Korean and Japanese language?
After reading this forum, I had the opportunity to listen to Korean and English on Sunday. Since the English was interpreted into Korean, it gave me the time to listen for words in Korean that matched what the interpretation would have been in Japanese.
Oh boy, yes! I did recognize words and I asked the interpreter later. I was NOT going to tell him I speak Japanese and I think he thought I noticed the connection from Chinese.
Here's an example. I heard "promise" in English, thought "yakusoku" and sure enough out came a word like that. "Yakusok" or something close.
I don't speak Korean at all and I recognized other words as well.
I'm not a linguist, btw.
1. Korean and Japanese have a very similar grammatical structure.
2. Korean and Japanese have many words deriving from Chinese. (The way we have Latin derivations in English) The pronunciations can be similar, but since they adhere to the language that they've been absorbed into they vary.
3. Chinese is grammatically similar to English, only even simpler.
4. Chinese can read Japanese if there are Chinese characters used, and even then it's all dependent on how well they can decipher the simplified Japanese versions of the characters and whether or not the uses of the characters are the same. (Example: 手紙 in Japanese means "letter", and in Chinese means "toilet paper")
5. Chinese would not be able to understand a Japanese person's conversation unless the Chinese person studied Japanese.
6. "El sofa es rojo" can easily be digested by an English speaker as "[something] sofa is rouge" and then reinterpreted as "The couch is red", but that doesn't mean the English speaker could say they can easily understand Spanish without having studied the language.
7. Study Chinese if you want to be a part of international business and economy. Study Japanese if you want to live in Japan or want to work as a translator in media or copyrights and patents. Study Korean if you want to live in Korea.
Japan is still very much a heavyweight in international business and economy, particularly where electronics are concerned.
Even the educated native Korean used Chinese characters instead of the artifical korean language before XX century.
It is in the XX century that the korean government forced to use the artifical korean,maybe out of political purposes,who know?!
Hangul is no more artificial than Chinese characters are. Moreover, what's so bad about an "artificial" script?
It maybe is hard to understand that the artificial script and the natural one are different.
Let me put it as:
The natural script is the work of God or many people over a long time,and has been revised and refined over and over.There are many connections between the characters.
The artificial script is the work of several persons within a short time,maybe several months. And they are created imitating a natural one,like korean script-chinese characters.
Which one is more scientific and sophisticated?
Chinese characters are among the most natural,do not take account the simplified characters. That's another thing, and I believe the characters used in Taiwan will win the mainland china after the communist idiots step down.
Hangul is great! It's so cool!
<< The natural script is the work of God or many people over a long time,and has been revised and refined over and over.There are many connections between the characters.
The artificial script is the work of several persons within a short time,maybe several months. And they are created imitating a natural one,like korean script-chinese characters. >>
I still don't see how that makes an allegedly natural writing system better. I actually consider the evolution of Chinese characters in relation to the spoken languages to be a weakness. For instance, the phonetic components of many hanzi are no longer as reliable as they once were. Modern baihua doesn't resemble wenyan, whether or not it's written with simplified characters.
<< Which one is more scientific and sophisticated? >>
Sorry, but my vote is for Hangul on that one. It is easier for them to read and write, and that beats being "natural". After all, reading and writing is the whole purpose of having a writing system.
- Kef
Hello, I've been studying Japanese for four years.
Japanese and Korean are related because of their grammar and sentence structure is similar, but their words are not similar.
What Presley said is true, "In a grammatical sense, they are closer to each other than they are to Chinese. Chinese grammar is freaking easy. Japanese and Korean have a crazy system with all of these nasty sentence particals and verb endings. "
As for Japanese and Chinese. Japanese has three alphabets: hirigana, kanji and romaji. romaji is used to write english words. hirigana is used together with kanji. KANJI symbols are CHINESE. yes, they are taken from the chinese language and have the same meaning, BUT you don't say them the same way.
the japanese language is difficult because of KANJI AND FUCKING PARTICLES.
many of my chinese friends had it easier because they already knew the kanji.
many koreans took the class because they understood the sentence structure.
SUMMARY:
Japanese and Chinese similarities: both use kanji/many of the same characters but have the samem meaning
differences: different sentence structure, kanji spoken differently
Japanese and Korean similarities: both have similar sentence structure
differneces: different symbols, no similar words
Just because they have a similar sentence structure doesn't mean they're related, though. For two languages to be related, they have to derive from a common ancestor language, and it hasn't been proven that Japanese and Korean have done so.
<< the japanese language is difficult because of KANJI AND FUCKING PARTICLES. >>
I can understand that kanji are difficult, but why the particles? Particles aren't that different from prepositions and other function words in English.
- Kef
By the way, the word is "hiragana", not "hirigana"... you have to be careful with those vowel sounds in Japanese. ;)