Japanese Mistakes Chinese Speakers Make: False Friends, Wa and Ga

Kanji you already know, meanings you don't

The shared script makes you fast, but it also makes you confident in the wrong places. When a kanji word looks familiar, your brain fills in the Chinese meaning before you have checked. Most of the time that is correct. Sometimes it is quietly wrong, and the error only shows when a Japanese friend looks puzzled.

These four words are the famous ones. Each card gives the Japanese meaning; the trap is the meaning your Chinese suggests.

False friends worth a second look

Here is a longer list. The middle column gives the meaning most Mandarin speakers would expect from the characters; meanings can differ in other varieties of Chinese and between regions. The last column is what a Japanese speaker means.

Same idea, different kanji shape

Japanese simplified many characters after the Second World War, but not always in the same way as mainland Chinese. Learners who write in simplified Chinese often produce a Chinese form inside a Japanese sentence, and learners from Taiwan or Hong Kong may write the traditional one. In handwriting tests and on forms, this counts as a mistake.

The pairs to watch are common ones: Japanese 気 (air, spirit), not 气 or 氣; 図 (diagram), not 图; 発 (depart, emit), not 发; 広 (wide), not 广; 単 (single), not 单. Also note words that use different kanji altogether, such as 駅 for a station instead of 站, and 電車 for an electric train.

The particle no is not Chinese de

Chinese de joins many kinds of descriptions to a noun: big de house, beautiful de room, my de book. Japanese no looks like the same word, so many Chinese speakers use it everywhere. But Japanese no only joins a noun to another noun: watashi no hon, Nihon no kuruma.

I-adjectives go directly before the noun with nothing in between: ōkii ie, atarashii hon. Na-adjectives take na: kirei na heya, yūmei na mise. Verbs in plain form also go directly before the noun: kinō katta hon. Adding no between them is one of the clearest signals of Chinese transfer.

Wa and ga: Chinese has no direct match

Chinese does not mark the topic and the subject with separate particles, so wa and ga are new territory. A common strategy is to learn wa first and use it for every subject. That works in many simple sentences, which is why the habit survives, but it fails in three places.

First, question words such as dare, nani and doko cannot take wa as a subject; they take ga, and so does the answer. Second, inside a description before a noun, the subject takes ga: watashi ga tsukutta kēki, the cake I made. Third, when you report something new that just happened or that you see, such as rain starting, ga is natural: ame ga futte imasu.

Wrong vs right: three quick checks

Before you send a message or hand in homework, run three checks: is there a no between an adjective and a noun, is there a wa after a question word, and is every kanji in its Japanese form? These three catch a large share of Chinese-influenced errors in writing.

Tones, pitch and voiced sounds

Mandarin gives every syllable a tone. Japanese pitch accent only marks where the voice drops, and each beat stays level. When a falling fourth tone lands on Japanese syllables, the speaker can sound emphatic or annoyed. Try reading a sentence in a deliberately flat voice first, then add only one drop per word.

The other sound pattern is voicing. Mandarin separates sounds like b and p by a puff of air, aspiration, not by voicing. Japanese separates them by voicing: the vocal cords buzz on d, g and b, not on t, k and p. So many Mandarin speakers hear and say tenki, weather, and denki, electricity, as the same word. Put your fingers on your throat: you should feel a buzz on the d of denki. Some speakers from parts of southern and south-western China also mix n and l-like sounds, which affects Japanese n and r, as in nani and nari; if that is you, practise such pairs slowly.

Mini dialogue: telling a friend about your weekend

A short chat with the fixes in place. Watch for adjective-noun pairs without no, ga after a question word, and the false friends used with their Japanese meaning.

Make the Japanese meaning win

• Type /create-flashcards in Mocchi's chat and list your false friends with their Japanese meanings. Pick a photo for each card, such as an envelope for tegami, so the picture replaces the Chinese meaning in your memory.
• Run /review-flashcards every day. The spaced repetition brings each card back just before you would forget it.
• Ask Mocchi to /explain any sentence where you are not sure whether to use no, na or nothing at all.
• Once a week, play Flashcard Flip on unihongo.com/games with your own flashcard deck, for quick recall under a little time pressure.