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Q: Japanese and Korean: How similar are they to Chinese? Some major differences?
I've just downloaded a couple of Korean and Japanese language apps onto my tablet in a bid to fulfill my far-fetched fantasy of being a master of Asian languages (mwahahahahahahh....ahem). I noticed during a recent trip to Korea that all of the subway stations had Chinese characters underneath with the Korean words being pronounced in pretty much the same way as the Chinese characters would if you read them in Cantonese. Pretty cool I thought.
Of course some Chinese would probably bang on all day about how Korean/Japanese is based on Chinese, but what's the truth of it? Any language experts/speakers of these two able to break down some simple differences for my simple mind? And yes I'm fully aware that they sound different, I'm just interested in similarities/differences in vocab/grammar.
Thanks.
11 years 6 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
Koreans use to write and use the chinese language. The history there was that it was getting too difficult so someone made a series of characters korean characters that you see today. So there are many similarities between chinese and korean in that regard. The directions North, South, West East are the same. The koreans use two forms of numbers and one of the way the numbers are pronounced are similar to the chinese number pronunciation.
As far as Japan goes they also have similar words compared to Korea and China. I believe Gou/ Dog is one of them. There are several other one's but I don't know all of them.
In Korea and Japan Goyangi meaning tiger is the same.
-Totally different language families. No grammar similarities between Chinese and Japanese/Korean. However, Japanese and Korean have some grammar similarities but no vocabulary overlap.
-BUT Korean and Japanese have taken many many words from Chinese. For example 'Mountain" in Chinese is 山 shan -but 'San' in Korean. Another is Japanese and Chinese big. Da in Chinese Dai in Japanese.
OwainLW:
"Dai" which is also "big" in Cantonese...interesting. Thanks for that.
t91camp:
This is correct, except Japanese and Korean do have some vocab overlap. Some are newer Korean words based on Japanese, some are borrowed from the same Chinese word, and some (fewer) actually derived from a time when the two languages were more mutually intelligible. Migration and war made for a lot of linguistic intermingling throughout the ages.
The three languages have many similarities, but are still vastly different--especially when it comes the verbal linguistics. While Japanese has kept a good deal of the Chinese writing (called Kanji), over time they changed many of the characters so that they are almost unrecognizable to their formal Chinese beginnings. This said, Kanji is one of three writing styles in Japanese, all commonly used in daily communication. Japanese has also kept many words (for example: 爱, pinyin: ai) of Chinese. However, the two languages are vastly, vastly different in grammar, so the way these words are used are different, too.
As for Korean--I don't know. I've never studied it. But I've heard it's very similar in speaking and grammar to Japanese. As for being a master of Asian languages...well...it certainly isn't impossible, but you should change your approach to studying them. To accomplish them well, and avoid a very big headache, they should all be looked at as three very different languages that have no similarities--so that you don't confuse yourself later.
I'm fluent in Chinese now, but I had taken two years of Japanese before. I can tell you right now--my knowledge of the Japanese language did not help with my Chinese in the slightest. In fact, when I tried comparing the two languages, it really hindered my progress in Chinese.
Haha, I think that it's only worth it to study the links between all three languages is if you're looking to write an interesting subject for an anthropological dissertation.
The written form of Korean is phoenetic - like the English alphabet. Each character represents a sound, as opposed to being an ideogram.
