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Is Chinese and Japanese language the same?
Not at all. The only similarity is that Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters, called Kanji. Those are the complicated looking ones. Hiragana and Katakana are derived from …Kanji, but are just sound representation. Spoken, Japanese is much more flat sounding and all the characters are pronounced differently. Chinese uses different tones, which are shown when writen in romanized text. That shows the way the word sounds, and you move your voice all around your vocal scale. Japanese Roomaji is again the romanized version, but does not have any sound changes. Absolutely not. Even the words for China and Japan are different in the two languages. In Chinese, the word for Japan is Riben, while the Japanese word for Japan is Nihon. The Chinese have only one "alphabet" which contains different symbols for different words. In Japan, they have many alphabets. One alphabet in Japan uses the same Chinese characters that China uses. But Japan also has the Roman alphabet (abcdefg.... z) and another alphabet used for words borrowed from other languages, such as the borrowed English words ice, computer, and wife. Also, the Chinese language is based on tones. There are five different tones which includes one rising tone, one falling tone, one steady tone, one tone which dips, and one neutral tone. In the Chinese language, one word, such as "ma" can mean completely different things depending on which tone is used. One tonal form of "ma" means mother, another means "horse", another means "scold", and another is the word used at the end of a question. So, you could ask "did your mother scold the horse" by saying ma ma ma ma. This use of tones makes Mandarin Chinese one of the hardest languages for an English speaking person to learn. (MORE)
