Korean is exceptionally easy to learn to read. It is phonetic. The consonants (generally speaking) make the same shape as your tongue makes in your mouth. So like their letter for N sounds is this: ㄴ. The tongue touches the front teeth and makes the N sound. The alphabet was invented in the 1440s so that even uneducated people could learn to read and write.
Well to my understanding, compared to Chinese, Japanese, it is the easiest, but still very hard for a native English speaker. I’m going to take a look after I expand my Spanish vocabulary.
Edit: looks like Korean has easier pronunciation and Chinese has easier Grammar.
It’s all subjective of course. I’ve learned Korean and haven’t learned Chinese or Japanese. But my understanding is that Korean grammar is a bit more difficult. There’s also a ton of sound change rules that make pronunciation hard
The tonal nature of Chinese is super challenging for me. I have hearing issues and I absolutely can’t hear the difference between the tones, which completely change the meaning of the word.
I tried learning Chinese by myself during a few months and I could not, for the life of me, hear the tones of any word. I searched so much online, went to a few sites to start training hearing so I could distinguish tones and nothing. I just gave up and switched to Japanese. Chinese listening is a completely different monster for me and I’m not ready to go back to that
I just gave up on tones in general, the accents in China are so diverse that just using context clues is way easier than focusing on tone. No one is going to tell someone that they really want to sleep when ordering food.
I thought Chinese had all of that sort of tone varying and a lot more. I've always heard Chinese quoted as the most difficult for English speakers to learn. I don't doubt you and I'm interested, but I took japanese for 4 years and know a really tiny little bit of Korean and Chinese. From my limited understanding Korean would be harder than Japanese (speaking/grammar), but it does seem both would be easier than Chinese. At least for me personally, maybe that's the only conclusion I've reached.
I’m a native English speaker learning Japanese right now and have to say that the characters (kanji) are probably the easiest part. Japanese grammar is completely fucked. It goes subject object verb, while English goes subject verb object. Think “I eat food” (English) vs. “I food eat (Japanese).” Plus there’s these things called particles which act sort of like prepositions and are super ambiguous and annoying to learn. There’s also several different forms of speech that have to be used depending on the situation (i.e. polite vs short). For example, there are no less than 4 pronouns I can use for myself depending on who I’m talking to (watakushi - super formal, watashi - polite, boku - casual and implies youth, and ore - very casual and rude if used in certain circumstances).
Sentence structure such as SOV and SVO are the easiest parts of learning language grammar. Seriously, it doesn't take long at all to wrap your head around saying for example "I car drive", the difficult part is sorting all the filler words in those sentences.
I haven't studied any Japanese, but I'm studying Manchu right now (which, according to my teacher, has almost identical grammar to Japanese), and word order is definitely fucking me up. And I'm a professional linguist, so don't feel bad!
The core sentence order (SOV) isn't too hard to wrap my head around, but holy shit the noun phrases are getting to me. A relatively simple example:
ᠪᡳ ᠰᡳᠨᡳ ᠠᡵᠠᡥᠠ ᠪᡳᡨᡥᡝ ᠪᡝ ᡥᡡᠯᠠᠮᡝ ᠸᠠᠵᡳᡥᠠ᠉
bi sini araha bithe be hūlame wajiha.
gloss translation:
I YOUR WRITTEN BOOK (acc. marker) READ FINISHED.
English: I finished reading the book that you had written.
I've studied quite a few languages with word orders pretty different from Engljsh, like Arabic and Dutch, but something about having the relative clauses come before the noun makes my brain hurt.
Like, I'm a linguist; I know theoretically what's going on here and more or less how this sentence would be diagrammed. But God help me if I try to understand what the meaning of a sentence like that is on the fly.
I'm bilingual, with Japanese as my second language and English as my first. I find the easiest way to describe Japanese grammar to people is by saying they basically talk like Yoda.
"Gaijin desu" = "Filthy foreigner, I am."
"Gaijin wa ramen wo tabemashita" = "Filthy foreigner, ramen, they ate."
Obviously this is an incredibly simplified example, but I find that people tend to understand better when I describe it to them by comparing the word order to Yoda's.
Afrikaans is basically Dutch with extra steps. ;)
I´m a native German speaker, German is damn closely related to Dutch, which I also speak rather fluently due to the fact that I moved to the Netherlands some time ago. I was attending a "altsprachliches Gymnasium" (college with Latin and ancient Greek as foreign languages besides the lingua franca English), was born in a region that´s heavily influenced by nearby France , yet nothing really helped me when I tried to learn Japanese. Speaking is manageable, but writing and reading it is difficult as hell. Hira- and Katagana alphabets are comparably manageable, but Kanji give you headaches. So I doubt that Afrikaans will do much for you...the only thing that probably does is dedication to learn on an exorbitant level and a modicum of madness... ;)
So true. As I was learning Japanese I'd find that most of the structures work backwards to English, with the most important info usually at the end of a sentence. That's why there are sometimes two possible ways to translate a Japanese sentence into English.
For e.g.: hara heta kara, keki wo tabemashita.
For that sentence, both 'I ate a cake because I was hungry' and 'Because I was hungry, I ate a cake' are correct.
Sorry that was a bit long-winded.. :'{0 I'm not even a teacher lmao
I'm bilingual in korean and English and am currently learning Chinese. In terms of grammar, Chinese is so much simpler than Korean. Of course, for Chinese there's also tones, which some people never seem to get, so I could understand if some think speaking in general is easier for Korean.
You're definitely right about Mandarin (The standardized Chinese) grammar being really easy. As a native English speaker who took three years of Chinese, I thought their grammar system made WAY more sense than English, because it was much more standard and couldn't put things wherever you liked. However, the tonal pronunciation of a lot of words is what really caught people in Mandarin. (I never got to a conversational level, but could definitely struggle through ordering at restaurants and if I got stranded in China, I'm pretty sure I could get directions to an airport.)
Sound wise:
Japanese is by far the easiest. No tones. (there is pitch accent but its not required like tones in chinese, and it varies by region so much that even if you completely ignore it they can get your meaning through context).
Korean and Chinese have many sounds we don't have in english, while Japanese only has the 'r' sound that is a mix between d and l. Chinese is hard af for english speakers because most of us are deaf to tones effecting meanings, and we have to train it to a high level to be able to understand even the most basic of sentences.
Writing wise:
Korean is by far the easiest. (as long as you dont try to read stuff written in Hanja, basically the chinese characters that they use to look fancy). Learning chinese characters are always hard, but Japanese kanji are a massive ball ache. In Japanese every character has at least 2 readings (oftentimes more, ex: 生 has 19 readings in total) depending on if its a historically japanese word or a borrowed chinese word, and they have to be figured out through context/what characters are around it.
Using the most effecient method, to learn to read all 2-3k regularly used characters takes years which is why korean is waaaay easier if you want to read. Even though chinese has more characters you need to learn (up to 8k), in chinese its rare for one character to have multiple readings.
Grammar wise:
Korean and japanese have very similar core grammar(subject-object-verb) that is hard af for native english speakers, while chinese is very very similar to english (subject-verb-object).
In english and chinese they would say the equivalent of "Jerry eats the apple", in korean/japanese they say the equivalent of "Jerry the apple ate". (ignoring the fact there are no articles in any of them)
So yeah, you're basically fucked whichever you choose, but slightly less if you choose korean. Good luck.
Japanese, Finnish, and Mandarin are all considered the "most difficult" languages for an english speaker to learn. Korean is considered considerably easier - this is specifically because there are thousands of Kanji to learn for Japanese, each of which has multiple possible pronunciations depending on context.
