Learn Three Languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) At Once | 🇨🇳 🇯🇵 🇰🇷 in 808 Characters

So you want to learn Chinese, Japanese, or Korean—they may sound intimidating, but don't worry. This video lays out an effective approach to learning not just one but all three languages. Leveraging their shared writing system and vocabulary, this comparative method targets 808 characters that are commonly used across all three languages, allowing you to study Chinese, Japanese, and Korean at the same time. Of course, it's not possible to go through all the characters within 9 minutes, so this video focuses on the theoretical basis behind and history of the comparative method. The video also outlines future plans to eventually cover all 808 shared characters!

Chapters:
0:00 Learn three languages at the same time?
0:32 Romance languages
1:20 Comparative method of language learning
3:03 Comparing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
4:15 Learning through shared characters
5:01 Lack of English-language resources → Original translations
5:40 808CJK's format
6:13 Becoming fluent
6:38 Comprehensible Input
7:42 No need to stress out :)

References:

Image Assets:

[CJK]

A spreadsheet with the 808 characters is available at our Patreon page for free! If you find the information helpful, please consider becoming a Patreon patron, even if it is just at the free tier :)

[sandrawaweru]

I'm currently learning Korean, japanese and Chinese at the same time. These was very helpful information. Looking forward to more videos.

[hexwolfi]

I actually use this sort of thinking when I learned Japanese and Mandarin simultaneously. I learned the sound laws so I could easily predict what a character would sound like in either language. For example, the character 必 is _hitsu_ in Japanese; knowing that _h_ typically becomes a labial consonant in Mandarin Chinese— _b, p, _ or _f—_ I could easily predict that the character is pronounced _bì._ You can also do this with Korean, where the _h_ also becomes _b_ and final _tsu_ consistently becomes _l._ It helped me memorize a lot of characters rather quickly.

[loredell]

I did this 15y ago. I studied Chinese and Japanese at the same time, and they called me crazy, and I tried to convince everyone it was actually helpful and I didn't have problems with cross over info or whatever.

[nturlilfrk]

太厉害了, 以后也要加油更新视频呀！native Chinese speaker here🙋, self studied Korean by English and self learning Japanese by Korean now, I tried to compare them for learning more efficiently same as you:) so interesting 😊

[stingray_vinxen]

I feel like in theory this sounds really effective, but in reality with this method it can become very easy to become a Jack of all trades but master of none. With Chinese, Japanese and Korean it might be best to learn one and then learn the other once you get to an intermediate level in the first one you pick, and then learn the third when you are advanced in the first and intermediate in the second. Or maybe even learn the third through the first one you learned.

[CJK]

Hi everyone, I realised that I need to assemble a small team in order to produce these videos on a sustainable basis. (This is because I am a poor and overworked college student 😅.) I also want to pay my team because I believe that remunerating someone for their labour is the ethical thing to do.

Therefore, I have created a little Patreon if any of you want to support this project! Perks include shout-outs at the end of future videos and monthly updates on what's going on behind the scenes. (I'm open to suggestions about any other perks that you might want as well!)

I am currently the only source of information on this topic (808 commonly-used characters shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) available in English. I also think I am one of the few people in the world who has the skills to research this topic + cares enough to do it well.

I don't want to over-promise, but I hope to build up a steady supply of videos and start uploading again by May. I also want to start a new series on the 658 shared *words* as well as covering Vietnamese and Cantonese.

I do hope that you find this to be a cause worth patronising. Regardless, I am grateful that you are watching my videos and that you find them interesting ❤️

[iii]

Native Korean speaker here, I grew up in a Chinese speaking country and taught myself Japanese, can confirm knowing Korean and Chinese makes learning Japanese so easy

Kanjis are a breeze since I already read Chinese, just take note on minor differences, and for grammar there’s equivalents for basically everything in Korean

[reinburhythm]

Fun fact: knowing one of these languages makes the other 2 a little easier (at least from my experience). I'm learning Korean, and I've noticed there are quite a few word that sound similar to Chinese words, which makes memorizing it a lot easier. I will say that between Chinese and Japanese though...it's really confusing. Japan's kanji has the exact same characters as Chinese along with the same meanings, but completely different pronunciation. That's pretty annoying to differentiate cause everytime I look at kanji, my brain takes too long to adjust. Hiragana is a lot easier to memorize, and katakana too (to some extent), but it's still that much harder simply because it's split into 3 different categories. Tbh, I never realized how difficult it is to learn a language if it doesn't have an alphabetical system. I grew up speaking Mandarin, yet when thinking about it from a more objective point of view, it's painful. So that's why I'd honestly say Korean is a lot easier. Sure, the grammatical stuff is more confusing, but patterns are much easier to pick up and it's a lot easier to read (because there's an alphabetical system).

