinese-Americans Have The Easiest Time Learning Japanese
A surprising reason for why you might have a unique head start in learning one of the world's hardest languages.
Chinese-Americans (and Anglophone Chinese in general) can learn Japanese faster than anyone else, and they have good motivations to do so for cultural and practical reasons. By some (very generous) estimates, an incredible 70 percent of Japanese vocabulary consists of Chinese and English words, so any Anglophone Chinese with even a cursory interest in Japanese culture should consider investing in this language. This article is based on my personal experience and is going to focus on introducing the concept at a high level, so it is by no means an exhaustive investigation. By the end, you should hopefully have some excitement and motivation to get started learning this language.
Assumed Skill Level
"But wait," you might say, "I am a Chinese-American but I'm not fluent in Chinese at all!" -- That's okay. A great number of Anglophone Chinese struggle with Chinese fluency, but there are still some shared principles which provide an advantageous starting point in Japanese compared to someone jumping in from Monolingual English or, let's say, Russian backgrounds. Even if you only learned 10-50 characters in the most elementary of Chinese schools, with some decent amount of spoken proficiency, you will be able to benefit in and by learning Japanese. I would also imagine that just having the exposure to Chinese characters as a young child might impart some sort of neural benefit which makes it easier to learn additional characters later in life.
Shared Characters: Hanzi and Kanji
You will be able to read some Japanese characters right off the bat and, if you were decent at Chinese, quickly understand rough, rudimentary meanings of certain sentences. You may struggle to understand some of the unique simplifications and non-simplifications in Japanese, which are different from Modern Chinese, but you will quickly get used to it after a few trips to the character dictionary. With just a basic understanding of Chinese characters, Japanese alphabet, and Latin letters, you will be able to decipher very basic Japanese texts, like advertisements, newspaper headlines, easy manga, and media posters -- not with fluency, but in the manner of someone struggling to cobble together different disjoint pieces of meaning.
Take a look at this advertisement:
Although it may look unfamiliar now, with some basic training, an Anglophone Chinese can quickly pick up the skills to decipher this advertisement.
年 = year (nen, nian2) -- identical in CN and JP
父 = father (chichi, fu4) -- identical in CN and JP
の = no -- particle equivalent to 的 or 之 in CN, can be memorized
日 = day/sun (hi, ri4) -- identical in CN and JP
予約 = reservation (yoyaku, yu3yue1) -- unique word in JP but using CN characters for "give" and "appointment"
販売 = 贩卖 = sales (hanbai, fan4mai4) -- identical in CN and JP, but using traditional script on the left and new Japanese simplification on the right
キャンペーン = kyanpeen = campaign -- from EN, requires kana
So altogether, we have something like "Year 2022: Father's Day, given-appointment sales campaign." So, it's a sales campaign, consisting of fairly simple Chinese characters and one English word without much difference in meaning! And the rest of the poster gives away additional context. This is just a short illustration of how Anglophone Chinese learners get a bit of a head start in deciphering Japanese.
Deciphering Japanese with and without grammar
Here's an example of a very easy sentence in Japanese:
猫は魚を食べた
neko ha sakana wo tabeta
mao1 .... yu2 .... shi2
With basic Chinese, one can recognize that the sentence has something involving a cat (猫), a fish (魚), and eating (食). Based on the context, a Chinese person might correctly guess that the sentence says "the cat ate the fish" but might get confused by the reverse sentence 魚は猫を食べた (the fish ate the cat).
With some easy additional training, one can understand the grammatical topic and the object of the sentence. With intermediate training, one can see the verb and how it is conjugated. This is the "path of learning" that begins to open up to the hypothetical Anglophone Chinese person who is the subject of today's writing.
Additional examples of shared Sino-Japanese vocabulary
Some of these words are a result of Chinese historical influence on Japan, and others are the result of Japanese words being reborrowed into Chinese after the Meiji Restoration.
電話 phone (denwa, dianhua)
経験 experience (keiken, jingyan)
民国 republic (minkoku, minguo)
電車 train (densha, dianche)
小説 novel (shosetsu, xiaoshuo)
大学 university (daigaku, daxue)
歴史 history (rekishi, lishi)
世界 world (sekai, shijie)
If you've learned these words in Chinese already, it can be greatly gratifying to see them coming up in the appropriate contexts in Japanese readings. You might also start to see some phonetic patterns between modern Japanese and modern Chinese pronunciations, which will be the subject of a future article...
False friends in Sino-Japanese
On the other hand, there are some words that totally mean something different in Chinese. Encountering and understanding these false friends can be its own learning experience.
