How Chinese compares to other languages: a linguistic analysis (video)
Mandarin next to English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Arabic, measured on open linguistic datasets. Pick your language.
Chapters
- 0:00Start
- 0:19The short answer
- 0:40Related or borrowed?
- 1:33Grammar distance
- 2:23Sounds and tones
- 3:18Grammar habits
- 4:14Borrowed words
- 5:26Writing
- 5:47Learning time
- 6:28What to do next
Transcript
Start
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are full of words borrowed from Chinese. And none of them is related to Chinese. So what will Mandarin feel like, coming from your language? From SayMei Guides, by Mei Lin: how Chinese compares to other languages. A linguistic analysis.
The short answer
The short answer: in grammar, Mandarin is closest to Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, which differ from it on less than half of 36 features learners notice. European languages and Arabic differ on two-thirds or more. And none of the eight shares basic words with Mandarin beyond chance. What its neighbours share was borrowed.
Related or borrowed?
So, is Chinese related to Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese? No. Mandarin is Sino-Tibetan. Japanese and Korean each have small families of their own, Vietnamese is Austroasiatic, Arabic is Semitic, and the four European languages are Indo-European. What links Mandarin with its neighbours is two thousand years of borrowing from written Chinese. You can see it in basic words like eye, water and fire, which languages rarely borrow. On a 40-word list, a score of about 100 means no more alike than chance. Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese all land near 100, like English and Arabic. Only Cantonese, Mandarin's sister language, scores clearly lower, at 80.5. Mandarin's eye is 眼睛. The other three use native words.
Grammar distance
Grammar tells a different story. We checked 36 features a learner notices. Vietnamese differs from Mandarin on 42%. Korean and Japanese on about 46%. Then a gap: Spanish 66%, French 72%, Arabic 77%, English 78% and German 79%. Thai, an unrelated reference language, lands right beside them. English is the interesting case. On the learner features, it differs on 78%. But on every shared feature, just 46%, statistically tied with Japanese. Same subject, verb, object order, and no case endings on nouns. What they don't share is everything you hear in your first lesson.
Sounds and tones
Mandarin's sound system isn't unusually big: 24 to 27 consonants, the same range as English. The big difference is pitch. Of the nine languages, only Mandarin and Vietnamese use it to tell words apart. 妈, mom. 麻, hemp. 马, horse. 骂, to scold. Vietnamese has six tones, and Japanese a pitch accent. Everyone else builds a new habit. Syllables are short, too. They end in a vowel, an n or an ng: 中, 南, 好. One open dictionary's readings use just 419 syllables, or 1,291 with tones. Then each speaker meets a short list of new sounds. French speakers already own the vowel in tu. Korean speakers already have the puffs of air. And Arabic has no p sound at all.
Grammar habits
Mandarin drops most of what makes European grammar heavy. Verbs never change. 我吃, I eat. 他吃, he eats. He, she and it all sound the same, because there's no gender. Nouns take no plural endings. 一本书, one book. 三本书, three books. And time words carry the time, because there's no past tense. Then it adds three habits. First, aspect. In 我昨天吃了, I ate yesterday, 了 marks the action as complete. Second, measure words. 一张纸, a sheet of paper. 一只猫, a cat. Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese have counters already. Third, everything that describes a noun goes first. 我昨天买的书, the book I bought yesterday. Only Japanese and Korean share that.
Borrowed words
Mandarin borrows less than any language in the World Loanword Database: 26 of its 2,130 words, or 1.2%. The next lowest borrowed 5.6%. For new things, Mandarin builds its own words. A computer is 电脑, an electric brain. Loans like 咖啡, coffee, stay a short list. Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese went the other way. 学生, student. 大学, university. 电话, telephone. 文化, culture. In the database's lists, 27.3% of Japanese and 25.5% of Vietnamese came from Chinese. A full Korean dictionary reaches 57%, because it counts thousands of rare, formal nouns. But none of Korean's particles or verb endings came from Chinese. The words transfer. The grammar doesn't. Even shared words need care: the Japanese look-alike of 手纸 means a letter, while in Mandarin it's toilet paper. And one word travelled everywhere. In all nine languages, tea comes from Chinese, 茶.
Writing
Of the eight, only Japanese still writes everyday text with Chinese characters, with 2,136 official kanji. Korean is written in hangul, and schools teach 1,800 basic hanja. Vietnamese switched to the Latin alphabet, so its speakers get the vocabulary but not the writing.
Learning time
So does distance predict learning time? Only partly. The US Foreign Service Institute budgets 30 weeks for Spanish or French, about 36 for German, about 44 for Vietnamese, and 88 for Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. Vietnamese is closest in grammar, yet only Japanese and Korean share Mandarin's 88 weeks. Writing and vocabulary weigh at least as much. And these times exist only for English speakers. A few honest caveats. Distance isn't difficulty: having no gender to learn is easy, and tones are hard. And none of this measures how fast real learners progress.
What to do next
So what's next? Pick your language in the guide's tool. Train tones from the start, unless you speak Vietnamese. If you speak Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese, use your borrowed words and watch for false friends. And even from English, expect the first lessons to feel new. The quickest way to feel the difference is to hear the tones and say a few sentences out loud. You can practise speaking with Mei Lin, SayMei's teacher, in a short spoken lesson at your level. The full guide, with the language picker and every source, is on the page at saymei dot app.