2007-10-27 05:36:34 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
Absolutely. Chinese is structured along lines of English and Japanese has the verb at the end of a sentence. The sound of the languages are completely different . In written traditional Japanese - Chinese can communicate - after all Chinese was once their common language.
You have to hear the two spoken by natives - You will hear the differences clearly.
2007-10-27 05:41:15 · answer #1 · answered by organbuilder272 5 · 1⤊ 2⤋
Yes, of course. They are two completely different languages. They evolved very differently and are even based on completely different concepts.
In Chinese, all words are one syllable long and intonation is critically important in distinguishing similar sounding words (to western ears) from each other. Verb tenses are minimal.
Intonation isn't any more important in Japanese than it is in English. And in Japanese they have endless suffixes to make new, very long, multi-syllabic words. They also have endless verb tenses. They have all of the tenses used in European languages, times two, because they have positive and negative tenses. It's a bit like Latin in those respects, and nothing like Chinese.
2007-10-27 12:43:45 · answer #2 · answered by Lisa A 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
They are SO different - ignore the Spanish-English similarity. They are from 2 distinct language families: Sino-Tibetan and Japanese-Korean. It's only because of occupation that both use some of the same characters to write; but morpholigically and syntactically they are completely different. It's like comparing English with Japanese - I assure you.
2007-10-27 13:03:07 · answer #3 · answered by JJ 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Spoken Chinese are tonal,
say you want to say the word 'ma', based on the tones it is spoken in, it has totally different meaning.
While Japanese is not tonal based at all.
Most of the time, for chinese, one word is one character and has a standalone meaning. For Japanese, they still use their 'Japanese alphabet' to string a word (which most can be replaced with Kanji characters)
2007-10-27 19:35:47 · answer #4 · answered by sub 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
They're two completely different languages. It would be like asking if Spanish and English are different.
2007-10-27 12:39:02 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 4⤊ 0⤋
Yes they are entirely different in every way.
2007-10-27 12:39:28 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 3⤊ 0⤋
They are more different then spanish and english. Try compairing english and swahili.
2007-10-27 12:41:35 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