Japanese tv shows/series and Kanji/mandarin question?!

[Al-Kindi]

Goedendag!/Konnichiwa!
Hoe gaat het met u?/O-genki desu ka? (dutch-japanese)
So Iｴm finally really starting to learn Japanese(will start with Hiragana), I know that one can only speak a foreign language fluently once you have actually lived there(which I willbe doing for my education) but people told me watching tv shows/movies (and many other things afcourse) can be quite helpfull....
so could you please recommend some tv-shows(no lame chickflick type of soaps) I should get?
forgive my ignorance but can people who know Kanji actually read Mandarin/chinese texts? I know that it is an entirely different world speaking wise but can Japanese(speaking) people read books like the analects of confucius in ｴchineseｴ and can chinese read Kanji? in what way/role does the Han alphabet play?
thanks in advance

[chickie]

I don't know any Japanese TV programmes that I can recommend because I'm not so keen on TV programmes...:(

My native tongue is Japanese, but I myself cannot read Mandarin or Chinese. I sometimes guess at what the sentences written in Mandarin/Chinese mean, though! :p

[Jericho Desu]

My native tongue is Japanese, but I myself cannot read Mandarin or Chinese. I sometimes guess at what the sentences written in Mandarin/Chinese mean, though! :p

I read somewhere that even though Chinese and Japanese are so different grammatically, that with using kanji characters they can get the jist of what they're trying to communicate, then again I suck at kanji so no one take that seriously :p

[chickie]

I read somewhere that even though Chinese and Japanese are so different grammatically, that with using kanji characters they can get the jist of what they're trying to communicate, then again I suck at kanji so no one take that seriously :p
I believe it's true to some people. It's just me being dim-witted!

[Charles Barkley]

I think for traveling in the other's country and reading signs like "restaurant" "tea" etc, the correspondance is pretty high. Nouns and basic verbs in general are pretty close. Once the sentence gets more complicated however....

Chinese grammar is almost all done by word order, whereas Japanese grammar, which uses alphabets Chinese would be totally unable to read, would be utterly indesipherable for chinese.

Also, the new modified chinese is different from traditional chinese--which is what is still used in Japan and Taiwan. The word for the language Chinese is 中国語 in Japanese, but 汉语 in Chinese. The last character is the same in each, but as you can see they are written differently. In this example, a Chinese person would surely understand the Japanese, but I am not sure a Japanese would understand the Chinese.

I am just starting to take Chinese and my Japanese is helping a lot with the characters, but aside from that and the occasional characters that are pronounced similarly, not too much in common.

[Al-Kindi]

I think for traveling in the other's country and reading signs like "restaurant" "tea" etc, the correspondance is pretty high. Nouns and basic verbs in general are pretty close. Once the sentence gets more complicated however....

Chinese grammar is almost all done by word order, whereas Japanese grammar, which uses alphabets Chinese would be totally unable to read, would be utterly indesipherable for chinese.

Also, the new modified chinese is different from traditional chinese--which is what is still used in Japan and Taiwan. The word for the language Chinese is 中国語 in Japanese, but 汉语 in Chinese. The last character is the same in each, but as you can see they are written differently. In this example, a Chinese person would surely understand the Japanese, but I am not sure a Japanese would understand the Chinese.

I am just starting to take Chinese and my Japanese is helping a lot with the characters, but aside from that and the occasional characters that are pronounced similarly, not too much in common.

props for the info and good luck with learning Chinese!