Are all Asian languages similar in some aspects?

Question

I feel silly asking this, but I'm not versed in languages or even in cultures. I've always been curious as to whether or not most Asians -- Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. -- can understand each other on some levels. Being that I'm Canadian living in Northern Ontario, I am fluent in both French and English. I noticed many, many similarities in all Latin-based languages -- French, Spanish, Italian, and even English. Is this so with Asian languages? And also, being that Russia is a part of Asia, is the Russian language at all similar to the other "Asian" languages? And slightly unrelated -- are their cultures at all similar? I apologize for being so obviously naive, but I've always been interested in knowing. THANK YOU!!! =)

Answer 1

Overall, the answer to your question is closer to 'no' than to 'yes.'

Nevertheless, Chinese and Vietnamese are typologically similar to each other even though they belong to different language families (Vietnmaese is distantly related to the languages of the Philippines). They are both what are known as "analytical" or "isolating" type languages. They are both tonal languages too, where the meaning of a word depends on its tone and sometimes even its context as well as its form.

For example, depending upon tone or context, a word like 'ma' in Mandarin Chinese can mean either "mother" (first tone) "horse" (second tone) "to scold (third tone) ,"ant" or "agate" (fourth tone).

Modern English has many analytical (or isolating ) characteristics too.

Mongolian, Korean and Japanese are also typologically similar to each other . All three are basically agglutinating type languages much like Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish. However, they are not tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese.

The Chinese language was the same thing to Eastern Asia that Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin combined were to the Western World. So there are a tremendous number of Chinese loan words in nearly all the Asian languages.
In Japanese, even some common words like Hai (Yes), Sayonara! (Goodbye!) and Bonzai! ( May youl live 10,000 years!) are of Chinese origin.

Because Thailand is close to India, the Thai language has been influenced by Indian languages like Sanskrit and Prakit just as much as by Chinese.

Many languages spoken in Siberia are "polysynthetic" in nature much like Eskimo and the American Indian languages. They are thus very different from both Chinese and Japanese. Some linguists claim that French, although a European language, has some polysynthetic-like features too.

The languages of the Philippines have some typological similarities to the Celtic languages of Western Europe - Gaelic, Welsh, Breton etc, - but it is just a coincidence, a case of parallel development - and not a relationship.

Answer 2

No. Not all Asian languages have something in common. Chinese and Japanese share some characters--but other than that, the languages that use characters are unique. I believe Vietnamese is the only Asian language with Roman letters, as influenced by the French. some of their words are similar to French. Also--just because they're Asian doesn't mean they understand each other , although some of their cultural beliefs are similar.
For instance, not all Chinese understand each other, as there are different dialects. example--mandarin and cantonese. (you'll see difference in their food as well) and of course there are the local slangs and such that differ from region to region.
for vietnamese, there are northern, central and southern accents. they all speak pretty much the same language,but the accents and some of the words are different but they mostly understand each other. there are also some mountainous regions that speak their own language.
japanese has 3 different "alphabets" if you will. one for their words ( syllables that make up a word), one for foreign words, and kanji--which are characters that have a meaning on their own.
people who are familiar with asian languages, cultures, etc...can tell immediately what characters represent what country despite not being able to read the characters.
russian uses a different alphabet with some similar letters as the abc's that we know...but some different. nothing like any asian languages at all.
i could go on and on...but i won't.

Answer 3

All Asian Languages

Answer 4

Actually, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese come from three different language families. English, Spanish, and Russian come from the same family. I think that linguists believe that Japanese and Chinese (Mandarin) have fewer similarities that English and Russian. Take a linguistics class in college. This is pretty interesting stuff.

Answer 5

Japanese took some of the characters from the Chinese, but it is not always pronounced the same. So if a Japanese person went to China, he could write the character and the Chinese person would understand even if they read the character differently. Japanese and Korean are very similar as far as grammatical structure, but have completely different writing systems. Hope that provides some insight! :)

Answer 6

in writting sometimes are.............

languages of "Chinese characters cultural region"
so Chines Korea Vietnam Japan

hav many ords deivered from Chinese

but pronountiation is different but simiar for example

hook means "to learn" in Cantonese
and
hoc means he same in Vietnamese
Koreans and japanese have this too
but....
their languages are very different so they ca't use this as verb to learn" but they will use in word compounds

like
Korean:


mullihak
cheonmunhak
japanese:

butsurigaku
tenmungaku

so sometimes similar but i think pronoutiatio nchanged...
and especially...
Modern Chiense is different than this Chiesne which influenced those countires...
and in mandarin hook = xue

Answer 7

um, kind of but rarely can you see such similarities. probably the most similar are from thai, philippines, and maybe malaysia. the languages though from these countries are way different than that of the chinese