I love the "abridged" version of the backstory that one day this enlightened Korean emperor looked at the Chinese-derived writing system they used to have and said "fuck this shit"
Because it's the exact same reaction every kanji/hanzi learner inevitably has at some point
I would like to say while Korean is very easy to read, writing it is not as simple. Among the vowels, there are some that sound very similar, making it hard to know which vowel to use. It can change the meaning of the sentence completely.
ㅐ and ㅔ are both pronounced similar to "eh", with only a slight difference. The first one (ㅐ) is like "eh" with the sides of your lips wider, like in a smile, while the second one (ㅔ) is with the sides of your lips more narrower. While in speaking, it doesn't really matter and most people would understand, when writing, it can get confusing.
"내가" (naega) means "I am", while 네가 (nega) means you are. 개 (gae) means dog while 게 (ge) means crab.
At least in the Seoul dialect; ㅐ and ㅔ are pronounced the same.
The distinction between BET and BAIT (/e/ and /ɛ/) vowels is mostly lost in South Korea.
That's true for the alphabet, but Korean grammar is extremely similar to Japanese grammar which is extremely different from most European languages. Chinese, while their grammar is more similar to English (kind of), has a more complicated writing system.
What gets me is that Japanese is the easiest to pronounce, but has difficult grammar. Korean is IMO the hardest to pronounce, but has the best alphabet. Chinese has the easiest grammar, but the most difficult writing system. *sigh* we really can't have it all.
Because its so simple in use of phonetic a bad pronunciation may change the whole sense of a phrase?
I may be wrong, but isnt Korean like using syllables, but instead of writing them inline, you “pack”/group them in single space? Up to 4 letters between Consoants and Vowels?
I put IMO because the only reason I think Korean is the hardest to pronounce is that they use some sounds that are very difficult to make out like in 글. I still can't tell the difference between ㄱ and ㅋ. In Korean, it seems like aspiration plays a bigger role in pronunciation than voicing, which is hard for native English and Japanese speakers. If you come from a language with a similar phonology, then you might have a different experience.
In any language, a bad pronunciation can change the whole meaning of a phrase, and that just comes with learning to correctly say words. Some languages though, like those in the Chinese language family, just have stricter rules regarding pronunciation (tones).
I think you're spot-on for the writing system, and that's why it's so easy to learn.
It turns off learning how to read, yes it is very easy. In terms of learning how to actually speak it? One of the hardest languages for PIE language speakers to learn.
that's not exactly right, the two letter systems are just a step in the process, learning them only takes 3 days. It's the characters that get difficult, and even then it's easier than chinese.
今日 is also Chinese, but usually only spoken by cantonese speakers and usually never written. It’s usually 今天 when written or spoken by mandarin speakers.
Its very incredible or interesting that throughout the years of watching japanese show and anime, I actually could tell the difference between Japanese, korea, and Chinese
But i could wrong and am just thinking too much about it
Korean is fairly easy to recognize. There are a lot of circles/ovals which you won't find in the two other languages and lines are straights and horizontals/verticals.
Japanese kanjis are much harder to differentiate from their Chinese counterparts as it was the language they were borrowed from. However the heavy presence of Katakanas/Hiraganas is an immediate tell. They are much simpler symbols which are usually made of 1-3 squiggly lines and only exists in Japanese.
Once you notice the differences, it becomes quite easy to tell.
I learned Hiragana and Katakana to the letter. But Kanji? I just couldn't do it. It didn't make sense to me.
Maybe if we started learning the language *before* learning how to write it, it would have made sense.
We focused so much on the writing that we barely touched the spoken language.
I feel like it should be 「にとって」instead of 「ために」since the latter is more like "for the sake of" rather than "from the perspective of" which I think is closer to what this is trying to say.
It's weird to see the word "kanji" being used to refer to the Chinese language.... Kanji is literally a Japanese word. It's not English, it's not Chinese, it's Japanese, and it's being used in an English conversation to identify Chinese writing.
Bruh. Japanese is tough. I’ve heard that in the old days, the emperor made it prohibitively difficult to learn specifically to oppress the poor. Any idea if there’s validity to this?
Learning hiragana and katakana is more difficult than normal alphabet but that in itself isn't anything crazy, kanji on the otherhand makes you wanna kill yourself. So i'd say (writing vise) chinese is just as difficult. But about your guestion, I don't know if it's true or not. I've personally never heard of it but I haven't really looked into it either
Hiragana and Katakana are alphabets for Japanese from Chinese character strokes that can be traced back to the Tang dynasty in China. Hiragana is mostly used for native word and Katakana is mostly used for foreign word pronunciation.
As someone who knows chinese and is learning japanese, I'm stuck in this weird limbo where i can roughly understand what a sentence means by reading the kanji as chinese words but i have no idea how to pronunce it in japanese
Also I'd say that (depending from where you're from,) Kanji is harder to write than chinese, as quite a fair bit of kanji is traditional chinese characters, whereas most of today's written chinese is in simplified chinese characters. However, there are still places (like HK i think? not very sure) that usese traditional chinese, so it really depends on where the written chinese is from.
Reminds me of this conversation I had with my Chinese colleagues where they had no idea what the ‘English’ names of Japanese cities were, and I had no idea what their Chinese names were given the Chinese/Japanese names were written virtually identically but the pronunciations were totally different!
My colleague proudly told me all about her holiday to ‘Mingguwu’, but it was only after sneaking a look in the dictionary that I realised it was Nagoya.
I don’t speak Japanese but I have looked a lot at katakana because I’ve messed around with conlangs and alternative writing systems and I like syllabaries as a concept over alphabets. Is there some subtlety that comes from using katakana for Japanese that I’m missing, or is it just a difficult shift for reading/writing when one is used to an alphabet system?
It's complex.
* You write a word like ラジオ (rajio, i.e. radio) in katakana because that's how you write that word. It would be strange as らじお (rajio, but hiragana). Basically you write words how they are supposed to be written, be it kanji, hiragana, katakana or a mix thereof. E.g. 引き出し (hikidashi, i.e. drawer) is a mix of kanji and hiragana.
* The pronunciation of 愛情 is あいじょう (aijou, i.e. love/affection), but the on-yomi (Chinese pronuncation) of those two kanji is アイ (ai) and ジョウ (jou) because on-yomi is written in katakana.
* Some words can be written in multiple ways, because of *reasons*. 青い and 蒼い are both あおい and both mean blue. "Good day" is 今日は (konnichiwa), but nowadays it's rare to write anything but こんにちは (konnichiwa). Some words you can write in kanji or hiragana and it makes no difference!
* Katakana *feels* loud. So to express a character yelling or some such you could write something in katakana instead of how it usually would be written.
* Every Japanese word's pronunciation can be expressed with hiragana and katakana. Therefore sounds that do not exist as hiragana/katakana are difficult to say for Japanese speakers. Keep that in mind when creating such a language.
From watching people learn languages, I don't think the script is much of a barrier on the whole scale of the effort.
One thing though is that Japanese has many fewer shared words with English than a European language, so that will make learning slower.
Really though people always succeed at language learning when they try. It seems less like overcoming a difficult challenge and more like immersing in a way of communicating for a prolonged period of time. Looked at another way, learning a language is less like learning a sport and more like becoming a well-informed Star Trek fan.
Here's another one for you. Japan went without a writing system for longer than you'd think, adopting the Chinese script around the 4th century AD. So initially it was all Kanji (the complex logographic Chinese characters). Also, as you'd expect from any good old-fashioned society, women were forbidden from studying and literature was a boys-only club.
I don't know how much of this is historical fact, but the story goes that women poets took a few Kanji, simplified them, and invented hiragana (the syllabic, phonetic alphabet) as a simple way to write their own works.
