Does knowing Japanese help in neighbouring countries?

score:12

Accepted answer

I don't think your Japanese will be much help, except for interacting with Japanese tourists. Where there are guides or directions in Japanese, there will almost certainly be guides or directions in English. Your kanji may help with Taiwanese signs or Korean newspaper headlines, but Japanese is not related to Mandarin and distantly if at all to Korean, aside from a handful of loanwords.

Japanese is not widely spoken in either South Korea or Taiwan, and has not been for decades. English, on the other hand, is taught in both countries starting in elementary school— not to say English is necessarily widely or well spoken. Nevertheless, you are far more likely to find people with some knowledge of it, especially in cities and in customer-facing occupations, as opposed to Japanese.

I doubt you would encounter open hostility for merely speaking Japanese. These are modern and well-educated countries, whose citizens can distinguish people from politics (especially in cities and customer-facing occupations). Second, while Japanese colonialism was traumatic, most of the population in both countries has been born since 1945 and has no firsthand experience of it. Third, there is a cultural resistance to open displays of hostility of any kind, especially in front of foreigners. Of course, if you walk into a department store and address the sales clerk in Japanese, she may think a silly Westerner has forgotten what country he's in.

Upvote:1

If you know a bit of Japanese all the while you don't understand English as well as its local language, it is definitely helpful as there are some signs on the street, metro, airports, or shops written in Japanese (and don't forget that so many Japanese people can't handle even a pretty basic conversation in English).

However, once you know English, there is little to no added benefits to it. The kind of people who speak Japanese yet don't speak English are few and far between, and even if they are in such rare cases they would never consider you, white, speak Japanese. So you would never know he or she speaks a bit of Japanese until and unless you ask it.

That being said, in the case of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and less ture in China, sometimes you understand sings (no English) scattered in the city with your knowledge of Kanji. For example in China, an elevator for the disabled people is tagged as 无障碍电梯. While Japanese people don't understand 无 and 电梯, they understand 障碍, which means disabled. And given the context it is in, they can easily recognize that the elevator is for such people.

And last but not least, some Korean people might feel frustrated to see you, non-Asian, speak Japanese but don't speak even a basic Korean. I would like to encourage you to not talk to them in Japanese. If you still want to use Japanese, it's better to ask something like "Do you speak any other languages such as Japanese?", instead of asking it directly.

Upvote:4

Japanese is not hugely helpful in those countries, but not altogether useless. There will be a few Koreans who will know Japanese better than English. And part of the Japanese WRITTEN language (Kanji) is borrowed from Chinese, so Taiwanese will be able to read what you write in Kanji, and you would be able to read the Chinese script using Kanji.

Younger people, at least, will not have first hand memories of World War II; perhaps only people now 70 years and older will.

Upvote:7

Knowing Kanji will help a bit in Chinese-using areas such as Taiwan, in that you may be able to get the general idea of some signs. That's about all. Don't expect anyone in Taiwan or Korea to understand spoken Japanese. You would be better off trying English.

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