Korean vs Chinese vs Japanese

Hi there!

Today we are going to talk about an extremely interesting topic. If you've never studied an Asian language, it's easy to mix up Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Despite some similarities, these three languages are very different, and each one has its own set of challenges that may differ from the next. There is so much we can talk about when analysing them, however in this post I will focus on a brief history and the basic features of these unique languages, plus how they can be discerned from each other. I'll do all my best to help you to wrap your head around all this. So let's start!

Language history

• Chinese

Chinese is the most widely spoken language with over 1.3 billion native speakers. In fact, the land of the red dragon has the oldest spoken language currently being used in the world. We are talking about a language that dates back to over 3,000 years ago😮! 

China has several spoken languages, hundreds of dialects, and only one written system. The standard Chinese written language was created in 1913, a year after China was proclaimed a republic. As crazy as it seems, there was no common spoken language back then, and something had to be done to unify the language. After surviving millennia it finally had a standard written form.

• Japanese

Japanese has been dramatically influenced by the Chinese language in terms of its pronunciation, vocabulary, and writing system. In archaic times, Japanese was only spoken and not written. Things changed when Chinese characters began to be imported into Japan in the 3rd century AD.

By the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Japan had studied the Chinese language and culture on all fronts. Based on the Chinese characters they had learned, Japanese people created kana to suit the needs of the Japanese language. Nowadays, you can still find many Kanji (Chinese characters) in the Japanese language. Also language evolved, by creating two other scripts: Katakana and Hiragana.

• Korean

Korea is located geographically close to China and therefore it is no surprise that the Korean language adopted Chinese characters, too. Korea did have its own spoken language, but not a writing system, and hence Korean ended up "borrowing" Chinese characters.

By the 15th Century this led to Korea creating its own written language in an effort to promote literacy amongst common people. It was not an overnight success, however, and people in Korea carried on using Chinese characters for a prolonged period. After World War II, when the Korean peninsula gained independence from Japanese colonial rule and national consciousness rose, the abolition of Chinese characters became a national consensus. In 1945, both North and South Korea banned Chinese characters and promoted Hangul, the phonetic writing system invented by King Sejong in 1443.

According to the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, 77 million people worldwide were learning Korean in 2021, in striking contrast to the  52 million people who live in South Korea. During the last two decades, Korean culture has ridden a wave of popularity worldwide as many are fascinated with K-pop and K-dramas😍, which is probably galvanizing so many people are learning the language.

Writing system 

• Chinese: 3000+ Chinese characters

When first learning Chinese, many beginners may ask: where is the alphabet? Well, in contrast to English, which has 26 letters, Chinese doesn't have an alphabet, but rather 3,000 common Chinese characters. Yeah, I know that sounds crazy.

Chinese characters are ideological: each character has one or more meanings, and combinations of characters comprise various words. Furthermore, Chinese characters are pictographic, meaning they evolved from images. In other words, they were originally created by the "painter-like" Chinese people. 

It is worth mentioning that Chinese characters have two writing styles: the simplified and the traditional. Mainland China uses simplified characters, while Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan use traditional ones. The simplified and traditional characters correspond to each other and have the same pronunciation but are written differently.

Chinese characters (called hanzi in Chinese and kanji in Japanese) may appear in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. Chinese characters are extremely detailed. Strokes don't cross outside the square perimeter of any character, giving a line of script a consistent, uniform appearance.

Ancient Chinese used to be written from up and down, right to left, but after the cultural revolution in China, Traditional Chinese has become more modernised and it is now written horizontally.

Whilst the characters may look like a random mess of strokes, they actually are incredibly logical. So much so that if it’s the first time you see the character, the reader will most likely be able to guess at the meaning or how it is pronounced – or both.  Each character is made up of a collection of radicals, which we can easily understand as morphemes, or in other words, parts of a word. 

• Japanese: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji

Japanese consists of the syllabic alphabet (48 Hiragana, 48 Katakana) and 2000+ Kanji (Chinese characters). Since Kanji is not syllabic, we need kana to help us pronounce it. The image below may give you a more visual explanation.

The application of Hiragana and Katakana is more than just pronunciation. For instance, some words can only be written in Hiragana or Katakana (no kanji equivalent). Generally speaking, Hiragana is the more common variant in regular text than Katakana. In contrast, Katakana is usually reserved for specific purposes, such as loanwords and advertising phrases to catch the eye.

Loose, curvy lines that aren't constrained to a small box are Japanese hiragana. For a quick shortcut, look for the character "の." Neither Korean nor Chinese have a character that looks anything like "の." It's typically pretty easy to remember and spot. If you see this character in a passage of writing, it's most likely Japanese writing, even if you notice a few Chinese characters.