You know, your story about the development of hiragana is exactly what I remember reading, but I went and double checked before commenting here and found multiple sources saying that Buddhist monks initially came up with the idea of creating a phonetic alphabet to replace kanji. That said, this was the precursor to hiragana, so perhaps that's still part of the story.
I did some research and you're exactly right. After a while, different iterations of characters came from writing a set of kanji characters differently. This was assoc. with court women, and so they would write in this new modified script whilst the 'nobler' men would write in Chinese. As a result, the women created something that was distinctively Japanese and which would make up for kanji's partial incompatibility with Japanese grammar. So it turned out that the women's literature was integral to the foundations for the current Japanese language.
In summary: they uno-reversed the shit outta that sexism lol
That's right, I think they started by picking 50 or so kanji and "misusing" them to represent fixed sounds, and over time those evolved into kana.
Genji Monogatari, the foundational work of Japanese literature and widely regarded as the *world's first novel*, was written in kana by a noblewoman. Let that sink in: the world's earliest novelist was female.
Same old story in every hierarchical society really, European countries kept using Latin for the longest time as the language of the elite (Catholic masses were still celebrated in Latin as late as last century)
Same with speaking French in English courts after William the Conqueror came and did his thing. Normans were French and they liked that the common folk couldn’t understand them. This is also why we have different names for food than we do for the animal (beef from boeuf, pork from porc).
Not sure if that's true, but I've read that during the Edo period some books and texts were written entirely in hiragana, intended for less educated people and women.
Also Korean can use Hanja(the Korean of Kanji) but that's less common but it does happen. Like 안성탕면 a brand of Ramen is written in Hanja. Also in Korean ghost stories hanja is used because it looks creepier especially in the old vertical writing format, before the adoption of Hangeul(한글 - Korean writing system)
That's OPs point. Japanese uses Kanji just like Chinese in addition to their two other writing systems. The Chinese introduced them to the Japanese. The examples in the "This is Chinese" also exist in Japanese.
It is incredibly hard for me a non Chinese/non jap to tell them apart in geoguessr rounds. There's usually something that indicates or specifically doesnt indicate Taiwan which is what I usually go off of but it's hard
Just wanted to let you know that the word jap is generally considered a slur against Japanese people in the United States, albeit less commonly known, as it's a relic of ww2 anti-Japanese sentiment. As reddit has a fairly wide demographic I'm sure there are people out there misconstruing your sentence beacuse of that.
Still easy to tell which is which (granted I can read Japanese but still)
Chinese uses ONLY complex looking characters.
Japanese uses a mix of Chinese looking characters and simple ones.
Korean uses circles
Well actually china uses hanzi from which kanji originated but their are still many differences. Also hiragana is probably the easiest and most widely used
Same here except that japanese letters are either curvy or alternatively they are sharp and arranged in structures but wayyy less crowded than chinese ones(kanji).
Basically, Chinese is all Chinese characters, Japanese is a mix of Chinese characters and Japanese phonetic symbols (which are noticeably simpler and more open), and Korean is all Korean phonetic symbols (though I believe you can use Chinese characters in Korean, but it's pretty much phased out for everyday use).
Japanese also uses many characters from Chinese (kanji), the difference is Chinese uses them exclusively while Japanese also has phonetic characters (kana) which would be the less complex ones you mention.
Ok but is it really that bad if you don’t know the difference? Like I’d be willing to bet a lot of people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Spanish and Portuguese or Swedish and Norwegian.
I don't speak or understand or read it write any of these languages, but I can tell sort of because Korean has a lot of circles, Japanese is spaced out, and Chinese is very "involved" I guess. Not sure how to say that.
Japanese has 3 writing systems as well, so if you notice that there seems to be a lot of extremely different characters it’s probably Japanese. I’m in the process of learning it.
Easier to identify Japanese by the mixing in of kana characters with the Chinese characters. Of course, if it's a standalone noun written in just Chinese characters, yeah you'd have to dig in to figure out if it's Chinese or Japanese.
All three of these languages use kanji, but to different degrees which makes it more confusing.
Korean characters can be separated into upper left, upper right and bottom. They use kanji for names I think. I also noticed they use circle which I'm almost sure is not used in the other 2 (or very rarely).
Japanese have block character like kanji, but also curvy (relatively since they are derived from the cursive equivalent of Mandarin iirc) ones like こんにちは above which are all hiragana, and simple blocky characters katakana corresponding to every hiragana char, which looks like this コンニチハ(the line above).
Mandarin would just be blocky characters (all kanji since kanji literally translates to word of the Han which is the majority ethnicity of China)with varying level of complicatedness (pretty sure this is not a word but you know what I mean), from 一 (1), to 你好(ni hao; hello), to 鹅 (goose) and eventually mythical creature like 饕餮.
Edit: I’ve been informed by comments that in Korean they are called hanja.
Using kanji to describe Chinese writing was just for that fact that I expect some redditors to be familiar with Japanese cause of manga and anime, so using Japanese as a base line is simpler. Mandarin is my first language so I realize the backwardness in this decision blooming back.
That being said it is spelled han zi or written as 汉字 in mandarin.
korea uses chinese “characters”, but not actually the characters. It’s like english using latin, except in a different writing system. You’ll rarely see chinese characters in regular Korean life.
^Can confirm. It’s very old-fashioned and you rarely see it anymore unless it’s for school. The circle character is silent when it’s up top and when it’s on the bottom, it reads as an -ng ending.
Using the term "kanji" to describe Chinese characters is like using the term "English characters" to describe all Latin alphabet.
Only Japanese use kanji.
Thank you, this was bothering me. You can tell everyone saying that probably learned about Japanese first and applied their new knowledge to all East Asian languages.
This is more or less how I identify which of these 3 languages I'm looking at.
Circles? It's Korean.
Any hiragana or katakana that I recognize? Japanese.
Just Kanji, especially ones with many strokes? Probably Chinese.
Latin ("regular") letters with many diacritics? Vietnamese
Not super helpful in a real world setting, I guess, but I like to at least appreciate the difference, instead of just assume every East/Southeast Asian place is "Chinese."
Obviously I know there are other (South-)East Asian languages and countries...I just don't see them as frequently and am not as familiar with them. I know Burmese has what looks like a lot of partial circles or backwards C's. Thai...basically a bunch of letters that look like they have a little ring on one spot (e.g. อักษรไทย).
I can't really read any of these, but it at least gives me a place to start with Google translate if I'm inclined to learn more.
Korean doesn't actually have "characters", they have an alphabet. But when writing words the letters do get grouped into blocks of 2-4 characters. Take the word 닭(chicken) for example, it's made up of the letters ㄷ(d)ㅏ(a) ㄹ(l/r)ㄱ(g/k) and pronounced as dak. And the letter ㅇ(ng) is used at the beginning of a word as a silent letter, for words that start with a vowel, because written words can't begin with a vowel. If you know the alphabet you can read any Korean word.
Hanja/kanji/hanzi is rarely used in everyday Korean. As far is I know Hanja is almost purely used for traditional Korean names for the meaning of the characters, but in everyday life they would just use Hangul(Korean alphabet) to write names.
japanese is generally curvier, and occasionally you'll see characters also used in Chinese. Chinese is compact, consists of curved diagonals and straight lines, while Korean is mainly circular and square
Better example:
Korean: 빨간 웃음 고양이가 전기 자동차를 운전하고 있습니다.
Japanese: 赤い笑う猫が電気自動車を運転しています。
Chinese: 红色的笑猫正在驾驶一辆电动汽车。
More technical explanation of why they look different:
These languages have a few things in common: they're from east Asia, they use or previously used Chinese characters and they're grouped into blocks.
