Can Japanese understand Mandarin?

Japanese don’t understand spoken Mandarin, in general. There are some Japanese words that originated from Chinese, but only part of these words have pronunciation originated from Chinese. For the latter part, the pronunciation is usually close to Ancient Chinese, not to Mandarin.

Are Chinese and Japanese the same language?

Even though they use the same writing system, hanzi and kanji represent completely different languages. As a result, the Chinese pronunciation of a hanzi differs from the Kanji Japanese pronunciation. Many of the Japanese Kanji characters are derived from Chinese Hanzi, and many of them are identical.

Is there any language similar to Mandarin in spoken languages?

Neither Japanese nor Korean is similar to Mandarin in spoken languages. But both Japanese and Koreans accepted Chinese Characters in vocabularies, so some words sound similar to Mandarin.

How similar is the Japanese language to Chinese?

By this logic, Japanese is not related to Chinese. The further back you go, the less similar they become. Instead, what we see is the Japonic languages (a small family including Japanese and Ryukyuan) in a completely different category than Chinese. They are as different as English and Hungarian; there’s hardly anything in common at all.

What is the difference between Korean and Japanese grammar?

Grammer: Japanese and Korean share a very similar and unique grammatical structure that is totally different from Chinese. As a result, Korean and Japanese sentences are translatable word for word and the words used in the languages’ sentence are placed in the same order, but not so with Chinese.

Why do Korean words sound like Chinese words?

The Chinese-derived words in Korean generally sound more like the corresponding words in Chinese. This is because each character remains one syllable, like in Chinese (unlike Japanese). Also, the -ng nasal ending is borrowed as the same sound in Korean, while it becomes a non-nasal long vowel in Japanese.