People learning Japanese and Chinese are often curious about the relationship between them. After all, they are spoken by hundreds of millions of people daily and play an important role in communication and cultural exchange. Chinese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and Japanese and Chinese are both very popular second languages!
So you might be wondering, what are some of the similarities and differences between Japanese and Chinese? When it comes to language, Japanese and Chinese both have complex writing systems with thousands of characters and they share a lot of vocabulary.
However, you might be surprised that the two languages have less in common than you think. Not only are they not in the same language family but Japanese has a very different grammar structure from Chinese and the pronunciation of the two languages couldn’t be more different.
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the similarities and differences between Japanese and Chinese, their history and unique features, and which one might be easier to learn for beginners!
The history of Japanese and Chinese
Japanese and Chinese are two of the world’s most ancient languages. Chinese is generally considered to be the older of the two languages, with Japanese first emerging around the 5th century CE.
Japan and other East Asian countries, including Vietnam and Korea, borrowed Chinese characters and adopted them into their language to be able to write.
As time went on, Japanese and Chinese developed independently from one another with their own distinct features. As an island separated from mainland Asia, the Japanese language naturally developed a unique writing system and grammar, as did the other countries borrowing from Chinese.
Today, Japanese and Chinese share fewer similarities, making it difficult for speakers of one language to understand the other.
However, their writing systems still share characters in common, so reading and writing each other’s languages tend to be easier for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
Japanese vs Chinese from a linguistic perspective
Considering Chinese and Japanese are not in the same language family, they are linguistically quite different!
Japanese is thought to be descended from a common ancestor with Korean, but it is still labelled a linguistic ‘isolate’ meaning that people who study languages have not yet been able to classify Japanese into a known language family.
Chinese, on the other hand, is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family which includes other languages like Tibetan and Burmese.
Similarities between Japanese and Chinese
Japanese and Chinese share some similarities, mainly when it comes to writing.
Kanji/hanzi
Both Japanese and Chinese use ideographic writing systems (but Japanese also uses two other writing systems) which means that each character represents an idea or concept rather than a sound. These characters originated in China and were later adopted by the Japanese.
In Japanese, the characters are known as kanji while in Chinese they are called hanzi. Because Japanese kanji are derived from Chinese hanzi characters, many characters represent the same or similar concepts across both languages.
That’s why Japanese and Chinese speakers can sometimes understand or guess the general meaning when reading each other’s written language, even if they can’t speak the other language or correctly sound out the words.
Honorifics
Both languages also have a history of using honorifics to show respect. Honorifics are words used to address people politely, for example adding -san to the end of someone’s name in Japanese.
Honorifics originated in China due to class consciousness and Confucian ideals of order and respect. They were brought to Japan and influenced the development of the Japanese polite language (keigo).
Japanese speakers tend to use language that shows self-deprecating humility when talking about themselves. But when they talk about others, they use language that shows approval and respect.
