Japanese vs. Chinese vs. Korean: Which is Hardest?

whether it's watching Studio ji and Anime without subtitles being able to sing along to BTS and black pink and actually understand the lyrics or to be able to order your favorite Chinese dishes and impress all the waiters all three of these languages have an amazing and Rich culture and history behind them as a native English speaker self-studying Mandarin I often get asked by people which one of these languages is the hardest which one should I choose to learn though they may seem similar as a glance things are actually way way more complicated than initially meet the ey with five different scripts of writing coming from three different language families they're not even the same language family and with so much culture and history between them today we're going to find out exactly what those similarities and differences are so without further Ado let's dive in so we'll break down each of these three languages into their reading and writing their vocabulary their grammar their pronunciation and also the learner experience in case you interested in actually studying one of them if you're new here my name is Izzy I'm a Cambridge graduate and a doctor and I self-study manand Mandarin in any free time I can get if like me you're interested in learning Mandarin Chinese I'm actually working on a self-study method with all the mindsets methods and resources that you need to get from zero to Proficiency in Mandarin Chinese while self-studying it around your own schedule saving you all the time and confusion that I went through over thousands of hours of self studying Mandarin so if you're interested in hearing more and getting early access to this then click the link down below I've also started a newsletter so you know where to find it if you're interested in hearing updates and more tips while there are loads of similarities between the three languages they're actually from three distinct language families Chinese is from the Sino Tibetan family Korean is from the koreanic family and Japanese is from the japonic family essentially all three of these languages initially evolved separately the similarities that we often see between them are from extensive transmission and cross-pollination in the area cuz obviously they are neighbors after all and sharing is caring especially the transmission of Chinese writings such as the analex of confucious to Korea or to Japan many writings from Japanese Chinese and Korean philosophers don't go translated or they their meanings are Lost in Translation so the only way that you can truly connect with them is by learning the language you may have heard of confucious and his work but have you heard of model who was another Chinese philosopher he founded the whole school of mm or Mia which is the school of Mo so let's talk about reading and writing and for this we really need to start with Chinese characters also known as Hansel Chinese is entirely pictographic and ideographic each character represents almost image or kind of like a picture or an idea in some kind of way there are literally tens of thousands of Chinese characters but generally there are around 20,000 that are in use in the modern day and of that thankfully around 3,500 of those characters will cover you for 99.5% of the language that is actually used and spoken on a regular basis often in Chinese characters there will be Clues as to the actual meaning of the character in radicals radicals are like small subsets of the character that you can recognize within the overall character such as the word ha means good and it is essentially the radical for a female or or mother and a baby next to each other and a mother and baby together is good and so that's why this character means good sometimes there are radicals that do give you a hint as to the sound of the character for example the word Mama which means mom the character for Ma has the radicals of a woman and also a horse and you think okay why is there a horse radical in here the pronunciation for the word horse which is just this character here I'll put on screen now is ma by combining this idea of a woman and the sound of the word horse M then you get Ma and you get Mama there's often ways that you can kind of figure out okay what does this character actually mean but because it's not a clear phonetic script you have to learn every single character for every single word to be able to truly understand and write Chinese there are two main forms which are simplified and traditional characters Chinese writing has evolved so much over the years from its very Origins as a very very picture graphic script until the 20th century where it underwent a large reform where a simplified version was introduced to help boost literacy rates simplified characters are often used in mainland China and places like Singapore Etc while traditional characters are more typically used in Hong Kong Taiwan there have been several forms of romanization for Chinese characters that have been developed over the years and the most popular one and the best one really is pinion this helps you to learn pronunciation and also type the characters but people don't really use it for communication because the same opinion can have so many different meanings that you really need the character to know okay which one of these are we talking about for example the word GTI this actually has two potential meanings it could mean rooster or it could mean attack fortunately the characters are different so if you were reading it you would be able to tell which one they meant and in spoken language the context would hopefully give you a clue as to whether they meant rooster or attack Chinese characters have significantly influence the Korean and Japanese writing systems let's start with Japanese the Japanese language didn't actually have a writing system until around 400 ad when some Chinese Buddhist texts started to come over into Japan and then they started to integrate the writing system into their own language the original script is kji which is very very similar to Chinese characters you can even hear the name Hans which means Chinese characters in Chinese and kji they sound kind of similar one cool thing is because kanji is actually based on traditional Chinese characters if you learn traditional Chinese or even simplified Chinese because they do have a lot of similarities between the two scripts you can often read kji and understand the meaning but not necessarily the pronunciation in Japanese for example the word in Mandarin means water and this is the character over here I'll pop it somewhere on screen and in Japanese the word for water is misel but it's the same character