Let me get all didactic up in this: the Japanese one is a bit oversimplified. Japanese has four scripts - romaji, which is our alphabet, hiragana, which is all curvy and sweet (most of the really simple ones shown are hiragana), but then there's katakana which is all stark, straight lines and not cute at all. And kanji is derived basically intact from Chinese but with different pronunciations - a Chinese guy can read big chunks of a Japanese newspaper and vice versa, but they'd sound completely different if they read them out loud. So. The more you know.
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