对于“日本人能否大致看懂中文”这个问题，这就跟我们读文言文遇到的障碍一样，字我都认识，一部分词也可以明白大概的意思，但连成句子，甚至整个段落，看起来的确困难重重，这可能跟日语中的汉字现在所处的环境差不多。在海外问答论坛 quora上，日本网友提问道：中文和日语相近，日本人是怎样看待汉语的？这引起各国网友的关注，我们看看他们的回答。
问题：日本人怎样看待汉语？
日本网友福田美莎子的回答
The study of ancient Chinese classics (Confucius, Sun Tzu, Mencius, etc.) was the pillar of warrior education before the Meiji Restoration, which was extended to Japanese modern junior high school/high school curriculum. In a typical high school, ancient Chinese texts will become a compulsory course together with modern Japanese, ancient Japanese texts, English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, world history, Japanese history, etc..
对中国古代先贤典籍（孔子、孙子、孟子等）的研究是明治维新前武士教育的支柱，这被延续到了日本现代初中/高中课程中。在一所典型的高中里，中国古代文本会与现代日语、日本古代文本、英语、数学、物理、化学、世界历史、日本历史等一起成为必修课。。
Interestingly, we (and the samurai) generally read these texts in Japanese rather than Chinese, and even the order of Chinese characters is often reversed to conform to the Japanese grammatical framework. Therefore, we mainly study content, not language. In addition to accumulating vocabulary of about 4-5000 Chinese characters, we have also disseminated many traditional Chinese thoughts and cultures. When I was in high school, I never thought that I was studying Chinese, but ancient Chinese philosophy.
有趣的是，我们（和武士）一般用日语阅读这些文本，而非汉语，甚至汉字的顺序也经常颠倒，以符合日语语法框架。因此，我们主要研究的是内容，而不是语言，我们除了积累了大约4到5000个汉字的词汇，还浸染了许多中国传统思想文化。当我在高中时，我从未想过我在学习汉语，而是在学习中国古代哲学。
However, today's Chinese writing is not so easy for us, especially reading comprehension. Reading billboards in Chinese Mainland is actually a challenge. Most characters can be recognized individually, but when combined, we are at a loss. So far, many signs in Taiwan, China, China are easier to identify immediately, probably because many of them come from the Japanese occupation.
然而，今天的中文写作对我们来说并不是那么容易，尤其是阅读理解。在中国大陆阅读广告牌实际上是一项挑战。大多数字符可以单独识别，但一组合起来，我们就不知所云了。到目前为止，中国台湾的许多招牌更容易立即识别含义，可能是因为其中许多来自日据时代。
Another potentially interesting fact is that some Chinese characters representing Western concepts were created in Japan and used by the Chinese. According to a (Chinese) source, about 70% of the nouns in Chinese social research subjects and scientific terms are made in Japan, such as service, organization, discipline, guidelines, policies, etc., and even the terms of science, business, canteen, etc. are also translated from Japan.
另一个可能有趣的事实是，一些代表西方概念的汉字是在日本创造的，并由中国人使用。根据一个（中文）来源，中国社会研究科目和科学术语中约70%的名词是日本制造的，如服务、组织、纪律、方针、政策等，甚至科学、商业、食堂等词汇也来自日本的翻译。
日本需要学者青野的回答
All these answers are good and helpful. I particularly like that the respondent Serina regards pseudonyms as "childhood friends who came out of a group of fearsome gangsters" - which is similar to my feeling when I was in Japan in my early years.
所有这些答案都很好，很有帮助。我特别喜欢答主Serina将假名视为“一群令人生畏的黑帮分子中走出的童年朋友”——这与我早年在日本时的感觉差不多。
Let me add: ordinary Japanese feel very close to familiar things when they see Chinese, and feel "we already know", because the basic education in junior high school and senior high school includes Chinese classic courses. These not only cover ancient Japanese literature, but also Chinese works - they must be so, because many elements of Japanese culture are derived from Chinese history, especially many words and phrases can only be explained by telling a story from ancient China.
让我补充一句：普通日本人有一种看到中文时非常亲近熟悉的东西的感觉，一种“我们已经知道了”的感觉，这是因为初中高中的基础教育包括中国经典课。这些不仅涵盖了日本古代文学，也涵盖了中国作品——它们必须如此，因为日本文化中的许多元素都源自中国历史，尤其是很多单词和短语只能通过讲述一个来自古代中国的故事来解释。
A well-known example: the common word of "conflict" is contradiction, in which the characters act in contradiction. This can be traced back to a Chinese story about a blacksmith who sold weapons and said, "This spear is too sharp. It can pierce the hardest shield!" Then, "This shield is too hard to pierce even the sharpest spear!" His customers laughed at this inherent contradiction. A famous scholar quoted this story as the most extensive logic loophole.
