Differences between the Chinese and Japanese Language

It might seem to the casual observer that the Japanese language is closely associated with Chinese, however nothing could be further from the truth.

Admittedly, Japanese looks for all the world similar to Chinese in print form and indeed has absorbed a number of Chinese words over the centuaries, in common with many other langauges which ‘borrow’ from each other over time. In the context of Japanese however, these ‘loan’ words are merely a sign of cultural contact. In actual fact it would be hard to find two languages which are more dissimilar.

Chinese was originally monosyllabic, (now largely disyllabic), tonal, isolating with a subject-verb-object order. Japanese on the other hand is polysyllabic, atonal, with quite complex word formation and a subject-object-verb order.

It was precisely this enormous gap between the two languages that caused so many problems when the Japanese tried to adapt the Chinese script to their own ends in the 8th and 9th centuries.