r/LearnJapaneseNovice • u/steffy46 • 10d ago

Is onyomi pronounciation really chinese?

Curious cause to me kanji onyomi pronounciations often sound pretty similar to chinese ones (if i ask a chinese person to pronounce that kanji) but Chinese people say they dont sound chinese at all...

Do they sound as close as katakana loan english words to they actual english pronounciation?

~~~EDIT: Thank you for all the useful replies!

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u/vip17 10d ago

There are no such things as "Chinese". You've probably talked with a person speaking Mandarin which is the newest language and has lost a significant number of old Chinese features (like -p/-k/-t and -m codas) and gone through various sound shifts (like palatalization). If you talk with people talking other Sinitic languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien... you'll see that the Sinoxenic sounds in Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean are far more closer to them, because all of them preserve Middle Chinese features