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Quiz time: Are the following words Chinese or Japanese?

First.

Yes it's Japanese.

Next.

It's Chinese.

Next.

Actually, this is both Chinese and Japanese.

And finally.

Actually this is neither, this is Thai.

What, you thought all Asian languages are the same? Racist.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the LangFocus channel, my name is Paul.

Today's topic is: the question how similar are Chinese and Japanese.

A lot of people look at a map of Asia and see how close Japan and China are or they might look

at a sample of Chinese and Japanese writing and think that something looks

similar and they might conclude that the two languages are similar, but are they

really similar? Well, the short answer is no they are completely different

languages but Japanese has been highly influenced by Chinese in its vocabulary

and its writing system

Chinese and Japanese do not share any common origin and they don't belong to

the same language family

Chinese languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family and

Japanese as far as we know belongs to the Japonic language family.

Phonology: First off, the phonology of the languages is very different

With the most basic difference being that Chinese is a tonal language while Japanese is not.

A tonal language is one in which there are tones or pitches that help determine the meaning

of the words you use; if you used the wrong tone then the meaning of the word changes.

Here's an example: the word for teacher, "lao3shi1"

and the word for naive, "lao3shi2"

and the word for old-fashioned, "lao3shi4".

So I'm sure that Chinese teachers get called naive and old-fashioned all the time by mistake

or maybe not by mistake.

In Japanese there are basically no tones like this that determine the meaning of words.

In Japanese there is something called pitch accent which means that the syllables of a word have

either a higher pitch or a lower pitch but they're not like the tones in

Chinese because they typically don't determine the meaning of the word

they're more like stress in English.

Structure: the structure and grammar of the two languages is completely different

at the most basic level Chinese is an SVO language while Japanese is an SOV language

Here's an example in Chinese: "ta1shuo1zhong1wen2" This means he speaks Chinese and you can see

SVO: subject verb object.

And here's that sentence translated into Japanese:

"kare wa chūgokugo wo hanashimasu".

Here we can see SOV: subject object verb.

And you can see there are some extra little words in Japanese that don't exist in the Chinese sentence

for example Japanese has the topic marker "wa" which doesn't exist in Chinese

and Japanese also has the object marker "wo" which doesn't exist in Chinese.

Chinese is an analytic language which basically means that you create a

sentence by placing independent elements side-by-side. Analytic languages like

Chinese do not use inflection: inflection means modifying words to indicate some

kind of grammatical meaning like plural, gender, tense or case

You don't change any part of a word in order to change its meaning

Instead you can add to the meaning of that word by adding an extra word next to it

Japanese on the other hand is an agglutinative language that uses inflection.

Agglutinative languages use a lot of affixes:

Rather than just placing independent words side-by-side you attach additional pieces to words to

add or modify meaning: this kind of inflection in Japanese means that

Japanese words are often longer than Chinese words and that it may take a few

words in Chinese to translate one Japanese word.

In these Chinese sentences we can see that there's no inflection

"wo3qu4xue2xiao4"

this sentence means I go to school

"wo3qu4xue2xiao4"

this sentence means I went to school

so no part of the verb is changed indicate the past tense

We can show the past tense by just adding a time expression.

Now these similar sentences in Japanese show inflection

This sentence means I go to school "watashi wa gakkou e iku"

I went to school "watashi wa gakkou e itta"

And the polite form of "I go to school": "watashi wa gakkou e ikimasu"

I want to go to school: "watashi wa gakkou e ikitai".

In this Japanese example we use inflection changing the word "iku" to the "iki" form

and then we use agglutination to attach a form that shows intention: "tai".

In Chinese though there's no inflection or agglutination: you just add an extra word like this.

That's just a brief sample of how different the grammar is in Japanese and Chinese

basically they're completely different languages when it comes to their grammatical structure

The one area which there is some similarity between Chinese and Japanese is in vocabulary

and in the use of Chinese characters. During a period of great Chinese

influence between the 5th and 9th centuries CE there was a huge amount

of borrowing from early Middle Chinese into Japanese.

Japanese originally had no written form so Chinese began to be used as the literary language

and as the language of science and of religion.

Chinese vocabulary began to be borrowed into

Japanese and the Chinese writing system was gradually adapted to fit the

Japanese language so not only were vocabulary borrowed

But the Chinese characters that represent them were also adopted.

60% of the words used in Japanese are of Chinese origin but that includes all of the

words in the dictionary and that includes a lot of very specialized, academic

and formal vocabulary that's mainly used in writing.

In spoken Japanese the number of Chinese loan words used as much lower,

At about 18%. The borrowed words

were almost all Chinese nouns; even though in Japanese they might be used as verbs or as adjectives

that's just one way in which the vocabulary is used differently

but also the pronunciation of those Chinese words that were borrowed into

Japanese changed to match the Japanese phonological system and that included

the loss of the tones of those words. And also these words were borrowed a long time ago,

which means that the words have also changed in pronunciation in Chinese

so the pronunciation has diverged quite a bit,

meaning that modern Japanese pronunciation and

modern Chinese pronunciation of similar characters or words is quite different.

