I’ve been trundling along with trying to self learn Cantonese for years, mainly learning how to recognize and write celebrity names so I can recognize and look up news for them and do get Hanzi and Kanji confused. One of my friends was testing a messaging app and as a joke he messaged me something in Kanji. When he asked if I understood what he wrote, I said it must be something about if I could read Japanese because I saw the characters 日本 - yat bun (Japan in Cantonese) in the message. Since he understands some Cantonese he laughed because of course it should have been ni hon (Japan in Japanese). I explained to him that since I’ve been trying to learn Hanzi for years, even if I see Kanji, I immediately think of the Cantonese word first, then have to mentally translate to Japanese or English! 
Hmm, do you mean Kanji (漢字) or Kanbun
(漢文) ?
Modern Japanese text is pretty easy to identify as it uses a lot of Japanese characters (仮名) which have a quite different visual appearance to Chinese characters, even before trying actually to read the text. On the level of individual words there are a lot of “kango” which may or may not be confusing. The two languages have little resemblance, though; at least I’m not seeing it (but am happy to have ignorance fought!)
OP: the dictionary I recommended contains a Chinese-English dictionary for Chinese and/or Mandarin learners. If you want to avoid Roman script and Pinyin altogether it may not be the best fit, but it has additional functions, like clicking on a character to hear it pronounced, so may still be worth a look.
I’m pretty sure I’m referring to kanji since AFAIK, my friend wasn’t formally schooled in Japanese. He learned to speak and write though his grandparents who lived with his family. I’m not even sure if he can write in hiragana.
Arggh…kanbun, kanji, katakana, hiragana, why can’t they just use one form! 
BTW, I can’t recognize anything in simplified Chinese.
Wow, I had always “heard” that those with dyslexia have much less challenges with Chinese characters, but you’re the first one with anecdotal evidence that supports it.
I learned Chinese 30+ years ago when there wasn’t even a decent pinyin based dictionary and the educational books were complete junk. I’m not actually a very good person to ask since I haven’t used any Chinese language learning tools since 1985, although I had great experience with Pleco back when it was still supported on Windows phones. I just downloaded the android version FWIW. Wish I could be more help…
Lingyi nails the basics. It’s a lot of rote memorization of the characters, which should be done systematically by learning the stroke order/radical building blocks. Knowing the character back story helps some people remember the characters better but YMMV.
Is your niece mature for her age? The reason I ask is that there is Chinese language material for little kids (beginning readers) and for adults, and AFAIK nothing in between. The little kids stuff is a waste of time IMHO because it teaches things like “ducky” vs “duck”. I would jump straight into the adult and avoid the kids materials.
I haven’t seen these myself but maybe this is good? These conform to the HSK testing. HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi) is a standardized international Chinese language proficiency test for non-native Chinese speakers. Again, HSK is after my time but I have gone through the first few levels and it seems reasonably representative and helpful for studying practical Chinese, with a test to actually benchmark your skill level.
as lingyi points out, her teacher should be able to suggest additional resources. Likely whatever text book system they use, probably also has elated flashcards, audio, multimedia resources.
If you can read Japanese characters, many of them are actually simplified Chinese. For example, 日本国 or “Japanese nationality” as listed on Japanese passports. Kuni or country is “国” as opposed to the Traditional Chinese" 國".
I studied Japanese at a basic level and lived in Tokyo for 2.5 years. Personally, I like the hiragana and katakana systems. Frankly, I wish the Chinese would adopt a kind of katakana system for foreign words instead of hacking out characters to do the job.
LOL, this is how bad my understanding of written Japanese is (BTW, I’m Japanese/Okinawan, 3rd generation born and raised in Hawaii). I saw 日本国 and immediately thought yat bun gwok (Cantonese)!
Could you please elaborate on this? Who picks the foreign words’ characters in Chinese? Is there no standard?
Apparently there are people who are dyslexic in Roman script who are not dyslexic in Chinese script like my niece, but there are also people who are dyslexic in Chinese script who are not dyslexic in Roman script, and people who are dyslexic in both.
Not really.
It might be a matter of perspective. As native English speaker who first studied Korean, eventually studied the Chinese characters used in Korean (Chinese characters underlie most Korean words, even though nowadays it’s common to write almost entirely in the Korean alphabet), then used that to learn to read Japanese (don’t speak much), and now am gradually improving my Chinese reading (don’t speak at all), my perspective is:
There are basically just Chinese characters, and with a few exceptions no such thing as ‘Japanese characters’. It’s basically the same as writing a particular Latin letter in old Gothic form v a modern font. It’s still the same letter. There are cases where the meanings are different between languages in particular words, but that’s the exception not the rule. And there are cases, obviously, where a given character has a different meaning in different words in the same language, anyway.
