Difference:
First, the historical origins are different.
1, Japanese
The origin of Japanese has always been a controversial issue. Japanese in Meiji era classified Japanese as Altaic language family, but this view has been generally denied. Homer Herbert and King believe that Japanese belongs to the Dravidian language family.
Nishida Takashi thinks Japanese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, Christopher I. Beckwith thinks Japanese belongs to Japanese-Koguryo language family (that is, Fuyu language family), and Leon Angelo serafim thinks Japanese and Ryukyu language can form Japanese language family.
There is a hypothesis that Austronesian languages, Zhuang-Dong languages and Japanese languages can form Austronesian languages, that is, they are all homologous.
2. China people
Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family. The origin of Sino-Tibetan language family is still inconclusive. It is said that the original language of Sino-Tibetan originated in northern China, and differentiated into various languages of Sino-Tibetan family about 6000 years ago. Another hypothesis holds that this language family came from Sichuan in the southwest of China today and began to differentiate about 10,000 years ago. Chinese is one of the languages differentiated from the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Second, the structure is different.
1, Japanese
1) proper nouns
Inherent words are the original Japanese vocabulary, also known as "harmony language", which are mainly verbs and figurative nouns in daily life.
2) Chinese vocabulary
Japanese is greatly influenced by Chinese. In Japanese, words with grammatical meaning all contain Chinese characters, and most of them are related to real meaning. Therefore, friends who usually know Chinese can understand the meaning of a short sentence even if they don't know Japanese. However, some words cannot be understood from the perspective of modern Chinese, because it is classical Chinese rather than vernacular Chinese that affects Japanese.
2. China people
Chinese is an isolated language (analytical language), which is different from many tortuous languages in Indo-European family. There is only one form of Chinese vocabulary without twists and turns such as plural, part of speech, case and tense.
Chinese morphemes are mostly monosyllabic (washing hands-losing people). Morphemes and morphemes can be combined into compound words (horse+road → road → on+off → switch). Some morphemes are words (hand washing), others are not words, and they can only form compound words with other morphemes (people → people → loss → loss).
Third, dialects are different.
1, Japanese
Japanese can be roughly divided into Eastern Dialect, Western Dialect and Kyushu Dialect, and further divided into Hokkaido Dialect, Tohoku Dialect, Kanto Dialect, Donghai Dongshan Dialect, Bazhangdao Dialect, Hokuriku Dialect, Feng Jingen Dialect, Chinese Dialect, Yunbo Dialect, Shikoku Dialect, Fengri Dialect, Zhu Fei Dialect and Yu Sa Dialect.
2. China people
Chinese is generally divided into nine dialects, and each dialect can be divided into many sub-dialects. The International Language Coding Standard ISO 639-3 formulated by the International Organization for Standardization divides Chinese into nine first-class dialects.
Min (cdo), Jin (cjy), Mandarin (cmn), Hui (czh), gan (Gan), Hakka (Hak), Xiang (hsn), Wu (wuu) and Yue (Yue). In addition, there are still some controversial linguistic classifications of Chinese dialects, such as Pinghua dialect and Xiangnan dialect.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Chinese
Baidu Encyclopedia-Japanese