WtfEvenIsExistence1️English Language Problems
alaxitooAs a consequence my Taiwanese husband calls his mum “he” and his male friends “she” in English lol
That is kinda weird. There certainly are different sings for “she”/“她“ and “he”/”他” in chinese characters. Though, both signs are pronounced exactly the same.
Chinese characters are their own language. You don’t read them so much as you translate them. That’s why Chinese folk can mostly read written Japanese even though Japanese and Mandarin have almost nothing in common.
Chinese folk can mostly read written Japanese
This is 100% untrue unless you're talking about menus and such. Japanese uses three other writing systems (counting Roman letters) which Chinese speakers are not going to know without study. A handful of the hiragana/katakana still look and are pronounced like the old Japanese kanji they came from, but those also were not Mandarin but from other dialects of middle Chinese (I want to say there was a lot of Wu, but I can't recall for certain).
Japanese, on the other hand, can read a lot of the kanji, but aren't going to necessarily get a lot out of anything because Chinese grammar is so radically different to Japanese.
Both will have trouble with characters whose meaning for the same character differs in the other language, and potential difficulty with characters invented in one of the countries independently.
Source: live in Japan, married to Japanese, a number of Chinese friends (mostly Taiwan and HK, but a few mainland)
I’m basing that on my Chinese coworker, who travels to Japan on business but doesn’t speak the language. Of course she can’t read hiragana or katakana, but she says she gets the gist of the Kanji.
I doubt she could read a novel, but she’s not illiterate when she’s there like I am.
(There’s little point to throwing Kanji at me, BTW - when I lived there I was young and more interested in looking for a good time than learning the language, unfortunately.)