Reply #153: Not really

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Chinese uses Chinese ideograms exclusively.

Educated Koreans study Chinese ideograms, but in everyday life, they use their phonetic hangul alphabet.

Japanese uses a mixture of Chinese ideograms and its native syllabaries, the hiragana and katakana.

Before I studied Chinese, written Chinese looked like a random list of words.

Furthermore, some of the characters have different meanings in the different languages.

For example, "soup" in Chinese means "hot water" in Japanese.

"Letter" in Japanese means "toilet paper" in Chinese.

Each language uses characters that are archaic or unknown in the other languages. Furthermore, both Chinese and Japanese have simplified their characters, only mostly not in the same way.

In a pinch, Chinese and Japanese can SORT OF communicate with characters, but their spoken languages are so different in both sound and grammar that nothing beyond basic, basic communication is possible.