Name: How Similar Are Chinese and Japanese?
Uploaded: 2018-08-22T07:26:45.000Z
Duration: 12 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

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Quiz time: Are the following words
Chinese or Japanese?

Actually, this is both Chinese and Japanese.

What, you thought all Asian languages are the same? Racist.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the LangFocus channel, 
my name is Paul.

Today's topic is: the question how similar are Chinese and Japanese.

A lot of people look at a map of Asia and see how close Japan and China are or they might look

at a sample of Chinese and Japanese
writing and think that something looks

similar and they might conclude that the
two languages are similar, but are they

really similar? Well, the short answer is
no they are completely different

languages but Japanese has been highly
influenced by Chinese in its vocabulary

Chinese and Japanese do not share any
common origin and they don't belong to

Chinese languages belong to the
Sino-Tibetan language family and

Japanese as far as we know belongs
 to the Japonic language family.

Phonology: First off, the phonology of 
the languages is very different

With the most basic difference being that Chinese is a tonal language while Japanese is not.

A tonal language is one in which there are tones or pitches that help determine the meaning

of the words you use; if you used the
wrong tone then the meaning of the word changes.

Here's an example: the word for teacher, "lao3shi1"

and the word for old-fashioned, "lao3shi4".

So I'm sure that Chinese teachers get
called naive and old-fashioned all the time by mistake

In Japanese there are basically no tones like this that determine the meaning of words.

In Japanese there is something called pitch accent which means that the syllables of a word have

either a higher pitch or a lower pitch
but they're not like the tones in

Chinese because they typically don't
determine the meaning of the word

Structure: the structure and grammar of the two languages is completely different

at the most basic level Chinese is an
SVO language while Japanese is an SOV language

Here's an example in Chinese: "ta1shuo1zhong1wen2" This means he speaks Chinese and you can see

And here's that sentence translated into Japanese:

Here we can see SOV: subject object verb.

And you can see there are some extra little words in Japanese that don't exist in the Chinese sentence

for example Japanese has the
topic marker "wa" which doesn't exist in Chinese

and Japanese also has the
object marker "wo" which doesn't exist in Chinese.

Chinese is an analytic language
which basically means that you create a

sentence by placing independent elements
side-by-side. Analytic languages like

Chinese do not use inflection: inflection
means modifying words to indicate some

kind of grammatical meaning like plural,
gender, tense or case

You don't change any part of a 
word in order to change its meaning

Instead you can add to the meaning of that word by adding an extra word next to it

Japanese on the other hand is an agglutinative language that uses inflection.

Agglutinative languages use a lot of affixes:

Rather than just placing independent words side-by-side
you attach additional pieces to words to

add or modify meaning: this kind of
inflection in Japanese means that

Japanese words are often longer than
Chinese words and that it may take a few

words in Chinese to translate one Japanese word.

In these Chinese sentences we 
can see that there's no inflection

so no part of the verb is changed indicate the past tense

We can show the past tense by
just adding a time expression.

Now these similar sentences in
Japanese show inflection

This sentence means I go to school 
"watashi wa gakkou e iku"

I went to school 
"watashi wa gakkou e itta"

And the polite form of "I go to school":
"watashi wa gakkou e ikimasu"

I want to go to school:
"watashi wa gakkou e ikitai".

In this Japanese example we use inflection
changing the word "iku" to the "iki" form

and then we use agglutination to attach
a form that shows intention: "tai".

In Chinese though there's no inflection or
agglutination: you just add an extra word like this.

That's just a brief sample of how different 
the grammar is in Japanese and Chinese

basically they're completely different languages when it comes to their grammatical structure

The one area which there is some similarity between
Chinese and Japanese is in vocabulary

and in the use of Chinese characters.
During a period of great Chinese

influence between the 5th and 9th centuries CE
 there was a huge amount

of borrowing from early Middle Chinese
into Japanese.

Japanese originally had no written form
so Chinese began to be used as the literary language

and as the language of science and of religion.

Chinese vocabulary began to be borrowed into

Japanese and the Chinese writing system
was gradually adapted to fit the

Japanese language so not only
were vocabulary borrowed

But the Chinese characters that represent them were also adopted.

60% of the words used in Japanese are of Chinese origin but that includes all of the

words in the dictionary and that
includes a lot of very specialized, academic

and formal vocabulary that's mainly used in writing.

In spoken Japanese the number of Chinese loan words used as much lower,

were almost all Chinese nouns; even though in Japanese they might be used as verbs or as adjectives

that's just one way in which the
vocabulary is used differently

but also the pronunciation of those
Chinese words that were borrowed into

Japanese changed to match the Japanese 
phonological system and that included

the loss of the tones of those words.
And also these words were borrowed a long time ago,

which means that the words have
also changed in pronunciation in Chinese

so the pronunciation has diverged quite a bit,