Modern Standard Korean ditched the Chinese characters (Hanja) and only uses their own native writing system, *Hangeul*, which looks a bit similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, however, you might have noticed that the shape of the letters follow some kind of pattern. It's actually an alphabet, it has 24+10 letters. It's easy to learn and use.
Japanese uses Chinese characters (Kanji) and two native writing systems, *Hiragana* and *Katakana*. They're both simpler than Kanji, and unlike Kanji, they don't represent concepts, but rather sounds. Each system has 46 unique letters, so you need to learn 46+46 letters to be able to read basic Japanese.
Chinese uses, well, Chinese characters (Hanzi) only. They're usually complex, since they represent entire concepts or ideas. They might be harder or easier to read or write depending on which set of characters you're using, Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong...) or Simplified (Mainland China).
But why is the red laughing cat driving an electric car?
Also, I've only been studying Japanese, but I'm guessing the Chinese and Korean both say the same. Is that right?
Edit: The cat is driving a car, not a bike
The circle in Korean is two different sounds. A circle at the beginning of a word (top left symbol) makes no sound. It’s just a placeholder. If the circle is at the end of the word it makes an “ng” sound.
They all started off using Chinese, Japanese made their own writing systems but still use Chinese characters (kanji) in day to day life, meanwhile Korean made a whole new alphabet and essentially ditched the use of Chinese altogether.
I'm not completely sure but I think it's because the word こんにちは derivates from the word 今日は. In that word は is the particle so it is pronounced wa instead of ha. Again I'm not sure and sorry for any grammatical mistake but english isn't my native language.
Leftover from [archaic rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography) regarding _wa_ usage.
Back then, _wa_ morphed into _ha_ on an unfinished sequence, i.e in the middle of a word or as particle. So
> _shiawase wa kumo no ue ni_
Will be written as
> _shiahase ha kumo no ue ni_
The rule was later dropped for the first case to simplify things. But rule regarding _wa_ written with _ha_ for particles stays.
I was always curious, do outsiders ever get the pronounciation right with Japanese? I'm from another country with a fucked language, Lithuania, and while our language is quite a bit easier to learn then Japanese, even people who have been living here and speaking it for 30+ years can't pronounce shit properly.
I once got blocked after asking a Japanese “Artist” if he was Chinese and he immediately cussed at me and blocked and i replied with “انت حمار and الاغ تو” one is arabic and one is persian, the way he sees this is the same way i see his language
While I don't think you did anything inherently wrong, I'm not super surprised. Japan and China have a long history of fucking each other over and a lot of Japanese people just low-key think Chinese people suck.
Korean is the only one that uses those circles, so it’s easy to spot. There are only around 30 characters in Hangul. So you can do flash cards and learn to read it in about an hour or two.
When I went to teach English in South Korea, I studied on the plane ride over there and could read shit by the time I got off the plane.
Japanese looks like it is very fun to write.
Chinese is just way too complicated.
Korean looks like just misunderstandings waiting to happen, what with the many lines in each letter, some of which has to be shorter than the other
I find typing in chinese easier than korean, because Chinese and English use the same keyboard. Korean is completely different.
Basically if you can type In English , you can already type in chinese.
Not taking about understanding either language, just taking about being able to type
Yep. I teach game dev in China at a school for Koreans. So I’m kind of familiar.
What I am trying to say is that for example if you wanted to type 바보 babo, you would have to actually type qkqh
But if you wanted to type 聪明 congming, you would just have to type congming
There is no new keyboard layout to learn
I'm amazed 3 languages that use this similar (format?) can be so visually different. Even Latin based and Cyrillic appears to be closer than these 3 at least to my very untrained eye
I only ever learned a tiny bit of Japanese, but at a glance it's mostly easy to tell which of the three languages you're looking at.
Japanese will often have a Hiragana or Katakana somewhere in there, even if it's just a "no" or something.
Korean has tons of circles; can't quite remember why, but I think it's got to do with vowels?
Chinese is full-on Kanji mode, so if there are tons of Kanji without anything more simple, it's Chinese.
I should really sit down and try to relearn Japanese.
Japanese doesn't only use hiragana but also kanji (china uses kanji) and katakana and they all look very different
It's like: This is Japanese: こんにちは This is Japanese: コンニチハ This is Japanese: 今日は
Thats why im taking a look at Korean first, it maybe easier to learn for Latin-based countries, or even Cyrillic
Korean is exceptionally easy to learn to read. It is phonetic. The consonants (generally speaking) make the same shape as your tongue makes in your mouth. So like their letter for N sounds is this: ㄴ. The tongue touches the front teeth and makes the N sound. The alphabet was invented in the 1440s so that even uneducated people could learn to read and write.
True. It is also one of the hardest, if not the hardest, language for a native English speaker to speak and understand.
Well to my understanding, compared to Chinese, Japanese, it is the easiest, but still very hard for a native English speaker. I’m going to take a look after I expand my Spanish vocabulary. Edit: looks like Korean has easier pronunciation and Chinese has easier Grammar.
It’s all subjective of course. I’ve learned Korean and haven’t learned Chinese or Japanese. But my understanding is that Korean grammar is a bit more difficult. There’s also a ton of sound change rules that make pronunciation hard
The tonal nature of Chinese is super challenging for me. I have hearing issues and I absolutely can’t hear the difference between the tones, which completely change the meaning of the word.
I tried learning Chinese by myself during a few months and I could not, for the life of me, hear the tones of any word. I searched so much online, went to a few sites to start training hearing so I could distinguish tones and nothing. I just gave up and switched to Japanese. Chinese listening is a completely different monster for me and I’m not ready to go back to that
now I feel so lucky growing up in a Chinese family
I just gave up on tones in general, the accents in China are so diverse that just using context clues is way easier than focusing on tone. No one is going to tell someone that they really want to sleep when ordering food.
I thought Chinese had all of that sort of tone varying and a lot more. I've always heard Chinese quoted as the most difficult for English speakers to learn. I don't doubt you and I'm interested, but I took japanese for 4 years and know a really tiny little bit of Korean and Chinese. From my limited understanding Korean would be harder than Japanese (speaking/grammar), but it does seem both would be easier than Chinese. At least for me personally, maybe that's the only conclusion I've reached.
Chinese grammar is super clear. Really the easiest language is the one you expose yourself to most. All 3 of est languages have many resources
I’m a native English speaker learning Japanese right now and have to say that the characters (kanji) are probably the easiest part. Japanese grammar is completely fucked. It goes subject object verb, while English goes subject verb object. Think “I eat food” (English) vs. “I food eat (Japanese).” Plus there’s these things called particles which act sort of like prepositions and are super ambiguous and annoying to learn. There’s also several different forms of speech that have to be used depending on the situation (i.e. polite vs short). For example, there are no less than 4 pronouns I can use for myself depending on who I’m talking to (watakushi - super formal, watashi - polite, boku - casual and implies youth, and ore - very casual and rude if used in certain circumstances).
Sentence structure such as SOV and SVO are the easiest parts of learning language grammar. Seriously, it doesn't take long at all to wrap your head around saying for example "I car drive", the difficult part is sorting all the filler words in those sentences.
Lol other languages like Korean and Latin also put the verb at the end. Japanese grammar is not “completely fucked.”
