Hey guys
today, we are gonna compare Chinese, Japanese and Korean!
I've been wanting to make this video for a long time.
As a Chinese speaker, I often get asked :
oh, can you understand Japanese?
Are you using the same Alphabet?
Can you read Korean?
If you know Chinese, learning Japanese or
Korean must be so easy for you, right?
Wait, wait, wait
I know we are neighbours, but things are more complicated than you imagine
You know what?
They don’t even come from the same language family!
So what exactly are the similarities and differences between these languages?
Let’s find out in today´s video!
According to current research,
these three languages belong to different language families.
Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family
Korean belongs to the Koreanic language family
and Japanese belongs to the Japanonic familly.
Note that the names of the last two language families are controversial,
and there is still debate between scholars!
Chinese is the oldest out of the three languages
which dates back to over 3,000 years ago.
Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into 4 main periods
In the early 1900s a program for the unification of the national language,
which is based on Mandarin, was launched
This resulted in Modern Standard Chinese.
In 1956 a new system of romanization called Pinyin,
based on the pronunciation of the characters in the Beijing dialect,
was adopted as an educational instrument to
help in the spread of the modern standard language
commonly referred to as 普通话 or 国语.
The Chinese language has had a significant influence on
both Japanese and Korean throughout their history,
especially in terms of vocabulary and writing systems.
Before the 4th Century AD,
Japan did not have a writing system of its own and it gradually began to adopt the Chinese script,
it merged the Chinese characters into their own Japanese style.
According to the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki,
a semi-legendary scholar called Wani was dispatched to Japan by the Kingdom of Baekje
during the reign of Emperor Ōjin
in the early fifth century,
bringing with him knowledge of Confucianism and Chinese characters Hanzi,
we call Kanji in japanese.
By the 8th and 9th Centuries A.D.,
Chinese characters began to be used to represent Japanese language.
Since the two languages are so different in their syntax and phonology,
Chinese loanwords and characters began to
be "Japanified" for more convenient use.
Japanese writing developed into the threefold system today,
with an incredible complexity which include Kanji
two other scripts: Katakana and Hiragana.
We will discuss this in more detail in the next part.
The Japanese language has adopted many words and characters from Chinese,
with approximately 60% of academic vocabulary
and 18% of daily language use consisting of loan words (mainly nouns)
When it comes to Korean
Chinese characters arrived in Korea together with Buddhism
during the Proto–Three Kingdoms era
in the 1st century BC.
After being adapted for Korean use,
these characters came to be known as Hanja,
and remained the main script for writing Korean for over a millennium.
During this time, various phonetic scripts such as
Idu, Gugyeol, and Hyangchal were also invented.
Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in HANJA.
However, most of the population was illiterate
During the 15th century, King Sejong the Great
personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system
known today as HANGUL.
He believed that Hanja was inadequate for writing Korean,
which led to its restricted use.
Hangul was designed to either supplement or replace Hanja entirely.
The writing system was introduced in the document
called Hunminjeongeum
It quickly spread throughout the nation and helped to increase literacy in Korea.
Korean is often misunderstood and misrepresented
because its origins are still the subject of ongoing scholarly debate.
While the precise linguistic classification of Korean is disputed,
some scholars propose that Korean and Japanese
belong to the Altaic language family,
which also includes Turkish and Mongolian.
well After our small history background,
let's compare these 3 languages concretely
in Vocabulary, Pronunciation, Reading， Grammar and writing
to give you a general vision of their similarities and differences:
The similarities mainly lie in their vocabularies.
While the three languages have different grammatical
structures and pronunciation systems,
they share a considerable number of words
and phrases due to their historical and cultural interactions.
While some characters used in both Japanese
and Chinese have similar meanings and pronunciations,
others are unique to one language or the other.
For instance, this character 誠 means "honest"
in both languages,
but its pronunciation is very different
it's pronounced "makoto" or "sei" in Japanese and "chéng" in Standard Mandarin Chinese.
That´s so different!
Individual kanji characters invented in Japan, or multi-kanji words coined in Japanese,
have also influenced and been borrowed into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese in recent times.
For example, the word for telephone, denwa in Japanese,
is calqued as diànhuà in Mandarin Chinese,
điện thoạiin Vietnamese and jeonhwa in Korean.
For example look at these words:
Cheers chinese ganbei
japanese Kanpai korean gonbei
Time in chinese shijian
in japanese jigan
in korean xigan
They are similar with pronunciation and even
some characters are similar in writing
Pay attention,
Japanese Kanji still uses the traditional Chinese writing system which is also used
in Taiwan, hongkong, Macau and other Chinese speaking regions.
