How similar are Japanese and Korean?
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Langfocus channel, and my name is Paul.
How similar are Japanese and Korean?
That is the question of the day.
Japan and Korea are geographically very close to each other,
and at first glance they look like similar countries
with similar cultures, in a way.
But, just how similar are the Japanese and Korean languages?
Well, the short answer is they're closer to each other
than they are to any other languages,
and they are remarkably similar in some ways.
But, in other ways, they're also very different,
and they are certainly not mutually intelligible.
Disclaimer, I don't speak very much Korean,
but I do speak Japanese,
and I am aware of the differences and similarities between them.
Let's look at the similarities in terms of grammar,
vocabulary, pronunciation and the writing systems.
When it comes to syntax and grammar Japanese and Korean are very similar.
Japanese and Korean sentences can often be translated word by word,
with each word in one sentence having an equivalent in the other.
Let's look at a couple of Korean and Japanese sentences side by side,
and we can see the similarities.
Again, I don't really speak much Korean, so if my pronunciation is terrible,
Koreans, please forgive me.
In English: I am a student.
In Korean: na neun haksaeng-ida.
In Japanese: watashi wa gakusei-desu.
You can see that these sentences are translatable word by word,
that each word in the first sentence has an equivalent in the second sentence,
in the exact same position.
So, they are directly translatable.
One thing I want to point out is the topic marker.
That's the second word in each of these sentences.
The topic marker is something that's kind of unique to Japanese and Korean.
Topic marker points out the topic of a sentence.
That's different from the grammatical subject,
overarching focus are the topic of the sentence.
Another thing I want to point out is the last word in each sentence.
In Korean it's ida,
and in Japanese it's desu.
In both cases, that's like a copula, like the word 'is' in English.
So, in both Japanese and Korean,
this is a standalone word that is placed usually at the end of the sentence.
In Korean: na neun mul eul masinda
In Japanese: watashi wa mizu wo nomimasu
So, again we see that the topic marker is the second word in each sentence,
but a more important thing that I want to point out here is the SOV word order
that means Subject-Object-Verb.
So, we can see that the subject is 'watashi' or 'na' in Korean,
and then we have the object.
The object is water.
In Korean it's 'mul' and in Japanese it's 'mizu',
and then we have the verb at the end.
So, in Korean 'masinda' and in Japanese 'nomimasu'.
But, before the verb,
there is an interesting little word that we don't have in English
and that is an object marker.
That's another unique thing that we find in both Japanese and Korean
used in exactly the same way, in exactly the same position in the sentence.
Even though, the grammar and sentence structure of the two languages
is remarkably similar, the vocabulary is remarkably different.
If a Japanese speaker heard Korean without any prior exposure,
they probably wouldn't understand any of the words at all,
or maybe just a word here and there.
But, that doesn't mean that those words aren't related.
Korean and Japanese both inherited a large number of loan words from Chinese,
approximately 60% of the vocabulary in either language comes from Chinese.
If there are so many Chinese loan words in both languages,
then why are they not mutually comprehensible?
Well, it's important to note that for both languages,
in daily conversation, in informal speech,
the Chinese loan words are not used nearly as much as they are in writing.
Also, the Chinese loan words are different in either language.
They entered the languages in the form of Chinese characters,
but the pronunciation of those characters became adapted
to fit the phonological system of either languages.
So, let's look at some examples.
The first example is just the name of those Chinese characters themselves.
In Chinese: han zi
In Korean: hanja
in Japanese: kanji
So, you can see that the pronunciation started as han zi,
but it diverged and became different in Korean and Japanese,
even though it's the same two characters.
Some other examples.
In Korean: sajin.
in Japanese: sashin.
Photograph.
The word for singer.
In Korean: kasu
In Japanese: kashu
Word for promise
In Korean: yagsog
In Japanese: yakusoku
Those examples sound quite similar,
but sometimes they sound really quite different.
But, if we look at the romanized words, sometimes we can see the similarities.
This is the word for telephone.
In Korean: jeonhwa.
In Japanese: denwa.
So, those come from the same characters,
but, again, they're rendered differently in pronunciation.
The next word is school.
In Korean: haggyou
In Japanese: gakkou
Another example is University.
In Korean: daehag
In Japanese: daigaku
Tofu.
In Korean: dubu
In Japanese: toufu
The word for spa or hotspring.
