And people who aren’t part of any of these, do you think you are “missing” something?

  • Get_Off_My_WLAN@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    20 天前

    Japanese speaking and listening is still harder than reading and writing for me, and I’m guessing it’s the same for you, since you already know 漢字?

    • I can hear some Japanese words because Cantonese (and sometime Mandarin) has some overlap sounds with Japanese.

      In Steins;Gate for example: Japanse pronounciation for WW3 (第三次世界大戦) is “Daisanji sekai taisen”, Cantonese is “Daisaamchi saigaai daaizin”, so when that character said those words, I was momentarily confused, like: why is there Cantonese in my Anime?, but then I realized, both probably derived from the same common anestral language, probabky some merchants traveled from the 粵 (Yue) region of China to Japan or vice versa, and that’s probably how these pronunciations influenced each other.

      • Get_Off_My_WLAN@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        20 天前

        Aye, that’s it.

        You can hear it in some words like 日本, as ‘nippon’ and ‘Japan’ both feel closer to the Middle Chinese pronunciation than they are to modern Mandarin’s ‘rìběn’.

        Also, I hear Chinese students unintentionally (or half-intentionally) slip in Mandarin pronunciations all the time when they forget the Japanese pronunciation that is very close.