To spot Katakana, look for straight lines. One of the most recognizable Katakana symbols is シ and ツ, which look like smiley faces. If you see either of these, you are looking at Japanese text.

The Japanese direction of writing took inspiration from Chinese, traditionally also being written in the “up and down” format, but now also being written horizontally.

• Korean: the only alphabet - Hangul

Modern Korean has a far simpler writing system than Chinese and Japanese. Hangul is the official alphabet used to record Korean, which has 40 letters consisting of 21 vowels and 19 consonants. Although you can still see 한자 [hanja] (chinese characters) on ID cards or grave-markers, they don’t appear very often in daily lives.

In Korean, any vowel and consonant letter can be used individually or combined to form words. It’s systematic and comprehensive. Moreover, it’s easy to learn, print, and use on the computer. 

Ovals and circles are fairly common in Korean script but virtually unused in Chinese or Japanese characters. If you see a lot of open ovals and circles, as well as open squares, you can be fairly certain that you are looking at Korean script.

Korean has an alphabet, just like the English language. However, the written language combines 2 or 3 letters into a single character representing the syllable of a word. So you'll also see strong vertical or horizontal lines separating the letters.

The consonant shapes in Hangul are based on scientific principles and the shapes of vocal organs.

The basic consonant letter shapes (ㄱ, ㄴ, ㅁ, ㅅ, and ㅇ) imitate the positions of the mouth, teeth, tongue and throat when pronouncing the sounds.

test yourself

Take a look at the three languages next to each other (each means "Creative Translation"!) and you'll see the features described above:

Simplified Chinese: 创译

Japanese: クリエイティブ　トランスレーション

Korean: 크리에이티브 트랜스레이션

Pronunciation 

• Chinese: logographical characters with tonal system

As mentioned before, Chinese characters are ideological. Therefore, there are no rules to follow other than remembering the pronunciation of each required Chinese character, and the same applies to the Kanji in Japanese. To standardize Mandarin, Pinyin was created as the phonetic system to pronounce Chinese characters using the Latin alphabet. More importantly, Chinese is a tonal language, and words' meanings constantly vary according to their tones, which is not the case in either Japanese, Korean, or English. Thus, we can say that Chinese is the most difficult in terms of pronunciation😓.

• Japanese: vowel to consonant 1:1

There is a saying that Japanese is the best-sounding language due to its 1:1 vowel to consonant ratio, which is close to a musical rhythm😀. Japanese has no diphthongs, and all syllables are open. What’s more, Japanese has only five vowels (a, i, u, e, o), combined with 14 consonants to form the Japanese syllables. For English speakers, it’s easy to pronounce almost all of the Japanese syllables. Pronunciation is the simplest part of Japanese, compared to its complex writing system.

• Korean: all phonetic

The pronunciation of Korean is harder than Japanese. Korean has some complex syllables, such as compound vowels and synthetic consonants, which many people find difficult when they first try to practice Korean pronunciation. But the good news is that Hangul is entirely phonetic, without any hidden sounds. Beginners can basically read them within one to two hours of study and get familiar with them during a week’s practice.

Grammar 

• Chinese: relatively similar to English

You might be intimidated by the thousands of Chinese characters and their tough pronunciation. However, Chinese still has its strengths - including an easy grammar system😅 (why we cannot have the best of both worlds😑). Leaving aside ancient Chinese, the grammar of modern Chinese is probably one of the easiest among all languages.

To begin with, Chinese doesn't have prepositions, verb conjugations, or tense changes, which means you don't need to memorize all those mind-twisting rules😄. Then, Chinese doesn't have the honorific system that both Japanese and Korean have. In addition, Chinese shares a similar sentence order with English, namely the SVO order, which is also different from Japanese and Korean.

• Japanese: SOV sentence structure

The grammar of Japanese is possibly the most complex globally😓. For example, there are 13 different forms of any given Japanese verb, and when combined with the tense, even more forms are derived.

Furthermore, the honorific system of Japanese is quite brain-racking, requiring the speaker to change the speech politeness levels depending on different listeners and situations. In English we might use indirect language and longer sentences to show politeness. In Japanese and Korean they change verb endings instead😩.

The most substantial difference between Japanese and English is sentence order. As mentioned earlier, both English and Chinese use SVO order, whereas the Japanese sentence structure is SOV (Subject - Object - Verb).

• Korean: similar grammar to Japanese

The grammar of Korean is very similar to Japanese in terms of the honorific system😵 and sentence structure. However, Korean's grammar system is simpler than Japanese. For example, the verbs do not have that many different conjugations.

Because the grammatical logic is similar overall, native Japanese speakers and native Korean speakers can learn each other's languages relatively easily. Similarly, if you already speak Japanese or Korean, you will learn the other one more quickly😏.

That's all for today. Have a nice day💗