In Korean: oncheon
In Japanese: onsen
So, you can see that sometimes the words are clearly related,
but when you're listening to the language being spoken,
you probably wouldn't be able to catch those words.
Chinese loan words aside,
there are also some Japanese loan words that have entered the Korean language
The word for cheers, when you're having a drink.
In Korean: geongbae
In Japanese: kanpai
The Japanese word for bag.
In Korean it's 'gabang'.
In Japanese it's 'kaban'.
There are also a lot of words that are native to both Korean and Japanese,
that might be related to each other
The word for island, in Korean: seom.
In Japanese: shima.
The word for village, in Korean: maeul
In Japanese: mura.
There are a lot of words like that that I don't really think are connected,
but linguists think might be connected.
Interestingly though, some of the grammatical particles
have very similar pronunciations in the two languages.
For example, the word for above.
In Korean: wiei.
In Japanese: ue.
Question particle.
'Kka', in Korean double consonant, double k.
In Japanese, it's 'ka'.
The word for 'to' or 'towards'.
In Korean, it's 'e'. In Japanese, it's 'e'.
The subject marker, different from the topic marker.
Subject marker in Korean is 'ga' or 'i'.
In Japanese it's just 'ga'.
So basically, Korean and Japanese have a lot of vocabulary that are related,
but not the same.
It's probably enough to help you remember that word if you study it,
but not necessarily enough to pick up that word
when you're hearing it in conversation.
And, of course, most of the spoken vocabulary seems to be unrelated
or they're words that have very ancient connections to each other.
Now, let's look at the different pronunciation of the two languages
In some ways, they're similar.
The basic phonetic sounds of the two languages are quite similar,
but the way those phonetic sounds are arranged
to create syllables is different in the two languages.
In Japanese, basically every syllable has to end in a vowel.
You cannot have a word that ends in a solid consonant like 'cut'.
It has to be something like 'cutto' with a vowel added to the end.
But, in Korean, you can have a consonant at the end of a syllable.
That's why in one of the words that we compared before,
the word for promise, in Japanese it's 'yakusoku'.
You need those vowels after the consonants,
but in Korean it's 'yagsogg'.
Another difference is that in Japanese, the pronunciation of consonants
doesn't change depending on their position in the word,
they just are always the same.
But in Korean, there are consonants that can change,
depending on whether they're at the beginning of the word,
in the middle of the word, or at the end of the word.
Korean also has a greater variety of vowels and diphthongs.
So, in general Korean pronunciation is just more complex than Japanese pronunciation.
One thing that is completely different between the two languages
is their writing systems.
Japanese is written using a combination
of Chinese characters and two syllabaries.
Those syllabaries consist of characters that represent entire syllables,
rather than just individual phonetic sounds.
The Japanese writing system is quite complex,
and since you need to learn more than 2,000 kanji to be able to read at an adult level,
it can take quite a lot of time and efforts to learn.
Korean on the other hand is written in the Hangul alphabet,
which is one of the simplest writing systems in the world.
Korean used to use hanja or Chinese characters
in the same way that Japanese uses kanji in combination with hiragana and katakana,
but they've done away with that.
Now, they're just using the simplified writing system of Hangul.
The Hangul alphabet consists of individual phonetic symbols,
that are arranged together to create syllables.
In this example for Hanja.
This is the sound for ha like an h
this is the sound for a
this is the sound for n like an n,
this is the sound for j or t, and this is a.
So, where as Japanese requires you to learn 92 syllabaries symbols and 2,000 kanji.
In Korean, you just have to learn 24 phonetic symbols
and you can use those to represent any new words that you learn.
So, to summarize Korean and Japanese are very similar
in terms of sentence structure and grammar,
and they both have a large number of Chinese loan words.
But, the native vocabularies are quite different as in the pronunciation,
which makes these two languages mutually unintelligible.
On top of that, the two writing systems are now completely different,
with the new modern Korean system completely avoiding Chinese characters these days.
My feeling is that Japanese and Korean did originate from the same language
a very long time ago,
but they've been diverging for a long time perhaps about 2,000 years,
so that now they're very different even though structurally they're quite similar.
Thank you for watching the Langfocus channel.
Leave your comments down below,
especially if you have studied Japanese or Korean
and you can let us know about some other similarities or differences
that you have discovered.
Thank you for watching and have a nice day.