Chinese Vs Japanese Vs Korean: Learning Experience
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today. I want to talk about learning Chinese or Mandarin Chinese versus, uh, Japanese and Korean. Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell to get notifications. So, uh, I have learned to varying degrees of fluency, uh, Mandarin Chinese, which is the first one I learned back in 1968.
Full-time at school, but living in an environment which was not Mandarin speaking, in other words, Hong Kong. Uh, then I learned Japanese basically on my own, uh, helped by the fact that I could read Chinese characters. And of course, living in Japan for nine years, my Japanese got progressively better.
And then I said, at some point, I think in the early eighties, I should learn Korean because I have invested so much time into learning, uh, Chinese and Japanese, but I never had much time for it. And at different sort of points I have given it a go. Three months here, six months there. And I'm really not very satisfied with the level that I have achieved in Korean, but let's compare these three languages.
So they're East Asian languages from a geographic point of view because these three countries are located in East Asia. However, they are not of the same language family. Chinese is Sino-Tibetan. So related to languages in Tibet, Burma, uh, I don't know all of them. I'm not a linguist in the sense of being, you know, someone who studies linguistics.
Of course Japanese, according to some is related to the sort of, uh, Ural-Altaic languages, Korean, Turkish, Mongolian. There are other people who challenged that, but it's a completely different language family, both of them, Korean and Japanese. Um, but the underpinning of Japanese and Chinese in terms of vocabulary is Chinese.
Uh, in the case of Japanese, even their writing system, their phonetic writing system derives from Chinese characters. So China had a major influence on them. Of course, learning these languages has become easier than ever. I learned Chinese and Japanese at a time when there was no internet, there were no MP3 files.
There is no way, no online dictionaries. You certainly couldn't do the things we do at LingQ, import stuff from newspapers, from YouTube, from Netflix, or, um, you know, basically save words to a database for later review and all of these things weren't available. You had a book, you looked things up in a dictionary, and if you had the money, you got yourself a teacher.
And if you are lucky enough to live where the language was spoken, as I did for Japanese, then of course you took advantage. I learn languages because I'm interested in history. And so it's important to understand that what we talk about today as China, Korea, Japan, and in the case of China, at one point, whatever, four or five billion people, uh, Japan, maybe 125/127 million people.
Uh, Korea would be 50 plus 25, I don't know the exact number for North Korea, 75 million people. Those are large language groups. And as I said, Chinese, insofar as vocabulary is concerned, is the base. More than half of all of the words used in Chinese and Japanese, especially in more serious content, much as is the case in English where much of our more sort of serious...
okay, academic vocabulary comes from French in the case of Japanese and Korean comes from Chinese. So geographically, we consider East Asia as an area where you look at China, but it's important to remember that, you know, homo sapiens came out of Africa, spread all over the world, moved eastward towards, uh, Asia.
Maybe to some extent and increasingly people feel there were some, you know, intermingling with, uh, previous, um, call it homo sapiens. Like we are homo sapien sapiens. So, you know, Neanderthal or the equivalent in Asia might have had its contribution. I just don't know, but it's possible. Because things they said were not the case before it turns out they do more research and they discover for example, that, uh, many human or homo sapian sapians did mix with Neanderthals, um, at any rate...
so if you look at a map of, of human movements 50,000 years ago, you see people moving through China, moving from the North, down to the South. Uh, even the Ainu supposedly, sort of indigenous to the, to Japan. They came over from the mainland. Uh, there's no one indigenous to Japan. They didn't spring out of the ground like mushrooms.
They came from somewhere. They might've come via a sea route. And there are theories that people went to Japan via Shanghai and originated in Southern China, or that they came across their Korean peninsula. This is 2000 odd years ago. So at some point things sort of solidified. And there is the sense that at least in terms of, uh, you know, genetics, not that that matters, but, uh, Japanese with their, Ainu sort of mixture and the Koreans and the Mongolians and the Manchurians, uh, there... and the Northern Chinese there sort of one group, Tibetans, even though the Chinese and the buttons are closer, linguistically.
And then the Southern Chinese, Southeast Asians, that's sort of like somewhat different groups with a lot of scrambling going on. And of course, historically a lot of those peoples in central or in, in inner Asia call it, Mongolians and the Khitans and the Tanguts and the Manchus and the Jurchens , they were quite powerful in their own
right. And at various times conquered their neighbours. And so lots went on before we ended up with what we got today. So that's just a little, I like that kind of stuff. And so then of course, uh, over the last few thousand years, these countries have developed distinctive, you know, histories of their own.