一个众所周知的例子：“contradiction”的常用解释词是矛盾，其中的人物做事自相矛盾。这要追溯到一个中国故事，讲的是一个卖兵器的铁匠说：“这把矛太锋利了，它能刺穿最坚硬的盾牌！”然后，“这盾牌太硬了，连最锋利的矛都刺不穿！”他的顾客嘲笑这种固有的矛盾，一位著名学者引用了这个故事，并被引用为最广泛的逻辑漏洞。
Reading the wiki article Hanzi can get more detailed information than you might want... However, the "Hanzi" system can read classical Chinese just like reading classical Japanese (although there are huge differences in grammar), which everyone must learn at school, even if they are never good at it. It is true that modern Chinese is not the same as classical Chinese, but Japanese readers do have some experience in following the unique word order.
阅读维基文章《汉字》可以获得比你可能想要的更详细的信息……但是，“汉字”系统可以像阅读古典日语一样阅读文言文（尽管语法存在巨大差异），这是每个人在学校都必须要学习的，即使他们从来都不擅长。诚然，现代汉语与古典汉语并不相同，但日本读者确实在遵循独特的语序方面有一定的经验。
By the way, a normal Japanese reading ability requires a basic stock of about 3000 Chinese characters, and more Chinese characters are added to each professional term. Chinese literacy needs about 4000, especially for majors. This is not because the number of characters is so different, but the two groups of characters do not overlap completely - some characters are common in Chinese, but have never been used in Japanese, and vice versa to some extent. In these two languages, there are still thousands of characters in theory, or they have been used in history, but now they are left to scholars and classicists for fun.
顺便说一句，正常的日语阅读能力需要大约3000个汉字的基本库存，每个专业的术语中还要加上更多的汉字。汉语识字需要4000左右，特别的专业需要更多。这并不是因为字符的数量如此不同，而是两组字符没有完全重叠-有些字符在中文中很常见，但在日语中从未使用过，在某种程度上反之亦然。在这两种语言中，理论上还有数千个字符存在，或在历史上曾被使用过，但现在留给学究和古典主义者来取乐。
Of course, everything I said is limited to written language. As other respondents said, pronunciation is another matter!
当然，我所说的一切都仅限于书面语言，正如其他回答者所说的那样，发音又是另一回事了！
海外网友Peter Yonge的回答
As a bilingual person, I can tell you at least one thing: Chinese attaches great importance to context. Sometimes, if you don't know what the other person is saying, you can't understand how to explain a sentence. Sometimes Chinese people play games with this feature. Someone told me that someone was holding a cup with a string of words written on the outside, which formed a closed loop. You can start from any role, read it and other roles in turn, and it will become a meaningful sentence. So if there are 25 characters on the cup, you can have 25 different sentences.
作为一个通晓两种语言的人，至少有一点，我可以告诉你，汉语非常注重上下文。有时，如果你不知道对方在说什么，你就无法理解如何解释一个句子。有时中国人玩的游戏都有这个特点。有人告诉我，有人拿着一个杯子，杯子外面写着一串字，这样就形成了一个闭环。你可以从任何一个角色开始，依次阅读它和其他角色，它会成为一个有意义的句子。所以如果杯子上有25个字符，你可以有25个不同的句子。
Chinese readers can generally understand a paragraph in Japanese, but the more Chinese characters, the better, because unless they are educated in Japanese, they do not know the meaning of syllables. So they may miss the negation of verbs, such as "he is really not my friend," and become "he is really my friend."
中国读者通常可以用日语大致了解一段话，但汉字越多越好，因为除非他们受过日语教育，否则他们不知道音节符号的意义。所以他们可能会错过动词的否定，比如“他真的不是我的朋友，”变成了“他真是我的朋友。”
As long as you insist on using simple vocabulary items, the two languages are usually similar, because at the beginning, Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write, and they also borrowed a lot of technical vocabulary, products or technology names. Later, with the advance of economic and social revolution, and the leading position of Japanese in western learning, China often borrowed Japanese characters to express English or other western language vocabulary. If the Japanese have an acceptable combination of Chinese characters, why should they invent a new one?
