Why does Japanese sound so different from Chinese even though it uses kanji?

12 comments

1. Very different language families. The grammar and phonology are apples and oranges.

   For what it’s worth, English is kind of in the same boat. English uses Latin/Roman letters but it’s not a Romance language.

2. Japanese and Chinese are more different than Chinese and English. It’s only the writing system, which is actually very poorly suited for Japanese to begin with, that tie these two languages together.

3. They just borrowed the writing system, not the grammar or anything. They did borrow a bunch of words, but this was 500-1000 years ago and they’ve changed an awful lot since then.

   Even at the beginning they were fitting a round peg in a square hole, the words they borrowed always went through a phonological filter.

4. The spoken languages evolved separately without any influence on each other and then eventually Japan adopted the Chinese writing system. Writing and language are linked, but they’re different things

5. English sounds different from Greek, although it has words like telephone and democracy.

6. That’s an odd question. It’s like asking, Spanish and Danish both use the alphabet, why do they sound so different?

7. We use (highly-modified) Egyptian hieroglyphs, yet English sounds nothing like Ancient Egyptian 🤷‍♂️

8. Everyone here is correct but there are three additional reasons why even the Japanese words made from onyomi readings sound different.

   1. Japanese made contact with Chinese from different regions and eras from modern standard Chinese, which is based on Beijing Mandarin and more broadly northern dialects. Japanese has “Chinese words” first from the 700s-900s mostly for Buddhism and political concepts, and later from Chinese traders. Both waves were from more Southern dialects of Chinese as well, particularly that second wave which were from the Southeastern coast.

   2. Japanese people interpreted the Chinese sounds they heard through the filter of their own language, which also sounded quite different from modern Japanese.

   3. Many onyomi words were created by Japanese people much later after the kanji were introduced, for new terms mostly for modern political concepts and technology. Some of the usage of those kanji is different from how modern Chinese people use them as well. Some of those new kanji terms have also been re-introduced into modern Chinese via Japanese.

9. Alright r/languagelearningjerk, which one of us was this?

10. I mean the same could be asked about any two random languages that use the latin alpbabet.

    However, in this case it is a bit deeper, at least on the Sino-Japanese side of things (I can’t personally speak with authority on Korean, though I believe they also used similar Chinese characters before switching to their current writing system). Japan’s Chinese characters (Kanji, or “Han letters”) have their Japanese pronunciation, and Chinese pronunciation.The Chinese pronunciation is usually used for words with multiple chinese characters compounded, while the Japanese for mostly single-character words. Often these compound words were imported from China, while single-character words were native Japanese words that simply had a character assigned to them. For example, the character 広 can be read as the Japanese “hiro” as in 広い (“hiroi”: wide, spacious), or the imported Chinese “kou” as in 広範 (“kouhan”: widespread, extensive).

    Keep in mind, when these readings are called “Chinese”, they’re a Japanese person’s take on what they thought Chinese sounded like from 500-1000+ years ago, and which may have come from any number of Chinese dialects, so any comparisons to modern Mandarin, Cantonese, or others can be challenging. Then again, sometimes they wind up being shockingly close.

    It’s also worth noting that Chinese characters in Japan are associated with certain readings/pronunciations, but themselves are more ideographic, used to convey a meaning. The actual sounds they are read with are represented by the Japanese syllabary (a syllable-based alphabet) called “kana”. There are two types of kana, but they make the same sounds, so their difference isn’t relevant here.

11. Does Vietnamese sound like English?

12. different regions develop their own languages and dialects, this is like asking why french and english sound so different despite using roman letters