For the most part yeah. I think that’s unironically how I “cheated” my old JLPT exams and got way higher grades than I should. And really high-level Japanese (such as political news, debates, legal matter) are mostly Kanji, and by that point you’d fully understand all the non-Kanji parts anyways so
But in real life you still have to actually say the words out loud…
k0e3@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
The Japanese changed a lot of hanzi to make it easier. The Chinese reaaaally simplified their hanzi to a point that I, as a native Japanese speaker, find it hard to decipher. With traditional Chinese, even with the more complex strokes, I can sorta make sense of signs and even some snippets from a newspaper article.
Also note that even though each character might have the same-ish meaning across languages, we might use different combinations to describe a word.