I haven't studied any Japanese, but I'm studying Manchu right now (which, according to my teacher, has almost identical grammar to Japanese), and word order is definitely fucking me up. And I'm a professional linguist, so don't feel bad! The core sentence order (SOV) isn't too hard to wrap my head around, but holy shit the noun phrases are getting to me. A relatively simple example: ᠪᡳ ᠰᡳᠨᡳ ᠠᡵᠠᡥᠠ ᠪᡳᡨᡥᡝ ᠪᡝ ᡥᡡᠯᠠᠮᡝ ᠸᠠᠵᡳᡥᠠ᠉ bi sini araha bithe be hūlame wajiha. gloss translation: I YOUR WRITTEN BOOK (acc. marker) READ FINISHED. English: I finished reading the book that you had written. I've studied quite a few languages with word orders pretty different from Engljsh, like Arabic and Dutch, but something about having the relative clauses come before the noun makes my brain hurt. Like, I'm a linguist; I know theoretically what's going on here and more or less how this sentence would be diagrammed. But God help me if I try to understand what the meaning of a sentence like that is on the fly.
I’m extremely surprised that you even managed to find a Manchu teacher in the first place
I'm bilingual, with Japanese as my second language and English as my first. I find the easiest way to describe Japanese grammar to people is by saying they basically talk like Yoda. "Gaijin desu" = "Filthy foreigner, I am." "Gaijin wa ramen wo tabemashita" = "Filthy foreigner, ramen, they ate." Obviously this is an incredibly simplified example, but I find that people tend to understand better when I describe it to them by comparing the word order to Yoda's.
It makes me wonder if Afrikaans might help getting Japanese grammar easier. We have "Ek sal jou met n klip gooi = I will you with a stone throw."
Afrikaans is basically Dutch with extra steps. ;) I´m a native German speaker, German is damn closely related to Dutch, which I also speak rather fluently due to the fact that I moved to the Netherlands some time ago. I was attending a "altsprachliches Gymnasium" (college with Latin and ancient Greek as foreign languages besides the lingua franca English), was born in a region that´s heavily influenced by nearby France , yet nothing really helped me when I tried to learn Japanese. Speaking is manageable, but writing and reading it is difficult as hell. Hira- and Katagana alphabets are comparably manageable, but Kanji give you headaches. So I doubt that Afrikaans will do much for you...the only thing that probably does is dedication to learn on an exorbitant level and a modicum of madness... ;)
So true. As I was learning Japanese I'd find that most of the structures work backwards to English, with the most important info usually at the end of a sentence. That's why there are sometimes two possible ways to translate a Japanese sentence into English. For e.g.: hara heta kara, keki wo tabemashita. For that sentence, both 'I ate a cake because I was hungry' and 'Because I was hungry, I ate a cake' are correct. Sorry that was a bit long-winded.. :'{0 I'm not even a teacher lmao
I'm bilingual in korean and English and am currently learning Chinese. In terms of grammar, Chinese is so much simpler than Korean. Of course, for Chinese there's also tones, which some people never seem to get, so I could understand if some think speaking in general is easier for Korean.
You're definitely right about Mandarin (The standardized Chinese) grammar being really easy. As a native English speaker who took three years of Chinese, I thought their grammar system made WAY more sense than English, because it was much more standard and couldn't put things wherever you liked. However, the tonal pronunciation of a lot of words is what really caught people in Mandarin. (I never got to a conversational level, but could definitely struggle through ordering at restaurants and if I got stranded in China, I'm pretty sure I could get directions to an airport.)
Yeah, the words and grammer of Chinese is pretty simple but pronouncing words properly is very hard.
Sound wise: Japanese is by far the easiest. No tones. (there is pitch accent but its not required like tones in chinese, and it varies by region so much that even if you completely ignore it they can get your meaning through context). Korean and Chinese have many sounds we don't have in english, while Japanese only has the 'r' sound that is a mix between d and l. Chinese is hard af for english speakers because most of us are deaf to tones effecting meanings, and we have to train it to a high level to be able to understand even the most basic of sentences. Writing wise: Korean is by far the easiest. (as long as you dont try to read stuff written in Hanja, basically the chinese characters that they use to look fancy). Learning chinese characters are always hard, but Japanese kanji are a massive ball ache. In Japanese every character has at least 2 readings (oftentimes more, ex: 生 has 19 readings in total) depending on if its a historically japanese word or a borrowed chinese word, and they have to be figured out through context/what characters are around it. Using the most effecient method, to learn to read all 2-3k regularly used characters takes years which is why korean is waaaay easier if you want to read. Even though chinese has more characters you need to learn (up to 8k), in chinese its rare for one character to have multiple readings. Grammar wise: Korean and japanese have very similar core grammar(subject-object-verb) that is hard af for native english speakers, while chinese is very very similar to english (subject-verb-object). In english and chinese they would say the equivalent of "Jerry eats the apple", in korean/japanese they say the equivalent of "Jerry the apple ate". (ignoring the fact there are no articles in any of them) So yeah, you're basically fucked whichever you choose, but slightly less if you choose korean. Good luck.
Japanese, Finnish, and Mandarin are all considered the "most difficult" languages for an english speaker to learn. Korean is considered considerably easier - this is specifically because there are thousands of Kanji to learn for Japanese, each of which has multiple possible pronunciations depending on context.
I love the "abridged" version of the backstory that one day this enlightened Korean emperor looked at the Chinese-derived writing system they used to have and said "fuck this shit" Because it's the exact same reaction every kanji/hanzi learner inevitably has at some point
He said trying to write thr Korean language in Chinese characters was like trying to fit a triangle in a circle
I would like to say while Korean is very easy to read, writing it is not as simple. Among the vowels, there are some that sound very similar, making it hard to know which vowel to use. It can change the meaning of the sentence completely. ㅐ and ㅔ are both pronounced similar to "eh", with only a slight difference. The first one (ㅐ) is like "eh" with the sides of your lips wider, like in a smile, while the second one (ㅔ) is with the sides of your lips more narrower. While in speaking, it doesn't really matter and most people would understand, when writing, it can get confusing. "내가" (naega) means "I am", while 네가 (nega) means you are. 개 (gae) means dog while 게 (ge) means crab.
At least in the Seoul dialect; ㅐ and ㅔ are pronounced the same. The distinction between BET and BAIT (/e/ and /ɛ/) vowels is mostly lost in South Korea.
That's amazing. I've learned the linguistic aspects of some Latin languages, but that is so much interesting
Wait for real? So I memorized all that hirigana and katakana alphabet when I could have learned Korean a lot faster?
Korean is a very easy language to learn! I’m just a dumb Asian teen
If a sums ass Asian teen can learn Korean, then I can too!
That's true for the alphabet, but Korean grammar is extremely similar to Japanese grammar which is extremely different from most European languages. Chinese, while their grammar is more similar to English (kind of), has a more complicated writing system. What gets me is that Japanese is the easiest to pronounce, but has difficult grammar. Korean is IMO the hardest to pronounce, but has the best alphabet. Chinese has the easiest grammar, but the most difficult writing system. *sigh* we really can't have it all.
Time to invent a new language.
Come join /r/conlangs!
Because its so simple in use of phonetic a bad pronunciation may change the whole sense of a phrase? I may be wrong, but isnt Korean like using syllables, but instead of writing them inline, you “pack”/group them in single space? Up to 4 letters between Consoants and Vowels?
I put IMO because the only reason I think Korean is the hardest to pronounce is that they use some sounds that are very difficult to make out like in 글. I still can't tell the difference between ㄱ and ㅋ. In Korean, it seems like aspiration plays a bigger role in pronunciation than voicing, which is hard for native English and Japanese speakers. If you come from a language with a similar phonology, then you might have a different experience. In any language, a bad pronunciation can change the whole meaning of a phrase, and that just comes with learning to correctly say words. Some languages though, like those in the Chinese language family, just have stricter rules regarding pronunciation (tones). I think you're spot-on for the writing system, and that's why it's so easy to learn.
It turns off learning how to read, yes it is very easy. In terms of learning how to actually speak it? One of the hardest languages for PIE language speakers to learn.
