Chinese Vs Japanese Vs Korean: Learning Experience

Three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean share a lot of vocabulary, history and culture and yet each one is distinctive, and well worth learning.

0:00 - How I learned Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
1:24 - Chinese Vs Japanese Vs Korean, the language families they belong to.
4:11 - How the geography of Asia impacts the differences in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
7:00 - The different writing systems.
12:34 - The differences in Chinese, Japanese and Korean pronunciation.
15:35 - What are the major grammar features?
17:11 - the issue of content when studying Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

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#chinesevsjapanese #learnjapanese #learnchinese

[Thelinguist]

In this video I compare learning Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean from a variety of points of view.

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[heidiloesti]

For Korean I like to use Talk To Me In Korean. The teachers have nice voices, there is a course divided in ten levels, and they have "natural conversations" about topics of everyday life.

[orinrin]

In a nutshell:

Easiest pronunciation: Japanese
Easiest writing system: Korean
Easiest grammar (relative to English): Mandarin
Hardest pronunciation: Mandarin (because tones)
Hardest writing system: Japanese (kanji with multiple pronuncations+two syllabaries)
Hardest grammar: Not sure if Japanese or Korean is harder, but I've heard Korean is

Japanese and Korean do not have tones, but they do have pitch accent instead of the common stress accent.

Japanese and the Chinese languages have the most similar writing systems although Japan and China simplified certain characters differently, and the old Chinese pronunciations used in Japanese have far diverged from the modern ones.

Japanese and Korean have the most similar grammar, although I can't say how similar because I'm not learning Korean.

[nilusdev]

I'm gonna try to learn chinese in this year and your videos are so useful to motivate myself

[janvdb]

This video could not have come at a better time! My partner is starting her Master's in Global Asian studies and has to pick what language she wants to focus on, well at least at first, and these are three of her four options. Thank you!

[Ryan-mwry]

Steve it would be interesting to see you speak with Oriental Peal. She speaks Chinese and Japanese very well. Lives in Japan and China.

[kkbbysweet]

Thank you for explaining that well I’m currently learning Japanese Korean and Mandarin Chinese, information will be useful!!😁

[BeesBugsJapan]

Steve, I am super impressed with your Japanese skills. I have lived in Japan for 30 years and I now taking a crack at Korean and Japanese sign language.

[ayi]

I understand 6 foreign languages : English, German, French, Arabic, Russian, and Mandarin with different levels of abilities.
I'm a 50 year-old Indonesian...
I speak German pretty well, and been to Munich to learn German.
It was long time ago that I reached B2 level, nearly C1.
But it seems that my German deteriorates.
I also learned French and Russian, but I don't speak those languages very well like my German, and of course, my fluent English.
Now I'm learning Mandarin, and I believe my Mandarin reached A2 or B1 level, because I got Hsk-3 in October 2019.
I want to participate Hsk-4, but the Confucius Institute in Jakarta closed down due to the pandemi ; open only with appointments.
The problem is maintaining the ability.
Once you get the B level, you start to be fed up with the language you have learned, unless you have a very high motivation and specific purpose to learn the language.
And after that the next question is whether you can maintain the level that has been attained.
I reached B2 or even almost C1 in German long time ago, but now it seems that I can only answer relatively correct the B1 level.
My German deteriorates.
Language is a matter of habits and habitation....

[sparrow]

Hey steve. I wanted to ask how much people should “think” in a language. So maybe after doing a bunch of reading/listening on lingq, to try and form sentences in your head?

[delfieraoktaria]

Yesterday I was uncertain about which one of these three languages I should learn first and this morning this video is uploaded. Thank you Sir! Greetings from Indonesia 🇮🇩

[danzacjones]

My new favourite channel - I love your infectious enthusiasm for language learning and understanding - its such a positive human thing - thank you for sharing

[arishiasol]

Appreciate the note on Japanese pitch accent. It seems the JP language learning Internet community is obsessed with that.

More power to whoever manages to perfect it, but they react too negatively when people (rightly so) deem it not as important as them.

[m_]

I want to learn Japanese and Chinese, Thanks to the valuable tips Steve !!

[Ewan_Smith]

Great video, Steve! I have to disagree about Korean pronunciation though - I think it's much more difficult than Japanese pronunciation. The consonants assimilate, you have aspirated consonants and double consonants (which are sometimes pronounced in words written with single consonants), and my personal experience is that many Koreans will not understand you at all if you don't have good pronunciation. Pronunciation is definitely one of the things which makes Korean difficult for a lot of people I know

[zel]

i just started learning Japanese recently , hoping l can read the original version of Totto chan next year

[tylercottam]

Generally speaking, Korean is the hardest one. The use of an alphabet makes it seem easier, but it has the most complex grammar and pronunciation of the three. And the hanzi actually helps to disambiguate meaning and build vocab efficiently

[WuHaoWinston]

Hi Mr. Kaufman, thank you very much for sharing the experience of learning Asian languages with comparison of so many details. I appreciate it if you could share more in the future.

There's only one thing that I'm afraid there can be a misunderstanding. Most academic vocabulary of Mandarin such as science 科学, are from Japanese rather than the opposite way(once it was called 赛先生 in Chinese). Japan accepted modernized civilization from Europe in about 19 century and many vocabulary were translated to Kanji words at that time, and then they were introduced to China in the form of Chinese character exactly the same. As a result, most traditional vocabulary of Japanese are from Mandarin while modern vocabulary like democracy, science, police etc are mostly created and come from Japanese. I'm from mainland China and proud of my ancient created the most beautiful and important language in the world, but I hope everything is going in the correct way.

I wish you all the best and good luck in the future.

[KochijaLanguageDiary]

As someone who is learning these 3 languages this was really interesting!! 
Thanks for always bringing us your insightful perspectives!

[amrmoneer]

I agree that there can be an issue of content when learning. I faced this problem when i was learning japanese and trying to go from begginer to intermediate. I didn't find content that i enjoyed and that was close to my level at that time. I was also self-studying and had to do everything on my own.