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If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner.
Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)
Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language.
The added benefit is that Chinese isnโt a dead language.
Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they canโt have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages.
Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago.
The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!
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I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having hell of a time untill I came across a Japanese textbook written in Turkish.
If you are from Central Asia, you can leverage both of your languages (native Central Asian & Russian) for learning English. It's better to learn English through Russian untill it's time to learn the English tense system at which point you can swith back to your native Central Asian as Russian is not very amenable for learning the English tense system whereas the tenses(rather aspects?) of C.A. languages line up with that of English in almost one to one manner. Thinking about the English tenses through the "Russian mind" was a nightmare untill I realized I already know the tenses through my native Kazakh.
Mathematicians never shy away from throwing everything at their disposal at a problem. Acting like them speeds up language acquisition process considerably.
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Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features"
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...
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As native Chinese speaker:
The Look:
1. Japanese: I like the kanji, it is very recognizable, even the character set is different. Most Chinese will have no problem reading traditional Chinese characters, though somewhat slower. The rest...not so much, kanas are my biggest headache.
2. Korean: First thing I noticed is the presence of circle, which is not part of Chinese radicals until very recently. Because it looks like bubbles, so it looks somewhat ... cute? No meaning can be inferred beyond that. Also the use of spaces are noticeable.
The Sound:
1. Japanese: Fast. Less variation in the speech itself. Notice the presence of pitch. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese
2. Korean: Not as fast as Japanese, but still faster than Chinese. A lot of unfamiliar sounds that are absent in Chinese pronunciation. Sometimes I would be able to find one word or two that sounds like Chinese and makes sense in the context, but the rest is just foreign.
Question to Korean speakers:
Do you guys recognize each individual Hangul character's meaning (under the context of the word of course) if that word has a Chinese origin? Or the word is recognized as whole. For example ๋ถ๋์ฐ(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, ไธๅ็ฃ, which in Chinese means ไธ(not)ๅ(moving)็ฃ(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?
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I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like ๅฝ) as traditional forms. Maybe someone knows the history?
Also, regarding this statement:
่บ (Korea/Taiwan) ๅฐ (Japan/China)
In Taiwan, the latter form of tai (ๅฐ) is used 99% of the time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (่บ) AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money. Street signs for famous buildings all use ๅฐ, i.e. ๅฐๅ101, ๅฐๅๆพๅฑฑๆฉๅ ด, etc.
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I suspect Japanese folks feel the same way so I turned to my right and asked a coworker what Chinese sounds like to him. His answer was ใกใใทใใใใทใ (gibberish).
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Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah.
As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences: 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China. With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan
For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai
But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified)
I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese.
Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite was:
ๆ็ด The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively.
In Japanese, it means 'Letter'
In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'
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If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional. It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.
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P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.
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Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish.
Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're a Korean speaker and vice versa?
Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would feel like.
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This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners brought their language, mixed it with the local language and evolved a new one out of that.
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Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese.
After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by ใงใ ใชใ ใ... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English.
Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as โฆใโฆใชใ and โฆไนโฆๆฒโฆ It is easy to find that ่จ่ชญใฟ words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin.
IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.