Differnce between janaese and chinese language.

Japanese and Chinese are two entirely different languages but, because Japan was ruled by China for many years, there are many Chinese loan words in Japanese, and Chinese characters are often used for these. Although Japanese and Chinese writing look superficially similar, this is really only because they were both originally written with a brush. Japanese characters (there are two separate 'alphabets' - Katakana and Hiragana) represent actual sounds, whereas Chinese characters represent 'ideas' or words. When Chinese characters are used, this is called Kanji. For most people, Japanese is an easier language to learn, especially to learn to read and write, because one only needs to learn a limited set of characters. In Chinese, each character represents a word (which may be pronounced differently in different parts of China) and one needs to know a minimum of about 3000 in order to begin to understand written Chinese.