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context: calligraphy > origins
Language Types
Chinese is monosyllabic and heavily inflected. Japanese is uninflected, but multisyllabic, with endings indicating tense and so on - the two languages are totally dissimilar. This made the Chinese script very unsuitable for Japanese, but it's what they started with. Chinese is an ideographic script - a symbol represents a word, with no clue as to pronunciation if you don't know the symbol. You simply have to know each word - well, except there are roots that get reused so you could spot that an unfamiliar character was something about tree or water, for instance. This was not a good fit for a multisyllabic language, so inevitably the Japanese modified written Chinese to their own needs.