Home  ›  From Japanese  ›  to Cantonese
🇯🇵 → 🇭🇰

How easy is Cantonese for Japanese speakers?

Going from Japanese to Cantonese (粵語) has a composite linguistic distance of 81% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

81% distance FSI Cat IV (Hardest) — ~2,200 hours
Lexical similarity
20%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
50%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
0%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
0%

Japanese → Chinese

Genealogical kinship
0%

Japonic ↔ Sino-Tibetan

Open the interactive comparison →

Other easy languages for Japanese speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Japanese:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Japanese and Cantonese. No signup.