只要你坚持使用简单的词汇项目，这两种语言通常都是相似的，因为一开始日本人借用了汉字来书写，他们还借用了大量的技术词汇、产品或技术的名称。后来，随着经济和社会革命的推进，以及日本人在西学方面处于领先地位，因此中国经常借用日语汉字来表示英语或其他西方语言词汇。如果日本人已经有了一个可以接受的汉字组合，为什么要重新发明一个新的汉字组合呢？
Modern Chinese has a lot of "pronunciation only" input, that is, they try to string Chinese characters together to form something that sounds like an English term. So you will hear Jeep's "gee poo" and Khrushchev's "Hey lou shweh foo". They did the same thing with the names of Mongolia and Manchuria in their history books. I always felt stupid, because after thinking about it for some time, I realized that it was a transliteration name, not some mysterious concept. The Japanese are also confused when they try to find out the corresponding concept of the word "MacDonald" in Chinese.
现代汉语有很多“仅凭发音”的输入，也就是说，他们试图将汉字串在一起，形成听起来像英语术语的东西。所以你会听到吉普的“gee-poo”，赫鲁晓夫的“Hey lou shweh foo”。他们在历史书中也对蒙古和满洲的名字做了同样的事情，我总是觉得很愚蠢，因为在思索了一段时间后，我才意识到这是一个音译的名字，而不是一些神秘的概念。日本人试图用中文找出“麦克唐纳”这个词语对应的概念也会感到困惑。
中国网友何天赋的回答
From the perspective of a native Chinese, if a Chinese with ordinary education shows them a Japanese reading material, such as a newspaper, he/she can basically read a considerable part and guess the rest. Generally speaking, people can guess the meaning, which is not more difficult to understand than imagined.
从土生土长的中国人的角度来看，对于一个受过普通教育的中国人来说，如果向他们展示一份日本读物，比如报纸，他/她基本上可以阅读相当一部分，并猜出其余部分。一般来说，人们能够猜出其中的含义，并不比想象中的难以理解。
Chinese characters in Japanese originate from Chinese characters, and combine with hiragana and katakana to form a grammatical pattern, thus forming sentences. Chinese characters are comprehensive units of structure (combination of strokes), pronunciation and meaning, and there are no equivalent symbols such as hiragana or katakana in Chinese. Grammatically, these parts help to understand the meaning of different patterns or concepts (tense, voice, singular/plural, clause, masculine/feminine...), while Chinese is mainly based on context.
日语中的汉字源自汉字，与平假名和片假名结合，形成语法模式，从而形成语句。汉字是结构（笔画的组合）、发音和意义的综合单位，在汉语中没有平假名或片假名这样的等效符号。语法上，这些部分有助于理解不同模式或概念的含义（时态、语态、单数/复数、从句、阳性/阴性……），而汉语则主要基于上下文。
In modern Chinese, many characters have new meanings, while in modern Japanese, they (the same characters) may retain their original meanings. For example, in Chinese, Qi1 Zi3 (note the number of tones) represents wife, while in Japanese, SaiShi/TumaKo (the same character) represents wife and children. This makes the guessing part more difficult.
在现代汉语中，许多字符具有新的含义，而在现代日语中，它们（相同的字符）可能保留了以前的原始含义，例如，在汉语中，Qi1 Zi3（注意声调的数字）表示妻子，而在日语中，SaIShi/TumaKo（相同的字）表示妻子和孩子。这使得猜测部分更加困难。
There is another difficult part. Many Japanese words are written in Hiragana and Katakana, but there are also Chinese versions. But nowadays, Japanese native speakers may not be able to write the Chinese version because they use the simplified version too frequently or the Chinese version is relatively complex. But the tricky thing is that in Chinese, these words are introduced from Japanese, which uses the form of Chinese characters (there are no meaningless pure phonetic symbols in Chinese). For example, the word "CLUB" was first translated into the Japanese Chinese character KURABU (transliteration and meaning, which is a gathering place or alliance for people with the same hobby), and then translated into Chinese. However, in Japanese, katakana is still a formal form of expression, while the Chinese version may be rarely used or seen.
