Japanese and Chinese Pronunciation Compared. This means that you should consider them an addition to Kanji that is necessary in order to make Chinese characters work for the Japanese language. Hiragana and Katakana are much simpler than Kanji (and Hanzi) because they're basically phonetic alphabets that are pronounced exactly like they're spelled (and because you only need to learn 46 letters).īut even though, they're simpler, this doesn't help you a lot, because they're seldomly used independently of Kanji characters. This is why Japanese hasn't just got the one script that makes up the Kanji characters, but also two phonetic scripts, Hiragana and Katakana, which are used to write Okurigana, which are suffixes and modifications that are added to Kaji, in order to inflect verbs and adjectives as well as denote specific meanings that aren't clear from just the Kanji. In Japanese, this is clearly not the case, meaning that the Japanes had to be inventive when it came to writing their language with its distinct grammar system in this script. The Chinese Hanzi characters were created specifically with Chinese grammar in mind, which means that they work ideally with the Chinese language and which makes them them wonderfully simple to figure out. Most Kanji have at least two on’yomi (音読み) “sound-readings" or pronunciations while Hanzi only have one per character. Japanese doesn't have the same logic when it comes to its writing system, and several characters have several different meanings and pronunciations. While Hanzi was made for Chinese and have very consistent pronunciation and grammar that goes hand-in hand with the individual characters, in Japanese, they're much more of an adaptation. The characters have mostly similar meanings, but there are differences to how they're used in the two languages. Kanji have been in use for around 1500 years, and they're a Japanese adaptation of the Chinese Hanzi system.
The Chinese characters, Hanzi have been in use since the bronze age, meaning that it's one of the oldest writing systems that's still being used today.Īnd Japanese Kanji are practically the same thing. In principle, Japanese and Chinese use the same writing system. In the following, I'll try comparing some of the specifics of both Japanese and Chinese in order to try and illustrate what the challenges are in each language. When it comes to writing, Japanese uses three separate scripts with different pronunciations and complicated rules, whereas Chinese uses only one which, despite the many characters, actually is logical. Japanese pronunciation is not a big deal, but Chinese tones will take a long time to learn. Japanese grammar and word order is a struggle, whereas Chinese is easy in that regard. While they're definitely time-consuming, there are a few others, like Arabic or Korean, that might compete for the title.īut focusing on Chinese and Japanese - which one is actually the more difficult language?īoth Japanese and Chinese are extremely complicated languages for an English speaker, but in different ways. Whether this is true or not is debatable. Many call Chinese and Japanese "the hardest languages in the world". They are notoriously difficult to master, and if you hope to reach even a moderately high level in either language, you'll need to keep studying for years! Certain radicals "impose" certain readings onto kanji, and after you hit a certain threshold of kanji knowledge, you can often make relatively accurate guesses as to how a new word will sound, even if you aren't confident about some of its kanij.Whenever people speak of language learning, or more specifically, difficult languages, two languages are almost always mentioned more than others.Įverybody and their aunt know that these two languages are two of the most complicated tongues out there, at least from the perspective of an English speaker. If you talk to intermediate/advanced learners, or have just read posts about reading on here, you'll probably see people comment that they can often "guess" how a new word will sound, even though they've never seen it before. If you look up the characters themselves on wikipedia, you'll see that phono-semantic characters make up an overwhelming majority of the characters. Semantic means meaning and phonetic means sound in other words, kanji are things with both semantic and phonetic information embedded into them.
If you look up writing systems on wikipedia, you'll see that kanji/hanzi are classified as a "logographic" system of writing, more specifically a phonetic-semantic one.
I don't own a Japanese textbook, but it's literally discussed in the introduction of my first Mandarin textbook. Like, it's the farthest from secret you can get.
It's true, but it's not "a little known secret", it's literally the way that characters are classified and discussed.
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