*In order of easiest to hardest, from my pov:*

1. Korean
2. Chinese
3. Japanese

[denisebalcala]

I love how you pronounced kanji, hanzi and hanja correctly! Nice video, thank you.

[deacudaniel]

Awesome presentation, but I think it's wrong to make a parallel between Chinese Korean and Japanese and Romance languages, since Romance languages are one family and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are unrelated at their origin, Chinese vocabulary influence and writing system being the only thing in common. I would later say that the equivalent of Romance languages in East Asia is the Chinese language family.For example, Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Spanish.

[harujo-koreanperspective]

As a South Korean who can speak Japanese language and have learned the basics of Chinese language, I can definitely say this video is more than precise. Looking forward to your next video!

+) A slight modification would be, however, the three major East Asian languages are the hardest language mainly for the navtive English speakers! As the linguistic distance between languages significantly influences the level of difficulty when you learn the other.

[CJK]

New videos coming out in May. Also, we have a team now!


Hi everyone, thank you for all your support. I am overwhelmed by all the traction that this channel has gotten and very thankful for all of your interest and support.

Over the past month, I have been building up a team and refining the video production process. We have taken your feedback and will be moving away from the shorts format. Instead, we will produce normal, longer videos, which means I don’t have to speed-read through the script like an overcaffeinated Eminem. This also means we can go deeper into aspects of the languages and the cultures that were previously cut for time.

For May, you can expect one new character video per week. We plan to gradually increase our capacity in the future so that we eventually release three videos per week.

I would like to thank the team, without whom none of this would be possible. I cannot appreciate them enough for all the time and hard work that they are putting in!


Finally, here is a shout-out to all our team members! They are:
AJ
Alex
Amberly
AshElly
Ha My
Jacqueline
Nate
Theo
Zhi Rui

[TaiChiKnees]

I’m studying Korean but doing Mandarin on Duolingo for fun while my son bugs me to Learn Japanese since he’s moving there. My main trouble in Korean is recalling vocabulary and have already noticed that similarities in some of the few terms I know in Mandarin or Japanese helps a LOT to remember Korean. And I only really need to recognize Chinese characters, not draw them. So any new pathway to reinforce a term in my brain will help. I look forward to your videos!

[abp]

I basically learned J and C from scratch at the same time, from absolute beginner to year 3 in university. I really enjoyed it.

[mxrbvzv]

people who don't study japanese always talk about how kanji is the hardest part, and it is pretty difficult, but you just need to do the same thing for hundreds of times, which is finding the kanji, learning the reading and meaning, it's a lineal process and it's quantifiable, you can know how many kanji you know, and how many of them are in the jouyou kanji list, but when it comes to listening and grammar it is much harder, and I'd argue those two aspects are harder than kanji, as someone who has been learning japanese for 2 years

[yoonieblues]

For Chinese speakers who are currently studying Korean, check out《韩文单字语源图鉴》!! It points out the differences and similarities between these two languages, which helps to memorize the meaning of words

[linmax]

As a Chinese learner, I believe Chinese has an easy grammar structure that English speakers can pick up quickly—the characters, unfortunately, tend to overwhelm most. I would say Japanese and Korean are more similar in grammar and writing overall since they have set scripts (unlike Chinese), their sentence structures are similar (SOV) and they use particles which are also used in Chinese, but less frequently and not in the same ways.

[teri]

When starting to learn Korean, I already had some basic knowledge of Japanese and don't get me started on how confusing it was. The grammar is similar in some ways so switching a Korean word for a Japanese didn't seem like much of a problem to my brain haha
I started to focus on Korean and only after reaching a higher intermediate level I began to learn Japanese again, from scratch and guess what.
The process was way more pleasant because I had something to compare it to (Korean) and I did not get confused with vocabulary, since Korean is already so engraved in my brain.
Never tried learning Chinese but I don't think learning it at the same time as the other two languages would be a good idea.

Tbh even with the romance languages, I know French quite well and when learning Spanish it seemed quite confusing sometimes. It is true you can understand some of the other romance languages but learning all of them at once just results in a jumble of words from multiple languages that don't go together.
That's just my opinion as an average language enthusiast and learner.. ^^;

[renmare]

I started trying to learn Chinese on my own after several years of taking Japanese classes. I found that each language aids the learning of the other, especially with recognizing the meaning of characters. To see a video that explains this phenomena is very exciting!