大丈夫 daijobu; JP: okay; CN: big husband
素敵 suteki; JP: wonderful; CN: elemental enemy
料理 ryouri; JP: cooking; CN: arrangements
旅館 ryokan; JP: traditional inn; CN: low quality hotel
自分 jibun; JP: myself; CN: self-assessment
English vocabulary
Taking your existing English vocabulary, and adding some additional training, will make it easier to understand Japanese loanwords. Some very common loanwords include:
アイスコーヒー(aisukoohii, ice coffee)
ゲーム (geemu, game)
コンピューター (konpyuutaa, computer)
パスポート (pasupooto, passport)
メニュー (menyuu, menu)
ティッシュ (tisshu, tissue)
レシート (reshiito, receipt)
ウェーター (weetaa, waiter)
テスト (tesuto, test)
ホテル (hoteru, hotel)
Of course, Japanese loanwords have their own particular pronunciations and pitch accents which must be memorized in their own way. You generally cannot just arbitrarily say a word from English and expect to be understood, and this often leads to frustrations when English-speaking tourists ask for "hamburger" but can only be understood when they pronounce it as "hanbaagaa." With some training, it becomes easier to verbally produce these loanwords with Japanese pronunciation, and I imagine this is much easier for English-speakers than for Monolingual Russian and Arabic speakers.
For Americans, there are some English false friends in Japanese to watch out for:
サービス (sabisu/service; JP: free of charge; EN: performing work for someone)
パンツ (pantsu/pants; JP: women's underwear; EN: trousers)
Likewise, there are also loanwords that might catch you by surprise from other non-English languages:
バイト (baito/arbeit, DE: part-time job)
アンケート (ankeeto/enquete, FR: survey)
ノルマ (noruma/norma, RU: quota)
English grammar
Another advantage that Chinese-Americans have while learning Japanese is fluency in English as well as possible exposure to other languages like Spainsh and French. The prior experience with conjugations, word-ordering, and tenses will certainly be helpful when learning Japanese, which has an abundance of all of these. Monolingual Chinese speakers without prior background in language study, who have less experience with these types of grammars, may find it very difficult to learn Japanese grammar at first.
Although Japanese grammar is still quite different from English grammar, having a basic foundation for past/present/future, subject/object, and independent/dependent clauses will make it easier to learn.
俺は俺の事を好きな人が好きだ
ore ha ore no koto wo sukina hito ga suki da
In this panel, the character is basically saying "I like people who like me" but with some decently complex grammar. We see many different grammatical elements used here:
は - ha (topic introducing)
の - no (possessive)
な - na (adjective)
が - ga (topic emphasis)
だ - da (empathic linking verb)
The sentence also contains a nested dependent clause (俺の事を好きな人) which consists of a noun with possessive adjective (俺の事) as well as a verb being used as an adjective modifying a noun (...を好きな人).
To represent the grammar, we could somewhat literalistically translate it into English as:
"As for me, those who like me are the ones whom I like."
It isn't a perfect translation, but you can start to see how the grammatical depth of English can prepare your brain to understand some of the more complex aspects of Japanese grammar. In contrast, in Chinese, the sentence could be translated as
我、我喜欢喜欢我的人。
wo, wo xihuan xihuan wo de ren.
Although the sentence stands out as fairly grammatically complex among Chinese sentences, it is still much less complex than the Japanese and English equivalents. For this reason, I suspect monolingual Chinese speakers may struggle more than English speakers to grasp Japanese grammar.
Conclusion
In the introduction, I stated quite boldly that 70% of Japanese overlaps with Chinese and English. How true is that really? Well, not really, as the 70% number is most correct in written contexts and high-prestige environments. Literary Chinese was historically the language of culture throughout Japanese history, and Modern English has become the language of commerce, communication, and prestige in contemporary Japanese society.
For Chinese-Americans, it will be much easier for them to understand general written Japanese or business communications than to understand, for example, a drunk old man grumbling at an izakaya. (Old men are notorious for speaking Japanese which is difficult for non-natives to understand.) This is also why, paradoxically, it can sometimes be harder for us to read shonen manga (which is filled with colloquialisms and slang) compared to news articles about politics and current affairs.
Ultimately, to truly learn Japanese to its fullest degree, you must learn many native phrases, colloquialisms, grammar structures, and pronunciations. Your experience will vary depending on the subject matter, the medium, and the social context. But despite all these natural hurdles, Chinese-Americans are still at a tremendous and unique advantage when learning Japanese compared to any other group of people! And if it that's appealing to you, then you should keep reading this blog for more insights from a Chinese-American studying Japanese.