Learning Japanese, Chinese and Korean Compared

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I was asked to do a video, today in fact, about the differences between learning Japanese and Chinese. I appreciate getting specific requests. It's always nice to respond to listeners/viewers who are interested in a particular subject, so I thought I would look try to look at these differences, both in terms of how I study the two languages -- I'm going to throw Korean in, as well, three Asian languages -- and what I think are general differences in terms of difficulty and so forth.

Remember that I studied Chinese as a full-time language student paid for by the Canadian Government because I was a diplomat and they were training me to learn Chinese. I had three hours in the morning and then I had lots of hours full-time to devote to reading, listening and building up my skill level in Chinese. I lived in Hong Kong, which was not a place where Mandarin Chinese was spoken, so I did not have the benefit of being immersed in the language. In Japan I studied it entirely on my own, but I had the advantage of living in Japan. Korean I am studying here in Vancouver, so again I'm on my own and don't have the language surrounding me.

First of all, as you may know, I believe that the best way to learn a language is to devote a lot of time to listening, reading and vocabulary accumulation. You can speak whenever you want to start speaking, but until you have a lot of words it's very difficult to have meaningful conversations and I like doing things that are meaningful in the language.

Now, with Chinese an immediate problem is that until you have learned enough characters you cannot read anything very interesting or meaningful in the language, so that makes Chinese quite difficult. I made a special effort to learn the most frequent 1,000 characters. I had flashcards for them and I used to write them out on these checked exercise books where I had sort of a primitive spaced repetition system that I've described before where I would write the character out seven to 10 times and then put the meaning or the pronunciation over three or four columns to the right, pick up another flashcard and do the same thing until I ran into that first character and I would do that literally every day.

Once I had the 1,000 most common characters that I deliberately wrote out longhand to try to learn, thereafter as I encountered characters in my reading it was enough to write them out five to 10 times. Of course you keep on forgetting, but forgetting, rewriting, relearning, seeing them in context and eventually they started to stick. With characters after a while you start to get used to the different components, the radicals as they are called, so that helps you remember these characters and you get better and better at learning them. When you first start out it seems like an impossible task to remember the stroke order, 10, 12, 13 different strokes for just one character.

So the reading in the case of Chinese initially is a big obstacle, but once you have the characters it becomes very easy to build vocabulary because different combinations of the characters that you now know correspond to different words the way we count words in English. That was regard to reading.

Bear in mind when I studied Chinese I had to write an exam. As it turned out, after less than a year I would have to be able to translate newspaper editorials from Chinese into English, from English in to Chinese, write a diplomatic note, so I had to focus on my writing. With Japanese I was studying it only in order to be able to use it and therefore I essentially never wrote it, so as long as I could read it I was happy. The problem in Japanese is that a lot of the sort of beginner material, the easier reading material is very heavy to hiragana and I found it very difficult to read hiragana. The other thing is because the hiragana is a syllable-type system I wanted to move to text that had a lot of characters as soon as possible, like newspapers and stuff like that, but of course I couldn't understand the newspapers. It was too quick for me if I listened to the radio news or something, so I was stuck with reading a lot of the beginner material.

One of the mysteries for me in language instruction is that people who write textbooks like to provide children's stories, stories about Taro who rode a turtle underneath the ocean, fairy stories, stories about flying carp on whatever festival day. Subjects I would never read about in English, I would have no interest in these subjects whatsoever. The same is true in Korean, lots of these “cultural-type” content items for beginners or children's stories which are really not of very much interest. I remember there was a series called Naganuma where I just read on and on and on in hiragana and found it quite boring and was very happy when I was able to get to texts that were of more interest.

In a sense, Japanese is easier to read because it's a phonetic system, but there are two different phonetic systems and I never enjoyed reading in katakana. You don't get enough of a dosage of it, at least I didn't, that I'm still not very good at my katakana. I prefer to read text with a lot of characters, even if at times I pronounce these characters in the Chinese way, I know what the meaning is. Reading-wise, Japanese is probably easier because you only need about 2,000, whereas in Chinese you have only characters to go with.

The reading of Korean is the easiest of all because it's an alphabet like we understand an alphabet. The difficulty with Korean, just as in Japanese or perhaps slightly more so, is there are a lot of words that are based on Chinese and if you read them in the phonetic script you often don't know what they are, so that presents certain difficulties. So for Japanese definitely you should learn the Chinese characters because it makes it a lot easier to reading. Reading is major tool for language learning for vocabulary accumulation. I don't know how you would accumulate sort of an adult vocabulary in Japanese if you can't read characters and read interesting and meaningful text.

