chinese and Japanese are really kinda similar huh...??

[muyongshi]

You know Roddy there is an amazing search function on here.... And I'm pretty sure we are encouraged to use it....

[GaryM]

Well the last comment was in 2007... and it is now 2012... I thought I would just add my few words on the subject.

A previous contributor stated;

"So, don't be ridiculous trying to say Chinese and Japanese are similar, because they're not at all."

I think this is a perfectly legitemate statement to make based on the stated context, i.e. that of linguistics.

However, I can't help but notice that hypothetically at least you could propose of measure of "distance" between languages

that relates to the amount of time it takes you to learn one language, once you know another. This could be determined irrespective of the linguistic similarities between two languages.

With this in mind, I have to say that in my experience the "distance" between Chinese and Japanese, is considerbly less than the "distance" between English and either of these. I base this on my experience in Japan, and the amount of time it took for my Chinese friends to pass the Level 1 National Proficiency Test (the highst level), analogous to the highest HSK level.

Typically it would take my Chinese friends approximately a year to take and pass this exam, from having virtually no Japanese ability. Whereas I have not met a single native english speaking foreigner who has achieved this in anywhere near the same time.

I have not met any native english speakers who have done this in less than 2 years.

Again anecdotally, I have been told that Japanese students studying Chinese in China make considerably faster progress than their native English speaker counter-parts.

I am an intermediate level Japanese speaker, and I am just now starting to learn Chinese. I can without any hesitation state that having some familiarity with the Japanese Kanji has helped me significantly in getting started with Chinese. This extends not just to recognizing and understanding a large number of the common characters, but also the pronunciation of these characters.

It seems to me that those people who have suceeded in mastering both languages cannot stress enough how different, they actually are. My Chinese classmates would say to me, "no... it is completely different", whenever I asked them about the similarities. Perhaps those that learn the two are very conscious of the differences, because this is where they concentrate their efforts. The more they know about the two languages, the more differences they find. That is only natural.

However, if you are talking about the time that it takes you to learn one language once you are fluent in the other, it is certainly my experience and observation that the "distance" between the two may be not much more than 1 year or so, for an average university graduate. Maybe it is comparible with that of an Italian student learning french?

[Iriya]

Typically it would take my Chinese friends approximately a year to take and pass this exam, from having virtually no Japanese ability.

Yes, because it's just a written test that mostly tests your vocabulary. I know a girl who has passed JLPT2, but can barely speak any Japanese. Basically, once a Chinese person learns the Japanese readings of all 常用漢字, they can easily pass JLPT1.

Again anecdotally, I have been told that Japanese students studying Chinese in China make considerably faster progress than their native English speaker counter-parts.

Maybe. However, in my experience it's much harder for them to pick up the pronunciation, since Japanese is one of the most phonetically poor languages in the world. And their horrible practice of trying to learn foreign languages through katakana doesn't really help either. Many Japanese never really get the differences between ch and q, sh and x, etc.

The character knowledge certainly helps, but most Japanese youngsters nowadays have absolutely terrible knowledge of the characters. I test my Japanese classmates (mostly 18 year old kids) from time to time, and they often don't know how to write a word (in Japanese). A girl didn't know how to write 俺 (very common word in Japanese), another kid didn't even know how to write 牛肉! He wrote something that looked more like 午内.. They would often mix up radicals, etc.

I took a look at their notebooks, all the notes are in full hiragana. So they're pretty much like Koreans now, I guess. I wonder how longer will it take before they abandon the characters completely.

However, we have two girls from 熊本 (I guess it can be considered a backwards area by the Japanese standards). They write in very, very beautiful 楷体, which looks better than what most of our teachers write.

It's very sad how traditional Japanese culture is getting destroyed by globalization. The young people don't really care about anything but the latest fashion trends.

My Japanese classmates would tell me that the words like フルーツand ドリンク are now used more often than 果物 and 飲み物, and I would tell them that セット was originally 定食. And I would tell them of 冷房, 寝台 and 麦酒 and other pre-WW2 Japanese words.

Once on a subway train in Tokyo I overheard two elderly ladies talking about one of their sons. He was a photographer. What surprised me is that they didn't use the word カメラ, not even once. They used 写真機 instead...

The generation gap is stunning.

But truth to be told, it's not that different from the Shanghainese kids essentially speaking 普通话 in the Shanghainese pronunciation... Many of them don't know a lot of the native vocabulary, so they just substitute it with Mandarin. Many youngsters don't know 口强, for example, and simply say 'bi ni' (便宜)...

[GaryM]

Hi Iriya, it is interesting to hear your experience of Japanese youngsters.

My experience was mainly the other way around, that is Chinese people learning Japanese, and this was 15 years ago now. Have education standards collapsed so much? Wow.. it is entirely possible, as this has definitely happened in the UK! Maybe my experience is entirely out of date. I don't know how difficult it is for Japanese people to handle Chinese pronunciation. I am only going on what my friends have told me there.

