The Connections Project

Mandarin

Mandarin and English have surprisingly similar grammar (though the former has also been called "grammarless", partly because its verbs never conjugate). However, their phonologies and their writing systems are very widely separated. While English uses the Roman alphabet, Mandarin uses the hanzi, which are difficult to transliterate into any alphabet at all. Mandarin is a tonal language and it's difficult for English speakers to pick up on the tones at all; conversely, it's difficult for Mandarin speakers to pick up on the stress of English.

Besides surprising grammatical similarities, there isn't much else connecting Spanish and Mandarin. Their writing systems and their phonologies are completely different.

Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters from Mandarin, though because of two different paths of evolution, the Japanese kanji are now slightly different from the Mandarin hanzi. Unlike Mandarin, Japanese mixes the characters with two syllabaries, the hiragana and katakana. While both languages are tonal, the tones in Japanese are somewhat less "important" than the ones in Mandarin. Japanese borrowed many technical words from Mandarin (although they are heavily altered in the process because of the very different sound systems). Grammatically, these two languages are extremely different. Most people would agree that Japanese grammar is much harder, which Mandarin in turn has the harder phonology.

Korean used to use the Chinese characters, until the switch was made to the Hangul. Chinese hanzi are still occasionally used to write family names and such.

This language shares a written language, but does _not_ stem from the same root language. Four major language groups moved throughout Asia; Mandarin and Taiwanese are not from the same group.

Source: Guns, Germs, Steel by Jared Diamond