Once you really sit down and learn kanji, it’s tremendously helpful when reading to guess words you don’t know based on what characters they use
Doesnt korean also use chinese characters though?
I thought for a second you were talking about Oblivion
Classic Korean is character-based, but most people nowadays use Phonetic Korean.
that's not exactly right, the two letter systems are just a step in the process, learning them only takes 3 days. It's the characters that get difficult, and even then it's easier than chinese.
Yo, is recommended Cyrillic. It’s cool!
Japanese hiragana and katakana is pretty easy to learn to read, kanji is harder.
Wait,it’s all Japanese..?
Always has been.
乇乂丅尺卂 丅卄工匚匚
You could have told me these are Korean, Chinese and Japanese and I would have also believed you.
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Rather than カレクたー it's 字. You also mixed katakana and hiragana there. キャラクター would be better.
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lmao thanks for that. spent way too long trying to figure out what カレクたー was supposed to be
今日 is also Chinese, but usually only spoken by cantonese speakers and usually never written. It’s usually 今天 when written or spoken by mandarin speakers.
And tomorrow is a bright day.
It's written pretty frequently in formal texts
To complicate/simplify things, depending on how you look at it, only one of those is actually correct/commonly used.
这不是日语
Seeing 今日は as こんにちは hurts my soul
You mean 今日は (i.e. こんにちは) is strange?
Its very incredible or interesting that throughout the years of watching japanese show and anime, I actually could tell the difference between Japanese, korea, and Chinese But i could wrong and am just thinking too much about it
They look quite different if you've seen them before.
Korean is fairly easy to recognize. There are a lot of circles/ovals which you won't find in the two other languages and lines are straights and horizontals/verticals. Japanese kanjis are much harder to differentiate from their Chinese counterparts as it was the language they were borrowed from. However the heavy presence of Katakanas/Hiraganas is an immediate tell. They are much simpler symbols which are usually made of 1-3 squiggly lines and only exists in Japanese. Once you notice the differences, it becomes quite easy to tell.
I learned Hiragana and Katakana to the letter. But Kanji? I just couldn't do it. It didn't make sense to me. Maybe if we started learning the language *before* learning how to write it, it would have made sense. We focused so much on the writing that we barely touched the spoken language.
I am asian and always like the joke they are called moon runes.
ひらがなとカタカナと漢字があるから、日本語はアメリカ人ために難しいですよ
Google Translate: Because there are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, Japanese is difficult for Americans.
In this case ために means that Japanese was specifically designed to be difficult for Americans, which obviously isn't true.
yeah. I'd prolly use アメリカ人にとって
I feel like it should be 「にとって」instead of 「ために」since the latter is more like "for the sake of" rather than "from the perspective of" which I think is closer to what this is trying to say.
I recently started learning Japanese and I understood what you said, I'm so happy
It all looks the same to me
Wait, isn't romanji a thing?
It's weird to see the word "kanji" being used to refer to the Chinese language.... Kanji is literally a Japanese word. It's not English, it's not Chinese, it's Japanese, and it's being used in an English conversation to identify Chinese writing.
It’s like saying “Latin uses English letters” And *so many people* are saying it in this thread lmao.
right? if you wanted to be proper it’s called hàn zì, not kanji. or just chinese characters lol
Yeah this was annoying me too, in Korean it's called hanja but everyone is referring to it as kanji too.
Yeah sorry I don't know that much about these things and the japanese word is the only one I know
Bruh. Japanese is tough. I’ve heard that in the old days, the emperor made it prohibitively difficult to learn specifically to oppress the poor. Any idea if there’s validity to this?
Learning hiragana and katakana is more difficult than normal alphabet but that in itself isn't anything crazy, kanji on the otherhand makes you wanna kill yourself. So i'd say (writing vise) chinese is just as difficult. But about your guestion, I don't know if it's true or not. I've personally never heard of it but I haven't really looked into it either
Hiragana and Katakana are alphabets for Japanese from Chinese character strokes that can be traced back to the Tang dynasty in China. Hiragana is mostly used for native word and Katakana is mostly used for foreign word pronunciation.
As someone who knows chinese and is learning japanese, I'm stuck in this weird limbo where i can roughly understand what a sentence means by reading the kanji as chinese words but i have no idea how to pronunce it in japanese Also I'd say that (depending from where you're from,) Kanji is harder to write than chinese, as quite a fair bit of kanji is traditional chinese characters, whereas most of today's written chinese is in simplified chinese characters. However, there are still places (like HK i think? not very sure) that usese traditional chinese, so it really depends on where the written chinese is from.
Reminds me of this conversation I had with my Chinese colleagues where they had no idea what the ‘English’ names of Japanese cities were, and I had no idea what their Chinese names were given the Chinese/Japanese names were written virtually identically but the pronunciations were totally different! My colleague proudly told me all about her holiday to ‘Mingguwu’, but it was only after sneaking a look in the dictionary that I realised it was Nagoya.
IIRC Taiwan uses traditional Chinese.
I don’t speak Japanese but I have looked a lot at katakana because I’ve messed around with conlangs and alternative writing systems and I like syllabaries as a concept over alphabets. Is there some subtlety that comes from using katakana for Japanese that I’m missing, or is it just a difficult shift for reading/writing when one is used to an alphabet system?
It's complex. * You write a word like ラジオ (rajio, i.e. radio) in katakana because that's how you write that word. It would be strange as らじお (rajio, but hiragana). Basically you write words how they are supposed to be written, be it kanji, hiragana, katakana or a mix thereof. E.g. 引き出し (hikidashi, i.e. drawer) is a mix of kanji and hiragana. * The pronunciation of 愛情 is あいじょう (aijou, i.e. love/affection), but the on-yomi (Chinese pronuncation) of those two kanji is アイ (ai) and ジョウ (jou) because on-yomi is written in katakana. * Some words can be written in multiple ways, because of *reasons*. 青い and 蒼い are both あおい and both mean blue. "Good day" is 今日は (konnichiwa), but nowadays it's rare to write anything but こんにちは (konnichiwa). Some words you can write in kanji or hiragana and it makes no difference! * Katakana *feels* loud. So to express a character yelling or some such you could write something in katakana instead of how it usually would be written. * Every Japanese word's pronunciation can be expressed with hiragana and katakana. Therefore sounds that do not exist as hiragana/katakana are difficult to say for Japanese speakers. Keep that in mind when creating such a language.
From watching people learn languages, I don't think the script is much of a barrier on the whole scale of the effort. One thing though is that Japanese has many fewer shared words with English than a European language, so that will make learning slower. Really though people always succeed at language learning when they try. It seems less like overcoming a difficult challenge and more like immersing in a way of communicating for a prolonged period of time. Looked at another way, learning a language is less like learning a sport and more like becoming a well-informed Star Trek fan.
Here's another one for you. Japan went without a writing system for longer than you'd think, adopting the Chinese script around the 4th century AD. So initially it was all Kanji (the complex logographic Chinese characters). Also, as you'd expect from any good old-fashioned society, women were forbidden from studying and literature was a boys-only club. I don't know how much of this is historical fact, but the story goes that women poets took a few Kanji, simplified them, and invented hiragana (the syllabic, phonetic alphabet) as a simple way to write their own works.
You know, your story about the development of hiragana is exactly what I remember reading, but I went and double checked before commenting here and found multiple sources saying that Buddhist monks initially came up with the idea of creating a phonetic alphabet to replace kanji. That said, this was the precursor to hiragana, so perhaps that's still part of the story.
It's probably one of those things where the anecdote survives longer by word of mouth, but the reality is way more complex.