Moreover as I think everyone knows, the character font now used in Japan dates from only since WWII as do simplified characters in PRC. Some of my Japanese reading is of military documents from the Pacific War. Those are written, basically, in ‘traditional’ characters (give or take some common ad hoc abbreviations at that time, what are called ‘sokja’ in Korean). This makes it IMO meaningless to talk about how kanji are something different from ‘Chinese characters’ (again, the literal meaning of the word ‘kanji’). I don’t think so.
The structures of Korean and Japanese as languages v Chinese is quite different, of course. Korean and Japanese have somewhat similar structures though it’s apparently coincidental not an actual historical linguistic connection. However IME a Korean speaker studying Japanese will often pick up intuitively on Japanese grammar. It’s not the same, but kind of ‘rhymes’ with Korean. Chinese is not that way relative to either of the other two, grammar-wise. Rather, the similarity is in the vocabulary, although the % of Chinese derived words is higher in Korean than Japanese. Also, words coined in Korea or Japan from pairs of Chinese characters are almost always common to those to languages, but only some found there way back to common use in modern Chinese (the categories of modern warships are an example, ‘destroyer’, ‘cruiser’ etc are Japanese coinages common to all three languages). So, in a high % of cases ‘Sino Korean’ words, pairs (almost always) of Chinese characters, will be the same pairs as the corresponding Japanese word. In a lower % of cases will it be the most common pairing in modern Chinese. However, if you know the individual character meanings, the different combinations in Chinese make sense immediately. And fairly often it is the same pair in all three.
Anyway it’s a gigantic difference IMO if somebody starts out learning Chinese knowing zero characters v knowing 800, 1600, 2400 (the old benchmarks in Korea for middle school, high school, college students) Chinese characters from studying Korean or Japanese. The simplified font (which I personally dislike, it spoils the beauty of the characters IMO) is an additional obstacle but doesn’t basically change the equation.
You are right that Japanese kanji are mostly no different from corresponding Chinese characters, but Japanese hiragana and katakana are greatly simplified from their underlying Chinese characters, which gives written Japanese today a distinctive visual appearance compared to written Chinese (and of course Korean).
Wikipedia says about 60% of words in a Japanese dictionary are “Sino-Japanese” (borrowed from Chinese or coined on that model), as well as 60% of South Korean vocabulary, but only 18% of spoken Japanese. I did not see a link to the corresponding figure for spoken Korean.
ETA aren’t two-character compound words more a feature of modern Chinese than classical Chinese vocabulary?
I’ve seen lower for Japanese and higher for Korean. But it’s hard to nail down either one. In Japanese there are also indigenous words which have come to be represented by Chinese characters, with the character adopting the indigenous pronunciation, as opposed to a Chinese derived pronunciation in a more pure ‘Sino Japanese’ word. And in Korean there are official ‘Sino Korean’ words with an official Chinese character equivalent, but also many words which were originally derived from Chinese but whose pronunciation has drifted away from the modern Korean pronunciation of those characters, so are never written in Chinese and are considered indigenous. The word for the stereotypical Korean food, kimchi, is an example.
And then it varies widely with subject and context even besides spoken v. written in general. Or by apparent design even. For example the standard Catholic translation of the bible into Korean tends to emphasize indigenous words, even using ones which are more unusual and old fashioned than the Sino-Korean of the same meaning more commonly used in modern writing. Perhaps this is to give a ‘rustic’ or ‘old’ feel to it? I’m not sure why it is, but it’s noticeable.
My impression is that the % is generally higher in Korean than Japanese, maybe I should say.
And yeah, character pairs are typical of modern Chinese and singles of classical/literary Chinese, and most Chinese loan/influenced words in Korean and Japanese are two character. Which I guess might indicate that a lot of the back and forth isn’t that old (some is clearly not old: many Japanese and Korean ‘Chinese’ words are the same because the Japanese coined them then they became common in Korea in the 1910-45 colonial period). Although, in Korean a few are also strings of characters based on how things were written in classical/literary Chinese, which remained the de facto official written language of the Joseon Dynasty long after the invention of the Korean alphabet. For example the name of the US-Korean military conflict of 1871, shinmiyangyo, is how it was written in literary Chinese, shinmi the Chinese year, yangyo ‘western+disturbance’. Yangyo is in the dictionary but it’s arguable IMO whether it’s really a Korean word on its own or just part of that (or similar) classical/literary Chinese phrase. It’s rarely used in any other context AFAIK.
IFAIK, there is no standard, and common usage drives the standard. For example, actor Gregory Peck is 格雷戈里·派克 or in pinyin gé léi gē lǐ · pài kè. Back in the old days before translation engines, and frankly even decent pinyin dictionaries, I can remember as a student in the early 1980’s spending literally hours looking up something like Gregory Peck before realizing it’s a proper noun and not trying to translate the characters.
