Ni hao or Kon’nichiwa?
While growing up, we were plagued with lots of Chinese movies from Jackie Chan to Gong Li. Jackie Chan really made me want to learn Kung Fu so I could beat up all the bullies in my class. Sigh!
However, in the last few years, I've come across Japanese culture from the growing influence of “anime” on Netflix and other online media. In the early 90’s, manga comics were a huge success but hard to come by in Nigeria, where I grew up.
Credit-screencrush.com
Today, I have come to appreciate both cultures and language through film. I did notice however, that although they look the same, they are very different. Here are a few things, I’ve discovered about both languages.
Culturally, Japanese was influenced by China and share certain similarities in number writing structure which is vertical rather than horizontal. Chinese primarily uses logographic characters (Hanzi), each representing a morpheme or a syllable. Japanese uses a combination of Kanji characters imported from China, alongside two syllabic scripts: Hiragana and Katakana. Kanji characters often have multiple readings (pronunciations) in Japanese, adding to the complexity of the writing system.
Credit :tutsupersite
The Japanese being culturally influenced by China, the two languages share the same name concept and order. The last name always comes before the first name. The grammatical structures of Japanese and Chinese are quite different. Japanese is an agglutinative language with a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, while Chinese is analytic and typically follows a subject-verb-object (SVO) order.
S.O.V word order on the world map by countries in blue. Can you find Japan? Credit :tumblr
Now that we’ve understood some of the similarities, let’s look into their differences:
Can you believe that there are over 1.2 billion speakers of the Japanese and Chinese language worldwide? It’s understandable that a lot of people mix them up!
Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family, while Chinese is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This means they have different linguistic roots and structures.
In the battle of Chinese vs Japanese , a major difference is that they have different grammatical structures. People find Chinese grammar easier to understand because it only features hanzi characters. Japanese grammar is more complex because of the hiragana writing system, which permits conjugation variations and particles.
If you guessed Ni hao as hello for Chinese and Kon’nichiwa as hello for Japanese. Well done!
China has the world's second-largest economy and is a major player in global trade and investment. Proficiency in Chinese can open up numerous career opportunities in business, finance, trade, and international relations especially in Africa.
Learning Chinese can be intellectually stimulating and rewarding. It offers a unique set of linguistic challenges, such as tones and characters, that can sharpen your cognitive skills and expand your linguistic abilities. If you’re interested in learning Chinese, sign up with Linguatopia to get started https://linguatopian.com/language-services-1
Japanese will be on offer at a later date! Watch this space.
written by Zion Okunor
