Originally Posted by
jotabe
Chinese and Japanese are not close at all, as languages. They just use (roughly) the same writing, due to the Chinese culture being hegemonic in the Far East. It wasn't complicated to adapt, because after all in Chinese each character is a word, and that's how you construct newer words and phrases (this isn't exact, as some characters are only phonetic). So, the Chinese writing doesn't really depend on the language, but on the meaning you want to communicate. Theoretically, you could obtain a good degree of understanding of texts in Chinese without having any idea of Chinese language, simply by knowing the meaning of the characters.
Japanese has a double system: kept the logographic characters from Chinese (the kanji), and has 2 additional syllabic alphabets (hiragana and katakana).