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How easy is Japanese for Cantonese speakers?

Going from Cantonese to Japanese (日本語) 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%

Chinese → Japanese

Genealogical kinship
0%

Sino-Tibetan ↔ Japonic

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Other easy languages for Cantonese speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Cantonese:

Think you can tell them apart?

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