|
|
|
|
|
|
by yomly
3607 days ago
|
|
|
You're right in that linguistically its roots did not come from Chinese, but I don't agree with
> except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English. That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are plenty of features in Japanese that make learning Chinese (or vice versa) easier than Mandarin/English. Assuming by "borrowed words" you're referring to onyomi (which is a huge deal in learning languages) there's still the fact that in both Japanese and Chinese (off the top of my head) there is: - no verbal conjugation - no genders for nouns - monosyllabic sounds - gender ambiguity in pronouns - no definite article I'd also argue the concept of tenses is more similar between Japanese and Chinese than Chinese and English. If you start factoring in things like onyomi, it's a whole different ball-game, and anecdotally I and other people familiar with South-East Chinese dialects (e.g. fujianhua/chaozhouhua) have noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Japanese and Chinese - which makes learning new vocabulary way easier see [0]. [0] https://www.quora.com/What-Chinese-dialect-is-the-most-simil... |
|
|
I don't know how you define conjugations, but I consider 食べた a conjugation of 食べる. I know some tokenization systems will split the former into 2 tokens and keep the latter as a single.
The other points in your list I agree with, but I am sure we can find just as many dissimilarities between Japanese and Chinese, although I concede that I was exaggerating with my comment about English.
My point is that the way Chinese is shaped, the character system is befitting. The way Japanese is shaped, it is not, but effort has been made to put them there anyway, which has lead to (at least a written language) far more complicated than necessary.
A friend of mine once described Korean as "Chinese words with Japanese grammar" and the Koreans transitioned away from Chinese characters with great success (and I dare say they are better off having done so) and retain plenty of words that more than resembles their Japanese and Chinese counter parts. I'm assuming you wouldn't argue that Korean is a "Chinese character based language"