And they developed a language of their own each one of them and a writing system of their own. And in the case of Chinese, the writing system is exclusively pictograms, each character represents meaning. Not always identifiable in terms of sort of pictorial or image wise, although you can with explanations, see how it's derived from something that we could visualize, but mostly it's, it's an idea.
So it's an ideogram. Yeah, I guess that's the way to describe it. And most of those ideograms have a phonetic component, uh, and that's where the kanna that's used Japanese... in Japanese they have these ideograms, but they also have two parallel phonetic scripts, which derive from certain Chinese characters, which were used to represent sounds in Japanese and then eventually evolved into kanna. And this happened about, you know, 980 or so, uh, part of that whole range of influence that came over from China, uh, artistic, religious, literary, and so forth. Uh, in the case of Korea, somewhere around the 15th century, supposedly their King created Hangul,
which is, um, a phonetic writing system that started from scratch and has no influence from Chinese characters. So that's in so far as the writing system is concerned. Um, as far as, you know, the, the, uh, Romanization or the phonetic writing system that we can use to get a sense of how these words are pronounced when we don't yet know Hangul or we don't yet know Hiragana,
uh, the Chinese use Pinyin, which was developed, uh, you know, after 1949 and replaced previous systems that had been created by, by foreigners. Uh, personally I thought that Yale Romanization system was better because in Pinyin they use letters like Q and X in ways that we are used to. So Q has a "ch" sound.
Because theoretically, the "ch" in Chinese is a little different from "ch". So they've got a different symbol. The similarly, the X is a "shi" Xi, which is different from S kind of between "Sh" and S, so use an X. So if you get a name card from a Chinese person and they've got Qs and Xs in there, you'll be quite confused until you get used to it.
But once you get used to it, it's actually quite a practical system. The Japanese use a Romanization system. There's two, there's the one that is the most helpful is one where, you know, if you have a word like hatchimitsu, which is, um, honey, uh, then the hatchi , chi is CH, and Mitsu "tsu" is TSU. However, in the Japanese writing system, in Hiragana or Katakana, uh, because you have sort of.
Sets of these...these are syllables. So you have sets of ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. Ha, hi, hu, he, ho. And then it goes, uh, Ta that uses the T sound TA, ta, chi, tsu, te, to. So in the Japanese system, the T becomes a "chi" and a "tsu". So they, they decide that therefore for the poor foreigner, trying to pronounce the word hatchimitsu
we should write it to be pure H A T I M I T U, Hatimitu, which might be, you know, close to the Japanese system but it's useless for a non-Japanese speaker trying to figure out how to pronounce a Japanese word. Fortunately, that's not used too much except by the purists. Now in Korean, they have a Romanization system, which I find the least useful
because it uses the letter E in all kinds of different ways. And I'm never clear whether this is a, some kind of a diphthong or an attempt to, to, uh, represent, you know, uh, this, "uh", sound, eh, I never know quite what it's trying to do. And sometimes it seems to have a Y, uh, role whenever I see the, the, uh, Korean, uh, Romanization, I'd just ignore it.
I, if I'm reading on the internet, I'll use text to speech, uh, or I'll use the Hangul. So it's really not very helpful, but again, developed by, you know, the ministry of education. So a whole bunch of very serious people came up with this thing as somehow being, uh, I dunno, close to the original Korean. So that's so far as the writing system and the, uh, call it transliteration or Romanization systems used.
In any case, I think you have to listen, you can't rely on the, uh, Romanization. You have to get yourself used to seeing something written with their phonetic script, which doesn't exist in Chinese and then how it's pronounced. And if you do enough listening, you gradually get used to it in the case of all three.
So that's... we've covered the writing systems, the differences, the romanticization differences, um, Pronunciation. Obviously the biggest problem in Chinese is the tones. And there are no tones in Japanese or Korean because remember Japanese and Korean belong to a different language family. So tonal language is Thai,
you know, Vietnamese, Tibetan, I guess I'm assuming. Cause Sino-Tibetan, whatever. But Japanese and Korean are not tonal. So to get the tones, I found it very difficult to try to remember the individual tones, um, with your reading. If you're reading on LingQ, the tones are marked, a lot of places they will give you marks, you know.
So they'll show you what tone it is. And by the end of reading a lot, in Pinyin, with the tone marks, you gradually start to get used to it. But the bigger thing is do a lot of listening. Focus on phrases so that these natural phrases come out with the natural tones and, and recognize that you're going to start out at 30% accuracy moved to 40, 50, 60, 70.
