Although Japanese and China speak completely different languages, the Japanese writing system comes from China. When China characters were introduced to Japan sometime in the 5th and 6th centuries, Japan supplemented China characters, Hiragana and Katakana with two pinyin characters, both of which were transformed from Chinese characters.
There are many local dialects in Japan. Under the influence of mass media such as radio, television and movies, standard Japanese based on Tokyo dialect gradually spread to the whole country, but the dialects spoken by people in Kyoto and Osaka, in particular, continued to prosper and retained their prestige.
There are many theories about the origin of Japanese. Many scholars believe that, syntactically, Japanese is close to Altaic languages such as Turkish and Mongolian. It is generally believed that Japanese is syntactically similar to Korean. There is also evidence that Japanese morphology and vocabulary were influenced by southern Malay-Polynesian languages in prehistoric times.
Although Japanese and China speak completely different languages, the Japanese writing system comes from China. When China characters were introduced to Japan sometime in the 5th and 6th centuries, Japan supplemented China characters, Hiragana and Katakana with two pinyin characters, both of which were transformed from Chinese characters.
There are many local dialects in Japan. Under the influence of mass media such as radio, television and movies, standard Japanese based on Tokyo dialect gradually spread to the whole country, but the dialects spoken by people in Kyoto and Osaka, in particular, continued to prosper and retained their prestige.