Globally, there are 5,651 languages spoken by humans. Just as the family name and lineage in human society to understand family history, the study of the origin and development of language also requires the search for similar languages for comparative analysis, and to reveal their internal connections through similarities and characteristics. For example, English and German belong to the West Germanic language group, while the Indo-European language family is the largest language family in the world, including the West Germanic language branch, the East Germanic language group (such as the vanished Visigothic and Ostrogothic languages), the Slavic language family, the Celtic language family, and the Greek language family.
Chinese, on the other hand, is self-contained and belongs to an important language branch and language family in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The claim that "Chinese comes from Tibetan" is actually not accurate. Although Chinese and Tibetan are related to a certain extent, they belong to different language families, indicating that they have different origins and development processes. Chinese belongs to an independent Sino-Tibetan language family, and Tibetan is also an important branch of this language family.
As for the relationship between Chinese and Japanese, there seem to be many similarities on the surface, especially the fact that Japanese contains a large number of Chinese characters, so that Chinese who are not familiar with Japanese can also understand some content literally. For example, the pronunciation of numbers in Japanese, such as ichi, ni, san, shi, go, and roku, does have similarities with some southern Chinese dialects. However, upon closer study, we will find that Japanese is not actually derived from Chinese, but belongs to the Altaic language family, which is very different from the Sino-Tibetan language family, to which Chinese belongs.
The emergence of hiragana business card kana in Japanese is the result of borrowing from other languages and incorporating local cultural innovations. In addition, from the perspective of grammatical structure, Chinese is a typical analytical language, relying on virtual words to achieve changes in word meaning and syntactic functions, while Japanese has similar morphological changes to English, and is also different from Chinese in terms of word order, for example, Chinese follows the subject-verb-object order, while Japanese follows the subject-object-predicate order.
Although there are a large number of Chinese characters and radicals in Japanese, which stems from the fact that Japan sent Tang envoys to China during the Tang Dynasty to study and introduce Chinese character culture, this is not evidence that Chinese and Japanese are homologous. In fact, there are two ways to read kanji in Japanese: "Kankan", which mimics Chinese pronunciation, and "Xunkan", which retains the inherent pronunciation of Japanese. For example, there is a clear difference between the pronunciation and pronunciation of numbers in Japanese, and it can be seen that although the two have common elements, there are still significant differences in their essence.
In conclusion, although there are many similarities between Chinese and Japanese in terms of writing forms, through in-depth analysis of the language and the study of historical origins, we can clearly understand that they belong to different language families and have their own uniqueness. Therefore, the similarity of the way in which the language is recorded can only illustrate the influence of cultural exchange, and cannot be used as a sufficient basis for judging the similarity of language origin or close kinship. Just as Hanyu Pinyin is recorded in the Roman alphabet, it cannot be assumed that Chinese is related to languages that use the Roman alphabet. Therefore, we should look at the relationship between Chinese and Japanese rationally, not only acknowledging the mutual influence between them, but also clarifying their independent identities and characteristics.