[godwine]

I have to admit, i haven't read through the thread before making this post, so if what I mention here is a duplicate, just ignore it

I want to point out several things. Mandarin is not a Language, its a dialect. There is no writing system as mandarin. There are 2 major Chinese dialect: Cantonese and Mandarin, and 2 writing system: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Taiwan is a remote island from China, they speak Mandarin and uses the Traditional Chinese writing System

Hong Kong is a small Province that is ATTACHED to mainland China, they speak Cantonese and uses the Traditional Chinese writing system

The rest of China speak Mandarin and uses the Simplified Chinese writing system

Kanji is a mix of both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, there are also characters that doesn't exist in the Chinese language at all.

Pronunciation though, I personally think that its closer to Cantonese: For the number 9 (九）- Japanese is Ku (Kyu), Cantonese is "Gau", while Mandarin is jiu.

But there are also Kanji that is pronounced completely different from its Chinese counterpart: The family name 林 - Hayashi in Japanese, Cantonese is "Lum", while Mandarin is "Lin"

So when we want to talk about similarities, it will really depend on what aspect of the language we are referring to. Sentence structure and the use of grammar, I think Korean will be the closest. Writing and pronunciation, probably Chinese is closer....

just my $0.02