know that there are differences in how words are used in Chinese and Japanese writing so sometimes for example in Japanese they will use a Ki that is the same as an ancient Hansen which is no longer used in modern usage in Chinese but is still used in Japanese and sometimes vice versa as well the other two scripts that were developed a bit more recently are Katakana and haragana these two are both phenetic alphabets you will be pleased to hear I'm sure haragana is used for Native Japanese words or is used for grammatical inflections while Katakana is used for foreign words or lone words finally let's talk about Korean Korean used to use Chinese characters initially but then since around the 15th century they developed their own writing system called hangun I can't make a video about this topic without discussing H girl the Korean writing system is amazing it's probably one of the easiest to learn to read and write in the whole world it was created in the 15th century to promote literacy because before this they were using Chinese characters which are notoriously difficult to learn it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours to fully learn how to use hul there's a Korean saying about the letters of this alphabet which goes a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over even a stupid man can learn them in the space of 10 days like English it's a phonetic alphabet that but it's actually much more simple because each one of the letters is made up of a few subp parts which give you hints to the exact pronunciation hangu makes it really nice to learn Korean because you can learn so much by just reading and self-studying speaking of writing systems for these East Asian languages I've been using my iPad a lot to practice writing Chinese handers but the issue with the iPad is that even though I have the apple pencil which is precious sensitive and all that good stuff the screen would be very slippery and not feel at all like paper and didn't feel like actually realistic the best solution I found to this is using a screen protector called paperlike who are very very kindly sponsoring this video paperlike screen protector is designed to give you that paperlike feeling when you're writing on your iPad instead of having no resistance to the apple pencil sliding across it it gives just the right amount of friction to feel like you're actually writing on paper paperlike has been so helpful for me whether that's taking digital notes or practicing my handwriting in Chinese and they've actually come up with an updated version of the paper like which is the paper like 2.1 this has the same papery feel and stroke resistance as the paperlike 2 the way the paper like works is it uses a nano dot technology where these little Nano dots are spread across the surface of the screen protector giving it that nice papery feeling and texture in the new Swiss paperlike the paper like 2.1 the Nano dots has spread a bit more evenly across the surface based on new Swiss manufacturing if you have an iPad you'll know that the screens are beautiful and bright and with a new paper like 2.1 it's even more transparent so you get to enjoy your iPad in all of its full Glory if you're interested in trying out the paper like then feel free to use my link down below to check it out next let's talk about vocabulary the vocabulary across the three languages is actually surprisingly kind of similar the reason why they share so many words is largely because there's been so much cross-pollination in the region especially from China to Korea and Japan but also the other way as well lots of the serious or technical vocabulary in Korean and Japanese languages is actually kind of Lone words based on the Chinese all three languages also often employ a compound structure for their words such as in Mandarin the word means electric so di now means electric brain which is computer or di means electric speech which means telephone or ding means electric Shadow which means movie or like kind of film projection and as we've mentioned since Chinese Hansel and Japanese kji often share a similar meaning you can sometimes guess the meaning between the two although obviously the pronunciation will often be a little bit different however there are some instances where this is definitely not the case and there are some false friends between Chinese and Japanese scripts so if for example we compare the combination of the words hand and paper in both Japanese and Chinese in Japanese teami that means a letter or sort of post mail that kind of thing whereas in Chinese should means toilet paper quite a different kind of paper around 1th of everyday Japanese words and around half of Korean words is actually very similar to Chinese if your mother tongue like me is English then actually all three of these languages will probably have a similar kind of difficulty in terms of their vocabulary because cuz there is a reasonable amount of overlap and additionally all of them have vocab that sounds very different from English so it's not like there's going to be one that's already quite similar to English unlike for example some of the romance languages like Spanish or French or German where there's a lot of overlap with English for these three East Asian languages there's very little overlap with English next let's talk about grammar broadly the easiest grammar out of these three languages for people whose mother tongue is English is Chinese grammar sentence structure in Chinese is broadly very similar to that in English with subject verb object as the classic combination also in chinesee there's no crazy genders or declensions or conjugations or tenses and billions of tables of grammar rules that you need to learn it's broadly very very simple there's literally one particle that you add on to try to describe the tense uh and it doesn't change depending on who's doing it now let's talk about Japanese and Korean their grammar is so similar that if you've learned one you've kind of learned the basics of the other for native English speakers sentence structure can be a bit confusing because often it goes subject object object verb and additionally they're both aguena of languages which means that the designated suffixes can sometimes take a little bit of getting used to both Korean and Japanese heavily use honorifics in Japanese there are different suffixes that are used to denote the kind of hierarchy of the person you're talking to in relation to you the grammar for Japanese and Korean is more complex than Chinese because Chinese is exceedingly simple but it's still a lot simpler than a lot of European languages because there's still less of this whole situation with 20 different