Pseudo-Chinese (Japanese: 偽中国語, Hepburn: nise chūgokugo, pinyin: wěi zhōng guó yǔ) is a form of Japanese Internet slang which first appeared around 2009. It involves taking sentences which are grammatically Japanese and stripping away the hiragana and katakana, leaving only the kanji behind, which causes the resultant sentence to appear Chinese. The phenomenon has spread to China, where Chinese speakers can often guess the meaning of the sentences despite not knowing Japanese. Taiwan's Central News Agency has hailed pseudo-Chinese as a new platform for Sino-Japanese communication.