还有另一个困难的部分。许多日语单词用平假名和片假名书写，但也有汉字版本。但如今，以日语为母语的人可能无法书写汉字版本，因为他们太频繁地使用简化版，或者汉字版本相对复杂。但棘手的是，在汉语中，这些单词是从日语引入的，日语采用汉字（汉语中没有没有意义的纯语音符号）的形式。例如，CLUB一词首先被翻译成日语汉字KURABU（音译和意义，是有相同爱好的人的聚会场所或联盟），然后被翻译成汉语，但在日语中，片假名仍然是正式的表达形式，而汉字版本可能很少被使用或看到。
It may be interesting or confusing to guess the meaning of these words or expressions, but once you learn some basic rules, it will become much easier.
猜测这些单词或表达的含义可能很有趣或令人困惑，但一旦学会了一些基本规则，就会变得容易得多。
This can be compared with Persian speakers who read Arabic or other languages under the influence of Arabic. Many words seem similar, but the structure is completely different from other basic words.
这可以与在阿拉伯语影响下阅读阿拉伯语或其他语言时说波斯语的人相比，许多单词似乎相似，但结构和其他基本单词完全不同。
英国网友埃德文•莫兰的回答
Chinese characters are available in both traditional and simplified versions. Chinese Mainland has developed a simplified version to improve literacy. Traditional Chinese characters were borrowed by Japan when it created its own written language, so Chinese characters themselves are very familiar to Japanese.
汉字有繁体和简体两种版本。中国大陆开发了简化版，以提高识字率。传统的汉字是日本在创造自己的书面语言时借用的，所以汉字本身对日本人来说很熟悉。
Although Chinese characters look the same, this does not mean that Japanese can easily understand the meaning of sentences, because the languages are completely different. Chinese mainly uses monosyllabic words, because they may produce a large number of syllables when using tones, while Japanese mainly uses polysyllabic words, not depending on tones.
尽管汉字看起来相同，但这并不意味着日语能够很容易地理解句子的含义，因为语言完全不同。汉语主要使用单音节词，因为它们使用声调时可能会产生大量的音节，而日语则主要使用多音节词，不太依赖声调。
Therefore, Chinese can use a single character to represent words, while Japanese must create Japanese words by using the combination of two or more Chinese characters (the same way as English creates words from other languages such as tele scope), or create multi syllable words by using a single Chinese character and additional Japanese pinyin characters. In addition, the grammars of the two languages are completely different. Although the same characters are used, the basic spoken language is not even from the same language family.
因此，汉语可以使用单个字符来表示单词，而日语必须通过使用两个或多个汉字的组合来创建日语单词，（与英语从tele scope等其他语言创建单词的方式相同），或者通过使用单个汉字和附加的日语拼音字符来创建多音节单词。此外，这两种语言的语法也完全不同。尽管使用了相同的字符，但基本的口语甚至不是来自同一语系。
The Japanese will feel familiar when they look at traditional characters, but this does not mean that they will recognize all traditional characters. Chinese uses about 30000 characters, while Japanese only uses about 2000 of the most commonly used characters.
日本人在看繁体字时会有一种熟悉的感觉，但这并不意味着他会认出所有的繁体字。中文使用了大约30000个字符，而日语只借用了大约2000个最常用的字符。
With simplified characters, it will be more difficult for Japanese to read because many strokes have been deleted from Chinese characters. This undoubtedly makes learning to write easier, but for those who already know traditional characters, learning to simplify characters is an extra job.
有了简体字，日本人读起来会更加困难，因为很多笔画已经从汉字中删除了。这无疑使学习书写变得更容易，但对于已经了解繁体字的人来说，学习简化字是一项额外的工作。
I am not a native speaker of Japanese, but I can read very well. I did an experiment. I saw thousands of simplified Chinese cards and tried to guess the meaning of Chinese characters. I can guess about 30% of them.
我不是以日语为母语的人，但我读得很好。我做了一个实验，看了几千张简体中文卡片，试着猜出汉字的意思。我能猜出其中大约30%。
Even so, when visiting China, it is difficult to understand what is written on the sign. Sometimes I can do it, such as the "No Spitting" sign. (This happened many years ago, so I don't know whether they still have it.) In the restaurant, I can find out enough things, so I can order something edible. But this is not just because of Japanese; I also often eat in Chinese restaurants in Japan, where the menu has Chinese and Japanese.
即便如此，在访问中国时，很难弄清楚标牌上写的是什么。有时候我可以做到，比如“禁止吐痰”的标志。（这是很多年前的事了，所以我不知道他们是否还有。）在餐馆里，我能弄清楚足够的东西，所以可以点一些可食用的东西。但这不仅仅是因为懂日语；我也经常在日本的中餐馆吃饭，那里的菜单上有中文和日文。
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