Does knowing Japanese help in neighbouring countries?
I know a bit of Japanese, but don't know any other Asian languages.
Does knowing Japanese help in neighbouring countries such as South Korea and Taiwan?
Am I likely to encounter people who are familiar with Japanese but not English? Are relationships between such countries and Japan bad enough that using Japanese will cause hostility? Will using it with harabeoji old enough to have lived through the Japanese occupation trigger memories best forgotten?
Best Answer
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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Answer 2
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.
Answer 3
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 ?????. While Japanese people don't understand ? and ??, they understand ??, 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.
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