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No - Japanese and Chinese are completely different languages - Chinese is a mono-syllabic tone language, and Japanese is a language where most words are multi-syllabic.

China had developed a script thousands of years ago, before scholars and monks brought the Chinese script to Japan (around the year 400? - I am not sure). Then a peculiar way of writing in Chinese and pronouncing it in Japanese ("kan-bun") was developed in Japan, before abbreviated Chinese letters {"characters") were created with phonetic values corespoding to the Japanese system of syllables; These "letters" are the present day hiragana and katakana syllabaric letters, which are mixed in the same sentence - even the same word - witth Chinese characters.

So both languages are completely different, but Japanese has a mixed writing system using also Chinese letters - and in the course of history, many Chinese words were introduced into the Japanese language - written with Chinese letters and pronounced in Japanee phonetics.

Sorry - it is a long explanation - but the facts are quite complex.

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