Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (w

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. This comparison is flawed. The Latin alphabet is phonetic and carries no inherent meaning, while the Chinese Hanzi (which were, historically, adapted in Japan and slightly modified/simplified since then, and are called Kanji there) rely on meaning, and each character can have multiple ways to be pronounced. Actually, Chinese and Japanese people could read (or rather, infer meaning from) texts the respective other has written if they use the subset of characters that both know (Hanzi ∩ Kanji, if you'd like ;) ), even though they could never communicate verbally. It'd be a bit like showing each other drawings of things that both know and understand, yet have completely different names for. Comparing both on a purely grammatical/syntactical level, of course, is pretty meaningless.