Mainland China has promoted simplified Chinese
characters for use since the 1950s and 1960s.
When it comes to pronunciation chinese might be the hardest
There are twenty-one consonants and sixteen vowels in Chinese language
with different combinations,
we can create
more than four-hundred mono-syllabic sounds together.
When pronouncing chinese you should consider the following:
first as i mentioned in my previous videos
pinyin is the latin alphabet system used to
help foreigners pronounce chinese but be careful.
The sound that pinyin letters represent does not correspond exactly like in english letters
or any language that uses alphabet,
each Chinese sound is associated with one syllable
and each Chinese character has its own pinyin syllable.
for exemple
G we pronounce Ge not G
the tones, since chinese is a tonal language
changing tones means changing meaning
so you have to pay attention to both the pronunciation
and tones.
There are 4 main tones in the Chinese language and a 5th neutral tone.
Japanese pronunciation is the easiest of all 3 Japanese has no tones
It has only five vowels (a i u e o) combined
with 14 consonants display vowels and consonants some sources says 14, 15, 19
Each syllable in japanese has the same length and strength
unlike in english where you would have to stress some syllables
You have to pay attention to pitch accent
but it’s not difficult
and you will still be understood if you make mistakes
but it’s still important to have a natural sounding japanese.
The Korean pronunciation difficulty is more
or less in the middle
The alphabet consists of 14 syllables representing specific consonants
and 10 symbols representing specific vowels
that get assembled into syllable blocks.
It is very different from english pronunciation
and relying on romanized letters to produce korean sounds would be a big mistake
Korean is a phonetic language which means
the sounds of pronunciation matches the written alphabet,
each letter represents a specific sound
for example
this ㄴn for north + ㅢeo for Pod ,This
means “you.”
Korean pronunciation can still be challenging
due to its complex syllables,
including compound vowels and synthetic consonants.
Many people find these aspects of Korean pronunciation
difficult to master when they first begin learning the language.
One of the major difficulties of the Chinese language is that it is not phonetic.
This means that learners must memorize the sound and meaning of characters separately
as some characters have multiple pronunciations and meanings.
like Hao the 3rd tone, its adj which means "good" Hao, the 4 tone means, "prefer"
but haochi means "delicious" hao chi means "someone loves to eat"
go and check, even Google Translate can struggle to accurately translate it.
This can make it challenging to correctly read and pronounce Chinese words,
especially for beginners.
For language learners,
reading a text out loud in Japanese can be challenging
because the Kanji characters must be memorized,
and they often have multiple pronunciations and meanings.
However, the Katakana and Hiragana scripts are phonetic,
making them relatively easy to read.
There’s also the Furigana script which is mainly composed of hiragana letters
it’s placed on top of kanji in case the kanji was unfamiliar
it aids with the pronunciation of the kanji,
it’s mainly used for by foreigners or kids to make reading kanji easier
While Kanji can be difficult for non-Chinese speakers,
Chinese speakers may find it easier to memorize.
In my opinion, reading in Korean is relatively easy
because it is written phonetically
especially for speakers of languages that use
the Latin alphabet.
But for Chinese speakers, of course we prefer the old Hanja system!
See! The difficulty of a language really depends on your native language.
When it comes to writing difficulty people tend to have different opinions
Some might say that Chinese writing is the hardest
and some might say Japanese is the hardest as an entire system of writing.
You see, both Chinese and Japanese use characters. As we all know, Chinese uses characters called
logograms or logographs
as they evolve from images.
Chinese writing is ideological which means that each character has one or several meanings
And when combined together they create even more meanings
For example，大means "big"，小means "small" 大小 means "size"
It´s quite logical right?!
When it comes to Japanese writing, the complexity lies in the integration of the three
writing systems.
These three systems work together to form a complete sentence
but Hiragana and Katakana are usually the starting point
since they form the phonetic base of the language. There are 46 Hiragana characters,
48 Katakana characters, and over 2,000 Kanji characters
There are several functions for the hiragana system:
A major function is to add grammatical structure to the sentence
Grammatical value as it’s used for verbs, adjective endings, particles,
adverbs and verb conjugations
It’s also used for words that have no kanji
etc. Katakana
Katakana represents the same sounds as Hiragana but looks more angular and sharp.
It is mostly used as a transcription for loan words from foreign languages,
similar to using italic English.
It is also used for brand names, scientific and technical terms.
It has similar uses to Hiragana,
but it can be used for some plant and animal names,
as well as words with uncommon Kanji.
