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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
than someone from Taiwan for example
So in short, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages
especially the spoken languages even though there was a lot of vocabulary
borrowed from Chinese into Japanese
And a little bit from Japanese into Chinese
Only in writing are those two languages somewhat intelligible
because of the Chinese characters that are used
So the question of the day for Japanese speakers:
"What's your experience when you look at a Chinese text?"
"Are you able to understand the basic meaning based on the Chinese characters?"
And similarly for Chinese speakers: "What happens when you look at a Japanese text?"
"Can you understand the basic meaning or did you get confused because of the different way that the Chinese characters are used?"
Thanks again to all my Pateron supporters and I want to say thanks to all the
New subscribers who joined this month; there are a lot of you
And you are very welcome and very appreciated
Thank you for watching, have a nice day