Having said that... I was in a Starbucks in Shenzhen and the Chinese high school students were studying business english and spoke better English than most high school studentd in the UK! Maybe the Chinese education system has been more resilient. This was only a couple of years ago.

It is certainly true that despite achieving level 1 in the Japanese proficiency test many of my Chinese friends did not neccesarily master the pronunciation as well as westerners, but their Japanese was still good enough to start work in a Japanese company after a year or so, and even study further Japanese qualifications in accountancy etc. This would be completely out the of reach of Westerners within this time period.There is a huge gap between the level 1 and the level 2 requirements, so perhaps your friend has not been studying to the same extent. All I can say that is of the 3 out of 4 Chinese people I studied with ( we studied full time for a year ), 3 of them achieved the level 1 in just over a year. The transition from the classroom to the work environment from there seemed to be fairly straight-forward.

However, as you say;.,,... "The generation gap is stunning."... I may well be very out of date!

[Areckx]

I guess I'm not the only one roddy yells at for reviving old topics from finding them in search...

Everything needs to be put in perspective. Youngsters always tend to "rebel" by not studying very hard, even intentionally using simple or sometimes incorrect language. In America, cursive script is no longer taught in schools. This is very similar to how many people want simplified hanzi to be the standard, rather than a healthy mix of traditional and simplified, depending on region and audience...

I guess it's a little different, because English is actually quite readable in print form. I believe that learning cursive is more useful as a tool to help students focus on their writing in order to produce more effective writing.

I don't know... I'm very different from other students; more brilliant than most, but I fall very far behind from the geniuses in the world. I'm somewhere in the middle, and it's kind of frustrating, since I want to be able to function in the world.

I have always been told that if you stick with something long enough, eventually you'll get good at it. Practice makes perfect, and all that jazz.

I dedicate all of my time to learning Japanese and Chinese, and have made huge leaps and bounds, but I am still unable to function in either. I can't find people to speak Japanese with, and my Chinese is still in the very early stages. I, I, I, I...

You see... I have my own bad habits in my English, despite being a native.

Everything is relevant, but not always, I guess it depends on who's reading it...

[GaryM]

Hi Areckx! I hope you don't mind me asking, I noticed in an earlier post from November you were looking to take on Chinese and Japanese at the same time, starting from Japanese being your stronger language (I think).

How are you finding it? I am a bit of dilemma at the moment. I have to ( and want to ) learn Chinese for work, but I have not lived in Japan now for 4 years. I am a little bit concerned that I might "over-write" some of my japanese knowledge. I know that happened to my french, when I try speaking french now, I inadvertently introduce japanese words.

So recently I have been thinking about refreshing my japanese characters at the same time as trying to learn chinese. I have friend who studied chinese and japanese at university, and he said that he found them complementary (for obvious reasons), but others seem to think that this might cause confusion. How is your experience so far?

[Areckx]

I usually keep them intertwined. Try to find a study method that integrates both. As in, if you encounter vocab that is used in Japanese, write some sentences using it.

Just keep it fresh, continue to listen to Japanese music and radio. (I enjoy TBS 954)

[GaryM]

I think you are right. It is not worth the risk of confusing the two. I have started to re-learn my kanji at the same time as studying the hanzi. It is probably good revision for me anyway, given that I have been out of the country for so long. Fortunately my japanese is helping me learn the Hanzi, but the pronunciation is that thing that is slowing me down at the moment. I find myself going over and over the same characters trying to make a similar sound to the chinese audio. I am concentrating on the characters initially until I get over to China, that is probably the most productive way to make use of my self-study time.

Unfortunately it looks like we can't get TBS 954 from the website whilst in the UK. I am less worried about speaking and listening at the moment. It would be quite good to expand my vocabulary through studying the Kanji anyway, that is probably my weakest point.

Good luck with the studies!

[Areckx]

http://www.v2p.jp/video/english/

It's best to learn the pinyin pronunciation. Here's a few videos that you should watch a bunch of times. If you can't watch children's programming, then you better quit now.

(I watched that first one for about an hour on youtuberepeat in June)

[GaryM]

Good point. I originally gave up on YouTube when all I got for a search with "HSK" was HardStyleKillaz and techno dancing... but it seems like there is some useful material after all!

[Sebastien_K]

Well, to put it simply, I would say that contemporary Japanese culture (and language), is an homogeneous blend of Chinese and "Yamato" (which I take here as the state of the Japanese culture right before the intense contacts with China began).

Yamato already had a language(s?), but not unified writing system and rather archaic technology, and the influence of Chinese culture was so gigantic throughout centuries once relationships began that it took a place on par with the original Yamato part in what would become modern Japan.

