[nekokami]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Yes, third tone ma also mean horse 馬 (depending on which Kanji is used). But the the question indicator 嗎 ma is also third tone. There is no real "fifth" tone in Mandarin -- though some people say there is a toneless sound, the so called "ping sheng", which only exists for a few sounds. An example would be "de" 的, the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese "no", indicating possession.

Apparently the neutral tone is less common in the Taiwanese dialect of Mandarin (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar...n#Neutral_tone for more info). The mainland speakers I know do, in fact, use it for the question symbol at the end of sentences. Note that many Chinese dictionaries (including the one at http://mandarintools.com/ ) explicitly list the question symbol as neutral tone.

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Hiragana and Katakana are alphabets of (if I remember correctly, around 50 characters each). So that is no problem to learn and you could, theoretically, correspond with a Japanese on the basis of these two, only.

Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, not alphabets, which often take alphabet users some getting used to. But while one could write a message using only the syllabaries, it would be rare (outside of texts for very young children) to read such a message written by a native speaker. One needs reading fluency of about 3000 characters to handle a newspaper.

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Of course, each Kanji can have a number of different pronounciations and meanings. Same in Chinese, almost every character has numerous meanings, and some have several pronounciations. Like 行 which can be "xing" and "hang".

Different meanings (especially when being defined in another language) are common for words in all languages. Different pronunciations for the same written word are more unusual. Yes, Chinese has some, but Japanese has more-- nearly every character has multiple pronunciations for the same meaning depending on whether the "On" or "Kun" reading is being used.

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Every language has some sort of tones (for stress). Even English.Teak and tick would are really just tonal variations of the same syllable, but teak would be 2nd or 3rd tone and tick would be 4th tone. That alone doesn't make it a tonal language.

My point was not that Japanese is a tonal language in the sense that Mandarin or Zulu are tonal languages, but that rather than using loudness to indicate stress (as is common in many Indo-European languages), Japanese uses tone for this purpose. At least, according to the analysis of linguist Rochell Lieber, whom I studied with as an undergraduate.