With the news that Aarki is opening new offices in Japan and China, we outline the origins of both Japanese and Mandarin, and compare their intricacies and difficulties
With the announcement that interactive and creative advertising technology Aarki will be opening offices in both Tokyo and Beijing in the coming months, what should employees know about the languages they’ll be expected to learn if they decide to relocate to one of the company’s international offices?
Standard Chinese (Mandarin) is estimated to have nearly 900 million native speakers and is the most spoken language in the world. When accounting for second language speakers, Mandarin is rivalled only by English, with each language having roughly one billion people capable of speaking each language.
The origins of Japanese are not entirely agreed upon, but it has been said that Japan inherited its writing system from China, although Japanese did exist as a spoken word before its adoption of the Chinese alphabet. Japanese developed and changed the Chinese logographs to suit the spoken word, as well as changing pronunciation and adding shorthand and phonetic scripts in the early stages.
The Chinese language dates back to over 1000 BCE, and up until the 1900s had been evolving more and more distinct local dialects, which lead to the need to develop a standard language, “Standard Chinese,” to adopt as an official language for the Chinese education system in the mid 1900s.
Mandarin Writing systems The alphabets of Germanic languages (such as English) and Mandarin differ in their entirety, but Mandarin can be expressed in the Latin alphabet using various systems of Romanization.
A speaker of any language using the Latin alphabet can be taught (potentially more quickly) to speak Mandarin by taking lessons in their native alphabet. For those who don’t want to learn the Chinese logographic script or struggle with learning it, using the Romaji, or Romanized characters, might be a better option.
The pinyin system (Hanyu Pinyin) is the ISO standard in the world today for the romanization of Mandarin. Pinyin translates to “spelled-out-sounds”. The method of phonetically spelling out Chinese characters was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and adopted as the ISO standard for the romanization of Mandarin in 1982.
The zhuyin or “bopomofo” method is commonly used for teaching Mandarin in Taiwan due to its non-ambiguity of pronunciation compared to pinyin, which requires tone-marking diacritics which are often omitted and lead to ambiguity over which meaning of the word is intended.
These ambiguities often arise in English and can be a problem when learning the language. When learning Mandarin, they can be avoided by learning the zhuyin/bopomofo method, although the method is not nearly as widely used for teaching outside of Taiwan, and it may be hard to find instruction in the method on mainland China.
Japanese Japanese is estimated to be spoken by 130 million native and non-native speakers worldwide. The written language can be reliably traced back to the eighth century CE, when texts containing recognizable Japanese words can be traced back to.
Writing systems The Japanese “alphabet” is a mixture of Chinese logographs (kanji), hiragana and katakana. Each character in hiragana and katakana represents a sound in Japanese language, that is, it is a phonetic alphabet. Kanji are used for nouns and adjective and verb stems. Latin characters are sometimes used, mostly in the form of abbreviations while Arabic numerals are common in counting.
Romanization of Japanese Learning Japanese through the sole use of the Romanized alphabet or rōmaji, is not recommended. This method introduces various inconsistencies in pronunciation and other problems. Learning hiragana and katakana is highly recommended: both use the Latin alphabet and can be used to represent every Japanese character.
Revised Hepburn is the primary method for expressing Japanese in Romanized form, although the Kunrei method is taught in elementary schools in Japan.
Similarities between Japanese and Chinese Japanese uses some Chinese characters in its written form. These are called Kanji, but usually are pronounced differently and have different meanings. Both languages can be written using the Romanized version of their alphabets.
Both Japanese and Mandarin are able to omit the subject of a sentence and still convey the complete meaning. Many Japanese words are also in use in Mandarin.
Differences between Japanese and Chinese Tense In Japanese, verbs are conjugated while in Mandarin they aren’t. For instance in Mandarin you would use “出席” (English: “to attend”) whether you had recently attended an event or were yet to attend an event.
Alphabet Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet while Mandarin uses a logographic one, where symbols each have a meaning (they are more than simply characters, they are morphemes) and have no relation to the pronunciation of words. Simplified Mandarin (zhuyin, pinyin etc), however, does use phonetic characters which are strung together to create words.
Sentence order Sentence order differs between Japanese and Mandarin, with Mandarin being “subject-verb-object” while Japanese’s sentence structure is “subject-object-verb.” As an example, the English sentence of “I went shopping” would be structured “I shopping went” in Japanese.
Honorifics Japanese uses honorific verb forms and vocabulary to show the relative status of the speaker, listener and any mentioned persons. This differs in Mandarin, where honorifics are obsolete in the language, but are still employed simply through the use of polite compliments or the non-usage of casual words and slang.
Learning a language is always a daunting task, and if you don’t enjoy it, it will inevitably become impossible. The best way to learn is to immerse yourself in the culture. For best results you must eat, sleep and drink the language!