Insofar as the sort of word order or grammatical structure of the languages, I think every language is different and you just have to get used to it. When you start out it feels strange, but certainly Chinese is easier than Japanese or Korean, easier to us as English speakers or speakers of European languages, because the word order is very often more similar to what we're used to and in many cases simpler. There are no conjugations or declensions to deal with, it's ‘I go today, I go tomorrow', very simple. ‘You go, he go, we go, they go', it doesn't change. There are some specific structures that are peculiar to Chinese and you just have to get used to them and they seem strange at first. For example, we use the relative pronoun ‘which', whereas in Chinese they talk about ‘the you ate dinner.' The dinner you ate is ‘the you ate dinner'. There are some different orders there that you have to get used to and it just takes time, so with enough reading and listening it eventually starts to feel natural.

There are more strange-to-us structures in Japanese and you have the problem of the different levels of politeness which to some extent exists in all languages, but is a much bigger deal in Japanese and in Korean. For a long time it just seems that you can't get used to that, but eventually you do through enough exposure.

With Korean right now I'm experiencing the difficulty that the way the future is constructed I just can't get my brain tied around it. I've seen the explanations, I've seen examples and when I speak I have a lot of difficulty coming up with those structures, but I know from previous experience that with enough exposure, enough listening and reading, eventually these structures will become natural to me. So, yes, Chinese is easier than Japanese or Korean insofar as the structure of the language is concerned.

Insofar as pronunciation, I think that Chinese is the most difficult because of the tones. However, the actual sounds themselves, a lot of them are quite similar to English. There are some difficult sounds, but not so many and it's not surprising that there are quite a few English speakers who are absolutely fluent and flawless speakers of Chinese, such as the famous Dashan who is Canadian and a personality on TV in China. I think all three of them are fairly straightforward when it comes to pronunciation.

The tones are a problem in Chinese and I think that's where, again, you need to do a lot of listening and listening for the intonation. As I've said many times, I found it very useful to listen to these shun chun comic dialogues because the comedians exaggerate the intonation and if you can get the intonation as part of a series of phrases or even pick up on the music of the language then the tones will slot into place. Not 100%, but 60, 70, 80% of the time as you get better at it.

As far as understanding the language, I think Chinese probably represents the greatest difficulty in terms of comprehension because there are so many homonyms, that is words that sound the same but have different meaning, and because different parts of China have different tones and pronounce these words differently. So the ‘jer' sound is ‘zer' in some places, the ‘shur' becomes ‘sa', so all of a sudden there are more homonyms because they aren't distinguishing between the ‘jer', the ‘zer' and the ‘shur' and the ‘sa'. So Chinese from that perspective is more difficult to understand.

I find Japanese quite easy to understand and Korean it's too early for me to tell because I'm just getting into it. I have the sense that, there again, there are no tones to deal with in Japanese or Korean, so that makes it easier to pronounce and easier to understand when the language is spoken. One of the problems I had with Japanese, but to some extent is true of all languages, is I remember myself being frustrated that so many of the words sounded the same, "kawarimasu", "wakarimasu". It is a fact that Japanese has fewer sounds in it than most languages. Of the languages I've learned it's the one with the fewest different sounds, "la, ki, ku, ke, ko" times however many, so that makes it more difficult at first because the words have a tendency to sound the same. So difficulty, I found Russian difficult. I find trying to go from Russian into Czech difficult where it's similar, but there are some different structures. It's always a challenge, but it's just a matter of giving yourself enough time and enough exposure with the language and not getting frustrated when you go to speak and you can't quite get the hang of their structure and you can't remember words. Don't worry about it. If you continue the intensive input eventually these things will become more natural and the brain will get used to it. I don't care if you're a Westerner learning an Asian language or an Asian learning a Western language or learning a language from the Amazon or an Aboriginal language our brains will eventually get used to the new patterns and you just have to exposure yourself enough to it.

So to that extent, comparing the difficulty level of Chinese to Japanese, I'm not sure that's useful. If you have Chinese and you go to Japanese you're at a big advantage because you already have the characters, hopefully. If you're a Japanese person, if you're an Asian language speaker, native speaker or otherwise, of the East Asian languages you have of course an advantage. I mean the challenges of the language are there and if you're motivated enough and you commit the time, if you're flexible, if you don't fight the new structures and find them strange and resist them and so forth, then you will learn them.

I don't know if that answers the question, but I've talked for almost 14 minutes on the subject and so I look forward to hearing your comments. Thank you.