Can Japanese Read Old Japanese? (Interview)

The tale of Genji is pretty interesting so I’d recommend it if you are interested in Japanese literature. If you read it, you will understand that Japan isn’t really a socially conservative country traditionally. But as you can see, if you speak today’s Japanese, you will be able to read a lot of classics. So if you want to learn Japanese with me, I can send you some Japanese lessons where I teach you the kind of Japanese that Japanese people actually speak. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3ioR1WR

Being Chinese, I was actually able to read the first one, but no idea on the second and third....

I'll never get tired of how you plug your Japanese lessons

"i can't read kanji" also them: reads the whole text 😁

It's like English speakers struggling to read 1300s English.

The interaction at 3:30 was gold

8:00 is me reading normal Japanese

I would love to see Japanese people react to Emperor Showa's last speech,where he declared that the war is over. I have heard his Japanese was different from normal Japanese, and I'm curious if people today can understand it.

Oh my goodness. As a native English speaker, the lack of obvious subject identifiers in Japanese drives me crazy. You really need to check the particles and ask yourself constantly who is acting upon whom and for what purpose. We had to read Genji monogatari for class and I was going to flip a table.

Despite Shakespeare being from only around 400 years ago, it's hard to read sometimes to the point of not being able to understand at all. Maybe this was because it was written in an artistic manner, and the casual vernacular was easier to understand. But it's interesting how Japanese can be understood that far back even in the 10th century.

Why are they all talking in sync so well though lmao

I remember my Japanese teacher mentioned that older Japanese pronunciation was different than how modern speech sounds, especially because the sounds yi, ye, wi, wu, and we, are no longer used

Can you make video about ryukyuan or okinawan language? I heard that the ryukyuan languages has retained a lot of archaic features from old japanese

I cried a river watching "The tale of princess Kaguya"

I’m Chinese and an intermediate learner of Japanese. Hōjōki seems to be the easiest to understand since it contains certain numbers of Chinese words (kango). But when it comes to the last one, I can barely make a guess because of it was written mostly in old Japanese word (wago).

when the girl said 読めへん i was like wait what since up till now i'd only heard non-tokyo dialects in fiction so it was weird hearing it from a real person

イタリア人の日本語学習者として、上代・中古日本語に触れ合う機会は滅多にないので、非常に興味深い動画でした!　僕もなるべく理解することに挑戦してみたんですが、半分ぐらいしかわかりませんでした（笑）! とにかく、投稿コメントを読みながら「やっぱり英語圏の視聴者さんと意見が全然合わないな〜」と思いました!　なぜかというと、イタリア語も日本語と同様に、何世紀も経っているにもかかわらずそんなに進化していない感じがするからです…もちろん現代人にとっては深く勉強しなければ全て理解するのは確かに無理かもしれませんが、普通にある程度推測することはできるのではないかなと思います! Thank you Yuta-san for this extremely interesting video! As an Italian native speaker, I actually think Japanese and Italian both evolved pretty slowly in comparison to other "major" languages such as English or French, just to name a few... That's probably because both Japanese and Italian have relatively limited phonetic repertoires, plus Japanese imported many "academic" words from Classical Chinese, re-adapting them in order to make them fit their own language, and since those are basically logograms they carry a meaning within themselves, so that might explain to some extent why today's Japanese are still able to understand their "ancient language"...

Yuta: If you want to learn Japanese… then come with me because we're going BACK IN TIME BOIIIIII YEAH

I think at 7:02 he said "soshi" abbreviate of "makura no soshi"

That was actually really fun and interesting because it's like history and old stories in literature and I like talking and hearing about those kinds of things. Good video Yuta! I might have to go read those stories now.... hahaha