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Originally Posted by jurianbai
Just curious, is it said to be around 2000 kanjis in Japanese language. then in mandarin it is also said that if you get about 2000 mandarin words then you can understand a mandarin newspaper or magazine or comic . so question arise, can Japanese understand what inside mandarin newspaper / comic ? is it the same THINGS ?
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This is a really good question... And the answer is, well, no.
Chinese is written entirely in kanji. This means that all the grammatical points are also in kanji. Japanese, however, uses kanji only for meaning with the grammatical bits in hiragana.
Reading a Chinese newspaper, a Japanese speaker can usually get a very basic grasp of what the article is about... And in some cases, glean a bit of information from it. But I certainly wouldn`t call that "reading". It would be more along the lines of a native English speaker being able to pick out bits and pieces in, say, German.
While you may be able to figure out that the sentence is talking about Subject A, you`d have no clue WHAT it is actually saying about Subject A.
That is assuming that the kanji being used carry the same meaning in Chinese as in Japanese, which is often not the case at all.