Excerpt from Bastiaan Edelman: > A Japanese and a Chinese can write to each other and understand most of > it... but talking to each other is useless.
I didn't realize Japanese and Chinese written languages were so close. You mean a Chinese could read a Japanese newspaper, and vice versa? But Korean has a different look to me, I think I might tell Chinese from Korean printed matter, but no way could I distinguish handwritten Chinese from handwritten Korean. If intonation is such a critical part of spoken Chinese, I'd be really lost in that language.