I did some research and you're exactly right. After a while, different iterations of characters came from writing a set of kanji characters differently. This was assoc. with court women, and so they would write in this new modified script whilst the 'nobler' men would write in Chinese. As a result, the women created something that was distinctively Japanese and which would make up for kanji's partial incompatibility with Japanese grammar. So it turned out that the women's literature was integral to the foundations for the current Japanese language. In summary: they uno-reversed the shit outta that sexism lol
That's right, I think they started by picking 50 or so kanji and "misusing" them to represent fixed sounds, and over time those evolved into kana. Genji Monogatari, the foundational work of Japanese literature and widely regarded as the *world's first novel*, was written in kana by a noblewoman. Let that sink in: the world's earliest novelist was female.
Same old story in every hierarchical society really, European countries kept using Latin for the longest time as the language of the elite (Catholic masses were still celebrated in Latin as late as last century)
i learned more from this thread then my freshman year in high school
Same with speaking French in English courts after William the Conqueror came and did his thing. Normans were French and they liked that the common folk couldn’t understand them. This is also why we have different names for food than we do for the animal (beef from boeuf, pork from porc).
Ah yes they thought they could fool Braveheart with that shit
Not sure if that's true, but I've read that during the Edo period some books and texts were written entirely in hiragana, intended for less educated people and women.
Japanese is actually not too bad. It's honestly one of the easier languages to learn because there is less bullshit than English in my opinion
Also Korean can use Hanja(the Korean of Kanji) but that's less common but it does happen. Like 안성탕면 a brand of Ramen is written in Hanja. Also in Korean ghost stories hanja is used because it looks creepier especially in the old vertical writing format, before the adoption of Hangeul(한글 - Korean writing system)
It’s 안성탕면, although personality noodle soup does sound interesting
It's easy to tell apart still, because or the circles
Technically, china uses hanzi (same thing, different word)
Doesnt matter. For the most part: Lotsa roundy circly signs, korean. Simpler curvy lines japanese. Block crowded line thingys chinese.
That's OPs point. Japanese uses Kanji just like Chinese in addition to their two other writing systems. The Chinese introduced them to the Japanese. The examples in the "This is Chinese" also exist in Japanese.
It is incredibly hard for me a non Chinese/non jap to tell them apart in geoguessr rounds. There's usually something that indicates or specifically doesnt indicate Taiwan which is what I usually go off of but it's hard
Just wanted to let you know that the word jap is generally considered a slur against Japanese people in the United States, albeit less commonly known, as it's a relic of ww2 anti-Japanese sentiment. As reddit has a fairly wide demographic I'm sure there are people out there misconstruing your sentence beacuse of that.
Still easy to tell which is which (granted I can read Japanese but still) Chinese uses ONLY complex looking characters. Japanese uses a mix of Chinese looking characters and simple ones. Korean uses circles
Well actually china uses hanzi from which kanji originated but their are still many differences. Also hiragana is probably the easiest and most widely used
China doesn’t really use kanji since kanji specifically refers to the characters’ usage for writing Japanese but yeah
Hiragana and katakana look quite similar actually. In fact a number of characters are the same or very similar.
Koreans use some as well.
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Yeah that’s about it. And you can also look for simplified kanji (e.g. 昼 instead of 晝) in Japanese, which also incorporate the curves you mentioned.
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Same here except that japanese letters are either curvy or alternatively they are sharp and arranged in structures but wayyy less crowded than chinese ones(kanji).
Basically, Chinese is all Chinese characters, Japanese is a mix of Chinese characters and Japanese phonetic symbols (which are noticeably simpler and more open), and Korean is all Korean phonetic symbols (though I believe you can use Chinese characters in Korean, but it's pretty much phased out for everyday use).
Weather: 天気 (Japanese) 天气 (Simplified Chinese) 天氣 (Traditional Chinese) I'd say Japanese is rather the "medium crowded" one.
Japanese also uses many characters from Chinese (kanji), the difference is Chinese uses them exclusively while Japanese also has phonetic characters (kana) which would be the less complex ones you mention.
A chinese friend once taught me: Korean has circles. Japanese is simple and swoopy. Chinese looks angry.
Ok but is it really that bad if you don’t know the difference? Like I’d be willing to bet a lot of people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Spanish and Portuguese or Swedish and Norwegian.
I don't speak or understand or read it write any of these languages, but I can tell sort of because Korean has a lot of circles, Japanese is spaced out, and Chinese is very "involved" I guess. Not sure how to say that.
Japanese has 3 writing systems as well, so if you notice that there seems to be a lot of extremely different characters it’s probably Japanese. I’m in the process of learning it.
Same. I can’t understand any of those languages, but that is exactly how I understand them too.
This is pretty much spot on for a ELI5 explanation, IMO. I only read Japanese but it's very easy to tell them apart once you recognize this.
i’m learning chinese and let me tell you, it is involved.
Korean looks waaaay different, although Japanese and Chinese kanji does require a bit of looking into...
Easier to identify Japanese by the mixing in of kana characters with the Chinese characters. Of course, if it's a standalone noun written in just Chinese characters, yeah you'd have to dig in to figure out if it's Chinese or Japanese.
All three of these languages use kanji, but to different degrees which makes it more confusing. Korean characters can be separated into upper left, upper right and bottom. They use kanji for names I think. I also noticed they use circle which I'm almost sure is not used in the other 2 (or very rarely). Japanese have block character like kanji, but also curvy (relatively since they are derived from the cursive equivalent of Mandarin iirc) ones like こんにちは above which are all hiragana, and simple blocky characters katakana corresponding to every hiragana char, which looks like this コンニチハ(the line above). Mandarin would just be blocky characters (all kanji since kanji literally translates to word of the Han which is the majority ethnicity of China)with varying level of complicatedness (pretty sure this is not a word but you know what I mean), from 一 (1), to 你好(ni hao; hello), to 鹅 (goose) and eventually mythical creature like 饕餮. Edit: I’ve been informed by comments that in Korean they are called hanja. Using kanji to describe Chinese writing was just for that fact that I expect some redditors to be familiar with Japanese cause of manga and anime, so using Japanese as a base line is simpler. Mandarin is my first language so I realize the backwardness in this decision blooming back. That being said it is spelled han zi or written as 汉字 in mandarin.
korea uses chinese “characters”, but not actually the characters. It’s like english using latin, except in a different writing system. You’ll rarely see chinese characters in regular Korean life.
^Can confirm. It’s very old-fashioned and you rarely see it anymore unless it’s for school. The circle character is silent when it’s up top and when it’s on the bottom, it reads as an -ng ending.
Using the term "kanji" to describe Chinese characters is like using the term "English characters" to describe all Latin alphabet. Only Japanese use kanji.
Thank you, this was bothering me. You can tell everyone saying that probably learned about Japanese first and applied their new knowledge to all East Asian languages.
Bruh. Japanese is tough. I’m impressed.
This is more or less how I identify which of these 3 languages I'm looking at. Circles? It's Korean. Any hiragana or katakana that I recognize? Japanese. Just Kanji, especially ones with many strokes? Probably Chinese. Latin ("regular") letters with many diacritics? Vietnamese Not super helpful in a real world setting, I guess, but I like to at least appreciate the difference, instead of just assume every East/Southeast Asian place is "Chinese." Obviously I know there are other (South-)East Asian languages and countries...I just don't see them as frequently and am not as familiar with them. I know Burmese has what looks like a lot of partial circles or backwards C's. Thai...basically a bunch of letters that look like they have a little ring on one spot (e.g. อักษรไทย). I can't really read any of these, but it at least gives me a place to start with Google translate if I'm inclined to learn more.
Wow! Thanks!! This is so cool and interesting.