In Japanese (ignoring exceptions), the katakana system is used for foreign words. It’s simply phonetic, and because its Katakana (vs hiragana for Japanese non kanji words) it is obviously a borrowed foreign word. Maybe it’s lowbrow, but certainly a lot easier than trying to decipher the Chinese characters being used phonetically. Of course, as one’s character recognition improves beyond a few thousand characters, then foreign proper nouns are more obvious.
In my experience, being reasonably fluent in Chinese characters and then living in Japan and studying Japanese part time. The Chinese characters used in Japan can be
a) the exact same meaning with very similar pronunciation such as 电话 or telephone, which is dianhua (Chinese pinyin) or denwa (Japanese) or
b) same character but different pronunciation like hot spring 温泉， which is wenchuan in pinyin and onsen in Japanese, or
c) something more akin to a latin root in English that makes sense but not the same word. Examples fail me at the moment.
I’m reasonably fluent in Japanese characters, and know some Chinese.
My wife is Taiwanese and I aways kidded her that she cheated when she learned Japanese – she already knew the characters.
She taught Chinese to Japanese students in Japan and now teaches Japanese to Taiwanese people.
While the characters share meanings, the combination of characters into words are often different. e.g., 汽車 in Chinese (Qìchē) is “car” in English, but means “train” in Japanese (kisha).
One I found on the net: 勉強 (benkyō) in Japanese is “study” in English, but an adjective meaning inadequate, unconvincing, strained, far fetched v. manage in Chinese (miǎnqiǎng).
My wife guesstimates that only less than half of the words are the same and that if you were give something written in one language to the other that they would only be able to pick up about 10% of the meaning. Probably similar to what an English speaker could understand of something written in German or Spanish.
Native Japanese and Chinese speakers can probably get to a reasonable fluency in each other’s language in (maybe) half of the time that it would take someone who speaks a languge which doesn’t use the characters.
The analogy is that (Classical) Chinese is the regional Latin of Chinese dialects, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.
I like that some Chinese compound words are literal translations, sometimes descriptive and sometimes phonetic (at least in Cantonese). In Mandarin, taxi may be 出租车 chu ze chi, while in Cantonese it’s 的士 dik si. The United States (of America) is 美國 mei gwo (Mandarin), mei gwok (Cantonese) which means beautiful country. And of course my favorite, 鬼佬 gwei lao (Mandarin), gwai lo (Cantonese) which literally means ghost man, but is often defined as foreign devil when meant to be derogatory. However it’s really a non-derogatory term for Caucasians because of their pale white skin.
Lingyi, one tiny bone to pick. 鬼 or ghost/devil always has a negative connotation in Chinese. It does not have a positive connotation. I totally get Honkies (I slay myself) may think it’s a neutral word, but I would disagree. That said, I never had issues with friends, colleagues or people that knew me using gweiloh. Mandarin typically uses 老外 laowai, where lao (“old” or by extenstion “respected” as in “respected elder” can at least be taken as an honorific). Or use 外国人 waiguoren or literally “person from outside the country” or “foreigner”, which is a descriptor (although the general belief is that there are Chinese and then everyone else, and as a foreigner you’re part of the everyone else). Anyhoo, getting deep in the weeds here.
Sorry for stepping even deeper into the weeds (I promise I’m stop after this post), but this is a story I don’t think I’ll ever be able to share anywhere else.
My mother and father were in a forbidden marriage. Her family was from mainland Japan (Naichi) and my father was Okinawa (Uchinanchu). GASP Nothing now, but back in the late 40’s Hawaii, it was a big no no!
Anyway, it wasn’t until the family meeting to celebrate and approve his engagement to my sister-in-law (who is Okinawa/Hawaiian/Chinese), did my Mom bring up a question she’d never asked in the 32 years she and my Dad were married. She asked the roomful of Okinawans, “What does Yamatunchu mean?” and why at family gatherings they would be speaking in in Okinawan and when they said Yamatunchu it was with a hard emphasis on the last syllable and everyone would look at her. Everyone laughed and explained Yamatunchu was just what they called non-Okinawans (from Mainland Japan) to distinguish them from Uchinanchu (native Okinawans) and the emphasis on the last syllable was just the usual accent on the word! My Dad glared at my Mom and asked her why she never asked him about it and she said she thought it was a dirty word! :eek:
I saw quite a nice one today. It’s 1000 Mandarin Chinese Words by Berlitz Kids.
Pics: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
The Hanyu da cidian (漢語大辭典) would make an awesome and impressive gift (like an Oxford English Dictionary), but definitely not for a kid, or anyone with less than a year or so of Chinese (to be able to understand the definitions).