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Because a large part of Japanese language (and Korean and Vietnamese for that matter) is made of loanwords of Chinese origin (漢語) it made some sense to bring th
by titanix2 11y ago
Because a large part of Japanese language (and Korean and Vietnamese for that matter) is made of loanwords of Chinese origin (漢語) it made some sense to bring them together (albeit I suspect it is often done because Japanese use Chinese characters too). So while the grammar vastly differ, learning one is really useful to learn another because a lot of words are roughly the same.
As a side note I was reading in a book[1] the rather extreme view that the "corrupt" Japanese or Korean readings of characters maybe seen as a dialect of Chinese.
[1] Élémens de la grammaire chinoise. Abel Rémusat (1822) https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=rJAUAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PP5 https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&out...
- emodendroket 11y agoBig surprise, a book from the early 19th Century has a silly linguistic view. By this logic English is a romance language because it has a lot of French borrowings, despite not descending from Latin. As for Chinese characters, well, do we consider Vietnamese and English part of the same language family because both are written with the Latin alphabet? I acknowledged, in the post you're replying to, the large body of borrowed vocabulary, but that's not how languages are classified/made into families. Chinese and Japanese do not have a common ancestor and have very, very different grammar and phonetics.