Now we are gonna play a game, I am gonna say
some japanese words with english origin and you guess what it´s
camera
computer
juice
sports
ice cream
Now you guys know where the cute japanese english accent from
Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.
They also help to break up sentences and add more structure.
In Japanese, there are no spaces between words when writing,
so Kanji makes it easier to read. For example,
consider these two sentences,
which convey the same meaning
'He speaks English very well',
one written with Kanji and the other with
Hiragana only.
The first sentence is easier to read as it is broken up with Kanji
But since Japanese is actually a different language from Chinese
and it has its own unique grammatical system,
using kanji only is not sufficient for Japanese writing
hence the evolution of hiragana and katakana. As they were used to add grammatical value.
Chinese grammar is considered the easiest of all three languages.
Chinese is an analytic language,
it doesn't use inflection to modify words for grammatical purposes
such as plural, gender, tense, or case.
It also doesn't have prepositions, verb conjugations, or tense changes,
which means you don’t need to memorize all those mind-twisting rules.
Chinese shares a similar sentence order with English, which is Subject-Verb-Object
In korean grammar Passive and causative verbs are easy to form.
Plurals are also easy to form， you just need to add a particle, but you would
still need to use measure words like in chinese language
the korean plural marker 들(deul) can be added to nouns, pronouns, adverbs and
connectives for example:
새 [se] bird 새들 [sedeul] birds
사람 [saram] person 사람들 [saramdeul] people
also, There are no grammatical gender
However if you already speak japanese, Korean grammar is considered similar,
they have many things in common such as: they both have the same sentence structure
SOV
For example
Japanese when i want to say I started a new job
watashiwa atarashī shigotoo hajimeta
Korean naneun saeroun ireul sija kaettta
But in Chinese, the structure is different
wi kaishi le gong zuo
it’s like in english
But still Korean’s grammar system is simpler than Japanese.
For example, there aren’t many different verb conjugations.
So in conclusion I would give Korean a medium difficulty rank.
Japanese grammar is considered the hardest of the 3
The difficult part:
changing forms between animate and inanimate objects can take time and effort
The heavy use of particles And honorifics
Linguistic honorifics are words or expressions used in a language to show respect, politeness,
or formality towards the person being spoken to or referred to.
While many languages have some form of honorific speech,
Japanese takes it to another level.
In some languages, such as French and German,
honorific speech is primarily represented by using a different pronoun
like "vous" or "Sie" instead of "tu" or "du,"
respectively, along with changes in verb conjugation.
However, the Japanese honorific system is much more complex and nuanced,
not only pronoun and verb conjugation changes, but also a wide variety of honorific prefixes
and suffixes that can be added to nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech.
For example, the suffix "-san" is a common honorific that can be added to
someone's name to show respect.
It's similar to using "Mr." or "Mrs." in English.
There are also more specific honorifics like "-sama"
for showing even more respect, "-sensei" for addressing teachers and experts,
and "-chan" for addressing children or people you're close to.
Not finished yet, they have “Kun”, "-dono" ,"-hime", "-senpai" …
One common aspect of Japanese honorific speech is the use of the "Masu form,"
a verb conjugation that is used to express politeness
and respect towards the listener or the person being referred to.
The "Masu form" is created by adding the suffix "-masu" to the verb stem
and is used in many situations where politeness
and respect are required. japanese also conjugate verbs into the masu
form to indicate politness. for example:
のむ (Nomu) becomes のみます (Nomimasu)
かく (Kaku) becomes かきます(Kakimasu)
So in conclusion this is my opinion in terms of difficulty between the 3 languages:
There are still other aspects and details we didn't compare in this video!
I know that every time I make a language
comparison video,
some people may not agree or want to argue about it, but that's okay.
It's not about comparing languages and picking a winner,
but rather about giving you some new ideas and perspectives on different languages.
It doesn't really matter which language has the hardest grammar, pronunciation, or writing,
as it depends on many factors.
As you can see, every language has its difficulties.
If you study a language you love, nothing else really matters.
If you feel inspired or have a clear idea about any of these three languages
and even want to start learning one or all of them,
I would be happy about it!
If you're a language lover like me and want to exchange
with other language learners in the Zoe community,
you can join our Discord server by clicking the link in the description box.
We have just added Japanese and Korean languages,
and we regularly share learning resources,
study plans, and organize events every week
to help you on your language learning journey.
If you liked this video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up
if you have any other questions or comments, feel free to write them in the comments.
See you in the next video! Bye!"