Here's why:
* Distinct Origins: Japanese and Chinese have evolved independently for thousands of years, with their own unique linguistic developments.
* Different Writing Systems: Chinese uses logographic characters (each character represents a word), while Japanese uses a combination of logographic characters and syllabic scripts (hiragana and katakana).
* Grammatical Differences: Japanese and Chinese have vastly different grammar structures. Japanese is an agglutinative language, meaning it adds suffixes and prefixes to words, while Chinese is an analytic language with a simpler grammatical structure.
Instead of being an early stage of Chinese, Japanese is a distinct language with its own rich history and development. It's more accurate to say they are related languages that share a common ancestor, similar to how English and German are related.