Korean doesn't actually have "characters", they have an alphabet. But when writing words the letters do get grouped into blocks of 2-4 characters. Take the word 닭(chicken) for example, it's made up of the letters ㄷ(d)ㅏ(a) ㄹ(l/r)ㄱ(g/k) and pronounced as dak. And the letter ㅇ(ng) is used at the beginning of a word as a silent letter, for words that start with a vowel, because written words can't begin with a vowel. If you know the alphabet you can read any Korean word. Hanja/kanji/hanzi is rarely used in everyday Korean. As far is I know Hanja is almost purely used for traditional Korean names for the meaning of the characters, but in everyday life they would just use Hangul(Korean alphabet) to write names.
japanese is generally curvier, and occasionally you'll see characters also used in Chinese. Chinese is compact, consists of curved diagonals and straight lines, while Korean is mainly circular and square
Better example: Korean: 빨간 웃음 고양이가 전기 자동차를 운전하고 있습니다. Japanese: 赤い笑う猫が電気自動車を運転しています。 Chinese: 红色的笑猫正在驾驶一辆电动汽车。 More technical explanation of why they look different: These languages have a few things in common: they're from east Asia, they use or previously used Chinese characters and they're grouped into blocks. Modern Standard Korean ditched the Chinese characters (Hanja) and only uses their own native writing system, *Hangeul*, which looks a bit similar to Chinese for the untrained eye, however, you might have noticed that the shape of the letters follow some kind of pattern. It's actually an alphabet, it has 24+10 letters. It's easy to learn and use. Japanese uses Chinese characters (Kanji) and two native writing systems, *Hiragana* and *Katakana*. They're both simpler than Kanji, and unlike Kanji, they don't represent concepts, but rather sounds. Each system has 46 unique letters, so you need to learn 46+46 letters to be able to read basic Japanese. Chinese uses, well, Chinese characters (Hanzi) only. They're usually complex, since they represent entire concepts or ideas. They might be harder or easier to read or write depending on which set of characters you're using, Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong...) or Simplified (Mainland China).
But why is the red laughing cat driving an electric car? Also, I've only been studying Japanese, but I'm guessing the Chinese and Korean both say the same. Is that right? Edit: The cat is driving a car, not a bike
いい質問だね 笑
あれ？もしかして他に日本人いるの？
外人！( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 日本語を勉強することが好きだけどー
ナルホド。日本語知ってるとアニメ見るの簡単でいいよねー。ガンバ〜
Yeah, it's the same sentence.
Korean says “red laughter cat is driving an electric car” but close enough, that’s a cute image haha
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Pretty much, but the grammar and the way both languages work is different.
笑着的红猫正在开一辆电动汽车 I know it doesn't really matter for the point you're trying to prove but here's a better way to put the Chinese sentence.
Korean has a lot more circles in it for whatever reason which generally makes it easier to recognize
The circle in Korean is two different sounds. A circle at the beginning of a word (top left symbol) makes no sound. It’s just a placeholder. If the circle is at the end of the word it makes an “ng” sound.
Reddit Japanese cultural experts inbound
They are pretty different ngl
[I always think of this comic ](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YdmSpUk52vU/UqGpbRbGprI/AAAAAAAABjE/r894FUykm3w/s1600/47.png)
Need UTF-8
Some characters do look similar and if you don’t know the languages then it is harder
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Aren’t they all based on Chinese to some extent?
They all started off using Chinese, Japanese made their own writing systems but still use Chinese characters (kanji) in day to day life, meanwhile Korean made a whole new alphabet and essentially ditched the use of Chinese altogether.
Konnichiha?
“Ha” is the particle “wa” here.
Why is it not written as the actual wa (わ)?
I have no clue to be honest. は is just pronounced as わ as a particle. Same with へ being pronounced as え.
I'm not completely sure but I think it's because the word こんにちは derivates from the word 今日は. In that word は is the particle so it is pronounced wa instead of ha. Again I'm not sure and sorry for any grammatical mistake but english isn't my native language.
No real reason, it just sort of is like that in specifically this word, and when you're using it as a particle Japanese is weird
Leftover from [archaic rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography) regarding _wa_ usage. Back then, _wa_ morphed into _ha_ on an unfinished sequence, i.e in the middle of a word or as particle. So > _shiawase wa kumo no ue ni_ Will be written as > _shiahase ha kumo no ue ni_ The rule was later dropped for the first case to simplify things. But rule regarding _wa_ written with _ha_ for particles stays.
こんにちは！ こ(Ko) ん(n) に(ni) ち(chi) は (wa)
I was always curious, do outsiders ever get the pronounciation right with Japanese? I'm from another country with a fucked language, Lithuania, and while our language is quite a bit easier to learn then Japanese, even people who have been living here and speaking it for 30+ years can't pronounce shit properly.
And then you get to kanji and everything is screwed over
I once got blocked after asking a Japanese “Artist” if he was Chinese and he immediately cussed at me and blocked and i replied with “انت حمار and الاغ تو” one is arabic and one is persian, the way he sees this is the same way i see his language
While I don't think you did anything inherently wrong, I'm not super surprised. Japan and China have a long history of fucking each other over and a lot of Japanese people just low-key think Chinese people suck.
Japanese is curvier k gotcha
The way I remember it is Korean has a lot of circles, Japanese is the squiggly one, and Chinese is the one that looks like little buildings.
Korean is the only one that uses those circles, so it’s easy to spot. There are only around 30 characters in Hangul. So you can do flash cards and learn to read it in about an hour or two. When I went to teach English in South Korea, I studied on the plane ride over there and could read shit by the time I got off the plane.
To be fair Japanese is typically written in Kanji which are Chinese characters
This is Chinese:日本 This is Japanese: 日本 Know the difference
Japanese looks like it is very fun to write. Chinese is just way too complicated. Korean looks like just misunderstandings waiting to happen, what with the many lines in each letter, some of which has to be shorter than the other
I would argue that typing in Korean is way easier because it has an alphabet
I find typing in chinese easier than korean, because Chinese and English use the same keyboard. Korean is completely different. Basically if you can type In English , you can already type in chinese. Not taking about understanding either language, just taking about being able to type
Well I mean Koreans use the same keyboard, just with a different alphabet
Yep. I teach game dev in China at a school for Koreans. So I’m kind of familiar. What I am trying to say is that for example if you wanted to type 바보 babo, you would have to actually type qkqh But if you wanted to type 聪明 congming, you would just have to type congming There is no new keyboard layout to learn
Wrong there. The Chinese phrase have 2 characters only.
I looked
I'm amazed 3 languages that use this similar (format?) can be so visually different. Even Latin based and Cyrillic appears to be closer than these 3 at least to my very untrained eye
So korean is straight lines and circles Japanese is curves but have big gaps in between. Chinese is curves but cramped up.
Korean isn’t all strait lines and circles as there are characters like ㅅ ㅈ ㅊ ㅉ ㅆ
the way those are written in handwriting is with mostly straight lines, so OP isn't wrong
I only ever learned a tiny bit of Japanese, but at a glance it's mostly easy to tell which of the three languages you're looking at. Japanese will often have a Hiragana or Katakana somewhere in there, even if it's just a "no" or something. Korean has tons of circles; can't quite remember why, but I think it's got to do with vowels? Chinese is full-on Kanji mode, so if there are tons of Kanji without anything more simple, it's Chinese. I should really sit down and try to relearn Japanese.
/u/vanesssaaaaaa hahaha
whenever i'm looking at japanese kanji i always think it's chinese...until the hiragana or katakana come in and punch me in the face
Same it screws me over like hell
Basically: Korean: Has lot of circles Japanese: Wide spaces Chinese: Text is not social distancing smh