You'll never be a hundred, but you'll get closer and closer. Uh, so tone is not a problem in Japanese. However, there are people who claim that there is this, uh, pitch tone issue in Japanese. I have, I wasn't even aware of it when I lived in Japan. Nobody has trouble understanding me. I don't think it's an important issue unless you are some kind of a purist that you want to, you know, be a hundred percent like a native, but then, then the issue becomes which pitch tone are you going to copy?
Because the pitch seems to me quite different in Osaka than it is in Sendai or in Tokyo. So I think it's more important to pick up on, and this is true for all languages, pick up on the natural intonation, the natural rhythm, uh, of the language. Try not to introduce, for example, English intonation into Japanese or Korean: "watashi wa".
They don't say that. It's a little more monotonous, more like French, and you have to catch, you know, you get ahold of that intonation by, by dint of doing a lot of listening without trying to worry about is this sound, which pitch and stuff, at least for me, not something I spend any time on.
I would far rather increase my vocabulary, increase my comprehension. And in doing so I will increase my ability to communicate effectively. Uh, Korean I found that the pronunciation actually is quite similar to, uh, to Japanese. Of course, the words are different. In fact, some words sound the same and are completely different from Japanese, but I find this, the pronunciation is if you can pronounce the one, you can pronounce the other.
And in terms of European languages, You know, Greek, Spanish, any of these languages where you have few diphthongs, basically pure vowels, it's going to be similar to those two languages. Okay. Grammar, generally speaking, having studied Slavic languages, Romance languages, German. Um, I find the Asian language is more forgiving when it comes to grammar.
Uh, it's harder to make a mistake. They're more flexible. I go today. I go tomorrow. I go yesterday. Um, not quite, but almost. In Japanese, there is a clearer sort of indication and in Korean, uh, of tense, not so much in Chinese, uh, no gender, no number. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's easier. Uh, this is somewhat compensated or at least the, the, the counterpart to that is
the different levels of politeness. Uh, what the linguistic students call register, you know, it's, it's quite a bit more differentiated than say in English or in European languages. So you have to be a little careful. Uh, I therefore try to keep it neutral in Japanese and Korean. Don't wander too far down the sort of casual side of things.
And I don't go too far into the very formal, polite kind of thing. Stay neutral until you get very good at it. And then you'll have a sense of, of what, what form of a word verb or whatever is appropriate. Less of a problem in Chinese. Normally they're not as polite or as formalized as the Japanese and the, uh, Koreans.
Um, now another issue when learning a language is the availability of content. And, uh, to that extent, I was very lucky when I studied Mandarin Chinese because the Yale in China series had had such a broad range of material: beginner material, um, you know, books on geography, history with 500 characters, 1000 characters. A range of, of, uh, reading material with glossaries behind every chapter or every page, uh, on literature history, you name it.
Uh, communist propaganda, whatever it might be. It, it was complete. I did not find that to be the case with Japanese. I had to regularly scour the bookstores to find any kind of reading material with, with the glossary. Uh, of course easier today because you can, you can find content, uh, Uh, you can go to these automatic transcription sites, get it transcribed, bring it into LingQ, for example, study it.
So it has become a lot easier in that regard. The same is... even worse with Korean. One of the reasons why I would sort of go out Korean for a while and then stop, is that there, there is an abundance of beginner to intermediate material in Korean: uninteresting, uninspired narrators, very difficult to listen to.
Uh, a lot of emphasis on, you know, older sister, younger sister, second cousin, uncle, third aunt, all the sort of details of, of different words used for relatives. I don't have any Korean relatives. To me, that's just... and it's part of this general trend in all three languages, those people who create texts, the native speakers of those languages,
put a lot of effort into, you know, festivals and traditional foods and things of that nature, which are therefore less familiar to us and less difficult, less, more difficult to get into, at least as far as I'm concerned. I like to hear about how people lead their everyday lives. And of course the, the voice is important.
It has to have resonance. You have to connect with that voice. People, natural conversations, uh, about things in our daily lives often, you know, natural conversations subsequently transcribed, this kind of thing is, is, is much better. But so in so far as the accessibility and availability of, of learning material, uh, better now than before, because of our ability to connect to
Netflix and YouTube, people who like Korean drama or Japanese or Chinese drama can find those things to learn from. So just trying to touch on some of the main areas, uh, that influence people who are studying these three languages. They are all worth it. Those are important centers of a history, of culture, of people that we want to get to know.
They're all a little different. They're all well worth learning for their own reasons. Okay. There you have it. And I'm going to leave a couple of suggested videos, one in Japanese, one in Korean that are these one in Chinese and one, and, uh, in, in Japanese that might want to listen to, to get a sense, uh, of those languages.
Okay. Bye. For now.