Japanese, comparing to Chinese

As a translation team located in south of China, we focus on providing the Chinese translation to our clients all around the world. Besides this, we also provide other Asian languages translation to our customers like Japanese.

With a neighborhood relationship between China and Japan, Chinese and Japanese these two languages have some similarity and differences in many aspects.

One hand, the similarity is that we enjoy the same culture that we usually view modest as a virtue, which could be shown in the language that there are many honorific words.

On the other hand, the language we speak, Chinese, has the different pronunciation with Japanese although the Chinese character (called “kanji” 漢字 in Japan) is the same. For example: this Chinese character “走”, Chinese pronunciation is “zou”, while it is “yi ku” in Japanese. More examples:

“勉强”, Chinese pronunciation is “mian qiang”, Japanese pronunciation is “ben kyo”;

“中国”, Chinese pronunciation is “zhong guo ”, Japanese pronunciation is “qiu ongku”

“英语”, Chinese pronunciation is “ying yu”, Japanese pronunciation is “e-i-ong”

“先生”, Chinese pronunciation is “xian sheng”, Japanese pronunciation is “sen sei”

“教室”, Chinese pronunciation is “jiao shi”, Japanese pronunciation is “kyo xi ci”

Besides above pronunciations, there are many words used in different ways in Japanese compared with Chinese like Verbs. In Chinese and English, the verbs always follows the subjective while it is opposite in Japanese. For example”

Chinese:

我在吃中饭。

English：

I am having a lunch.

Japanese:

私わご飯を食べます。

Read Also: The knack of using Korean font in Win 98 (Chinese version)

From above 3 sentences, we will see the Chinese verbs “吃” and English verbs “having” come on the heels of the subjective, while the Japanese verbs “食べます” follows the nouns not the subjective. And usually the Japanese verbs are put in the back of the sentence.

Also in the Chinese and English languages, the structure for the phrase is verb (action) + noun (objects which will be acted). In contrast, the noun is before the verb and there is an auxiliary word between these two words like “を” in the example.

Moreover, the tense could be shown by changing the adjectives, which have a conjugating ending い (i) . See below examples:

美しい wucikuxiyi“beautiful”,

厚い aciyi “thick”,

可愛い kawayiyi “cute”, etc.

These words could become past by deleting い (i) and simultaneously adding かった , thus the past tense words will be like this:

美しかった (it is not beautiful now and it was beautiful in the past),

厚かった (it was thick.),

可愛かった (it was cute in the past and it is not cute now)

Besides those adjectives ending with い (i) , there are two more adjectives, na adjectives and true adjectives.

Na adjective, which are followed by だ (da) For example: 変だ、简単だ、曖昧だ、元気だ，きれいだ、etc.

There is also an type of adjective which refer to one thing, objective or people. For example: あの山 ano yama “ that monuntain”, あの人ano hito “that peolpe” あの事故 ano jiko “that thing”

Want to have a try for English to Japanese translation? See here…