Since "Yamato" language(s) have no writing records, we barely know anything of it as an "untainted" language prior to Chinese influence - and writing. But for whom understand a fair deal of Chinese and Japanese, some words in Japanese are obviously Chinese in origin, while other don't have anything to do with Chinese and have a very specific "Yamato" sound to them. One doesn't even have to guess them (though it's possible in most of cases without much effort), pronunciations in Japanese are classified into two distinct categories which are even listed distinctly in character dictionnaries for clarity purpose. Every Japanese-speaking person is bound to have a perception of it, even without knowing any Chinese.

I regard it very much as a dual language in which two languages have blended into one but remained perfectly perceptibles.

So knowing Chinese is very useful for learning Japanese

and knowing Japanese is 50％ useful for learning Chinese.

Exemples of Chinese stuff : Zen, Geisha

Examples of "Yamato" stuff : Katana, Origami, Shinobi

DISCLAIMER : The grammar and word order is totally different from Chinese (but not unlike 'Altaic' languages like Korean and Mongolian, I heard).

Hope this puts it simply without too many inaccuracies.

[atitarev]

Perhaps a few grammatical similarities between Chinese and Japanese:

1. Existence of measure words or classifiers. They cause some problems to Western language speakers but do exist in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Burmese, etc.

2. Both Japanese and Chinese (and some others) are topic-prominent languages, although the topic-prominence is obvious in Japanese (and Korean) because of the particles but not so obvious in Chinese. In colloquial Japanese some particles may be dropped, so grammatically some sentence structures look similar.

3. Honorifics are almost dead in Chinese but phrases like 您贵姓 may be one of the remainders.

4. To me, relative clauses in Japanese and Chinese look similar, e.g.:

C.: 我要去看看一些过去在同一所学校学习的朋友。

J.: 昔、同じ学校に通っていた友達に会いに行きたいんです。

The whole (no matter how long) relative clause precedes the word(s) it relates to, the Chinese adds 的, though.

5. Because of the common vocabulary, forming new words is still very similar (if Japanese doesn't use an English word)), like noun clauses, the doers, -ism, ist, super-, anti-, etc.

6. Yes/no answers to negative questions confuses some learners. In many Asian languages answering "yes" to a negative question is confirming the negation.

I don't think katakana and loanwords are going away in Japanese, even if someone doesn't like them. New words come and go and some are really settled. It's possible that Japan will start borrowing some Chinese words but not on the scale they borrow English words.

Characters are one of the biggest hurdles, so with the right motivation, attitude and approach, it's easier for Japanese to learn Chinese and it's easier for Chinese to learn Japanese, although the pronunciation causes problems. Japanese people seem to be disadvantaged when learning foreign phonologies. I know some Japanese who self-study Chinese. They have a strong accent but working hard. I guess, Chinese people will have to get used to more different accents, some are hard to understand. I'm currently teaching a Japanese woman Russian, that's another story...

[dannie]

I might not be 100% correct here but the Koreans and Japanese are thought of to be originated from China. You can find stories and legends that tell you about all these stuff. Thus, the language system is highly similar to that of China's. For example some Japanese words are actually Chinese.

[murrayjames]

Iriya said.above that Japanese is "one of the most phonetically poor languages in the world." What does this mean?

[atitarev]

I might not be 100% correct here but the Koreans and Japanese are thought of to be originated from China.

That's incorrect. There is a lot of common vocabulary (borrowed from Chinese) and a lot of cultural proximity, especially in the past but Japanese and Korean languages are not derived from Chinese.

Iriya said.above that Japanese is "one of the most phonetically poor languages in the world." What does this mean?

It depends on the way you look at it. I like the way Japanese sounds. He must be referring to the absence of consonant clusters, R and L mix up, the way sibilants are pronounced. The number of consonants used in Japanese is lower even compared with neighbouring Asian languages. It doesn't make a language worse, though.

[jbradfor]

There is a lot of common vocabulary (borrowed from Chinese) and a lot of cultural proximity, especially in the past but Japanese and Korean languages are not derived from Chinese.

The older written language was. The spoken language is totally different.

[xiaocai]

I think it is more appropriate to say that the writing system was. But the language which the system was used to record was not.

[creamyhorror]

The older written language was. The spoken language is totally different.

That's because Japan (and probably Korea) initially adopted Classical Chinese as their (official) written language. What they wrote wasn't Japanese/Korean at all. It was a short time later that Japanese modified their writing system to change it to Japanese (grammatically), although they retained the use of Chinese hanzi as semantic and phonetic symbols. And then a set of the hanzi used as phonetic symbols evolved into hiragana and katakana.

[atitarev]

The older written language was. The spoken language is totally different.

Jbradfor, please don't make these claims. Due to literally traditions Japanese and Chinese have a large common vocabulary but they are unrelated languages, they don't have a common root, even less than English and French. English and French, at least belong to the same Indo-European group and many mutual borrowings also but Chinese and Japanese belong to different groups.