tables of grammar to learn let's next talk about pronunciation Chinese is without a doubt the most difficult of the three languages to pronounce this is primarily because Chinese is a tonal language in Mandarin Chinese there are four main tones and also a fifth neutral tone so this is ma ma ma ma and Ma as the neutral tone at the end and so though they sound similar because they use the same vowel and consonant pair they're actually five completely different words in this case one translation for them could be mother hemp horse nagging and the fifth one is a kind of question marker as a grammatical particle if you're learning Chinese one thing to bear in mind is that if you don't know the tone you don't know the word because the tone is so intrinsic to the meaning of what you're actually saying to the extent that if you continually get the tones wrong or you don't know the tones and you ignore the tones a native Chinese speaker listening to you will have a really hard time understanding you and on the flip side as a learner you will also need to learn to interpret and understand the tones when you're listening Korean pronunciation can also be difficult but it's not quite as tricky as Chinese the main thing is that some of the phones which are the sounds of the vowels and consonants that you make with your mouth can be quite different to English so you will need to drill these and work on them to be able to get them to a place where it sounds intelligible for native English speakers Japanese is the easiest to pronounce of the three there are only five relatively simple vowels and most of the consonants are also relatively present in English except for the r sound the Japanese R sound or what's written as an r in the romanization of it actually is somewhere in between an r and an L in English Japanese does also have an element of pitch tone as well so this is something that you will have to work around it's quite similar to Korean where different tones and also different timings will have different meanings finally let's talk about the learner experience learning any of these three languages has become so much easier with the Advent of technology that can support us in our own studying this includes things like apps or other resources where we can learn using courses or textbooks podcasts so much content out there as well on Netflix and More in all of these three languages it's even possible to self-study these languages I certainly did that with mandarin again if you're interested in self-studying Mandarin then you might be interested to check out the resources that I will have linked down below for that to wrap up each of these languages has their difficult points and also their easier points I'll be talking about this in terms of a native English speaker because actually the difficulty of a language is not determined by the language itself it's not really an inherent thing it's more which language you're coming com from and how different it is from your mother tongue or the languages that you are familiar with for Japanese the harder points are that there are three scripts so you'll have to learn kji Katakana and haragana to be able to read and write it fluently there is a complex system of honorifics that is a very complicated area and finally the uena of grammar structure can be quite tricky for an English speaker to learn the easier points for Japanese are that its pronunciation is broadly pretty easy for English speakers to learn for Korean the harder points again are that it's an aguena of language so it grammar is a bit tricky the phones can be very different to English the easy point for Korean is that their writing system is extremely logical it's beautiful and simple and so so rational that you can learn it in a couple of hours and then be Off to the Races reading and writing in Korean finally for Mandarin Chinese the hardest points of this is the pronunciation it's a tonal language the tones are essential to the meaning and additionally the writing system is very complex and deep with thousands of characters that you will need to learn if you want to master reading and writing this language the easier points is that the grammar is so beautifully simple compared to other languages especially European languages or even Japanese and Korean there are so many great learning resources available online especially for Mandarin given that it's such a huge language with over one billion native speakers so while we've talked through all of the points for each of these languages in terms of their reading and writing their grammar their vocabulary their pronunciation the learning reources out there and while all three of these East Asian languages with all their amazing culture are FSI category 4 language which is the most difficult category for a native English speaker to learn the single biggest obstacle that you and I will face in our journey to learn one of these languages is actually motivation and perseverance this means that whether or not it's slightly harder in terms of the grammar or in terms of the writing this isn't actually what I would focus on and what I would recommend is you choose a language that you truly love and are excited to learn something where you think okay I would love to be able to understand this or travel here or or watch this film or order this food in the native language that's what will fundamentally keep you committed and motivated to your goal and that's what will get you to your goal of proficiency in your language this means that it is crucial to learn a language that you love because then you will love to learn it have a listen to each of the languages look at the scripts for them soak up a little bit of their culture and some of their TV shows or their music or think about what your motivation is to learn this language and hopefully one of them will resonate with you more so choose that one to learn if you're interested in learning more about how to develop and maintain unwavering motivation to learn whatever language you're learning then you might find this video over here helpful let me know down in the comments below if you have any further thoughts on this video or which language that you love the most which one excites you to learn it thank you so much for watching as always take care of yourself and I will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Dr. Izzy Sealey

Views: 190,489

Keywords: cambridge university, university of cambridge, cambridge medical student, doctor, izzy sealey, issy sealey, izzy sealy, learn mandarin, learn chinese, language learning, self development, health, productivity, burnout

Id: b78z2Z4RB9w

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2023