And it's also important to point out that Mandarin was not the standard form of Chinese back in those days

when those vocabulary words were borrowed into Japanese, so

Even at the time they were borrowed the pronunciation was different from standard Chinese today

And from what I understand the modern Japanese pronunciation of those loanwords

Is often more similar to modern Cantonese than it is to Mandarin

These examples show how the same words are pronounced very differently in Japanese and Mandarin

The word for family: In Japanese it's "katei"

and actually in Japanese the meaning is more like household or home

And in Mandarin: "jia1ting2".

Next, the word for death: In Japanese: "shibou"

And in Mandarin: "si3wang2"

Next, the word for season: In Japanese, "kisetsu"

And in Mandarin: "ji4jie2"

And the word for home country: "In Japanese: bokoku"

And in Mandarin: "mu3guo2"

So you can see that these words look the same and they have basically

the same meaning but they sound very different

So Chinese vocabulary represented by Chinese characters were borrowed into Japanese

but those Chinese characters were also then applied to native Japanese vocabulary

that had a related meaning to those Chinese loan words

That means that a Chinese speaker can often look at a native Japanese word and

understand its core meaning without knowing that Japanese word because

the Chinese character is used to represent it

So Chinese people can often read a text in Japanese and they can make sense

of the basic meaning of it based on the Chinese characters but they won't understand all the details

And the same is true in reverse: Japanese people can look at a Chinese text

and kind of make sense of the meaning of it

based on the Chinese characters that they know.

But it is easy to misunderstand the details of what's written

especially if they have zero knowledge of the other language

Here are some Japanese example sentences that have the same Chinese characters

but the meaning is very different because of the inflection that's used

"Neko wa sakana wo taberu". That means, The cat eats fish.

"Neko wa sakana wo tabenai". That means, The cat doesn't eat fish.

"Neko wa sakana wo tabeta". That means, The cat ate fish, in the past tense.

"Neko wa sakana wo taberutsumori" the cat plans to eat fish

"Neko wa sakana ni teberareta", that means The cat was eaten by a fish

So a Chinese character reading these sentences would

get the core meaning of the Chinese characters

But they would miss something in the inflection

For example the negative, or the past tense, or intention or the passive form

especially the last example could be highly misunderstood

So imagine you're an English speaker reading something with English loanwords

it might look something like this

Cat bla fish blah food blah blah

Of course even after just a little bit of studying Japanese a Chinese speaker could probably

learn enough to understand basic Japanese sentences like that

For me, as someone who studied Japanese to a relatively advanced level the same is true in reverse:

when I was in Taiwan last year on the subway for example I could read a lot of the advertisements

and I would get most of the meaning; I wouldn't understand all of the Chinese characters

but I would get usually 3 out of 4 of them and the fourth one would be new to me

because in Chinese there are a lot of characters that actually aren't used in Japanese at all

But just getting 3 out of 4 of them was often enough to understand the basic meaning

of that advertising but of course I had no idea how to pronounce those Chinese

characters and if I tried to read them out loud like the Japanese I would hear

laughter from both my girlfriend and from local bystanders.

It might seem strange that I can look at a Chinese character in Chinese and understand what

it means without knowing how to say it but think of it as a symbol like a number

the number seven right here is pronounced differently in different languages

but when you see it you know what it means no matter how you pronounce it

Chinese characters are kind of like that except that they represent a much wider range of meanings

The Chinese characters used in any particular sentence can be

very different from those used in the other language for a sentence of similar meaning

and in Japanese there are a lot of compound words that were created from

Chinese characters but those compound words don't actually exist in Chinese

these are called "wasei kango" which means something like Chinese vocabulary created in Japan

Here are some examples of "wasei kango": some were created to represent things

unique to Japan like "ninja" "geisha"

and others were created during the Meiji period to represent Western concepts

like democracy, "minshu".

So even though you might recognize a lot of characters when you look at

some text in the other language they might be used in a very different way

so the meeting will be unclear

A Chinese speaker might be confused by "wasei kango" when they try to read some Japanese

and Japanese people might be confused when they read Chinese because

there are a lot of Chinese characters that were never borrowed into Japanese in the first place

or they're not used in modern Japanese

But in either case, even basic knowledge of the other language

would help in reading comprehension quite a bit

Japanese "returned loan words" in Chinese so as we've discussed already

lots of Chinese vocabulary was borrowed into Japanese

but some Japanese vocabulary has also been borrowed into Chinese.

A moment ago I mentioned "wasei kango" Japanese vocabulary created from Chinese roots

vocabulary that didn't exist in Chinese but some of those "wasei kango"

have actually been borrowed from Japanese into Chinese

Some sources say that such vocabulary accounts for around 30% of modern Chinese vocabulary.

Of course the way those returned loan words are pronounced

is based on the modern Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese characters

Here are some examples:

The word for history in Japanese, "rekishi" and Mandarin, "li4shi3"

The word for industry, in Japanese, "kōgyō" In Mandarin, "gong1ye4"

The word for electron or electronic in Japanese "denshi" In Mandarin "dian4zi3"

The word for injection, in Japanese "chūsha" In Mandarin "zhu4she4"

The word for philosophy in Japanese "tetsugaku" In Mandarin "zhe2xue2"

The word for system in Japanese "keitō" And in Mandarin "xi4tong2"

And most Chinese people these days are probably not even aware

that those words were borrowed from Japanese

It's also important to point out that in mainland China,

Simplified Chinese characters are now used as opposed to the traditional Chinese characters

used in Taiwan and in Hong Kong

That means that someone from mainland China may have some more trouble recognizing Japanese kanji