# Japanese/Chinese/Korean: Similarities



## Setwale_Charm

If speakers of any of these had to study the other two languages, which do they consider easier and closer to their own? 
 I know that none of these languages are closely related to each other, yet they are often clumped together in educational curricula. I wonder how it is in the countries where these languages are spoken. Which of the other two is considered more popular or more needed for career, life, communication?


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## CiegoEnamorado

I'm majoring in Japanese, and I've been studying Mandarin on and off independently for the past year, all while occasionally browsing through Korean grammar books at the bookstore. I've always assumed that Chinese is seen as more similar to Japanese, since it uses Chinese characters for writing and has preserved old Chinese readings, though it's not always that clear cut, obviously. Korean seems to me to have more expressions and phrases similar to Japanese, and they share many of the same grammatical points, like an SOV word order, honorifics, etc. I'm not studied enough in either Korean or Mandarin to answer though, and I'm not a native in any, so I can't really help. It will be interesting to read a native's response!


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## vince

Although there is no genetic relationship between Japanese, Korean, and the Chinese language family, there are a lot of cognates between the three, many of which are/were written with Kanji/Hanja/hanzi (Chinese characters).

IMO, it would be easier for a speaker of a southern Chinese language such as Minnan (Taiwanese/Hokkien) or Cantonese to learn these cognates since they have changed less (phonologically) than Mandarin has. That is, it's easier to recognize that a Japanese/Korean word came from the same origin when studying from Taiwanese or Cantonese than from Mandarin. One must still learn to distinguish native Japanese words from Chinese-based words written with the same Chinese character.

The reverse ought to be true, that is, learning Cantonese/Taiwanese from Japanese and Korean, but the only problem is that there are almost zero resources to learn any Chinese language other than Mandarin.


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## Qcumber

I was taught the Japanese languages and the Korean languages belong to two branches of a single family that has no kinship with Chinese.
That Korean and Japanese borrowed Chinese logograms and Chinese terms is another matter.
English borrowed the Latin alphabet from the Romans, yet, it is not a Romance language.
English borrowed about half its vocabulary from French, yet it is not French.


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## Setwale_Charm

Qcumber said:


> I was taught the Japanese languages and the Korean languages belong to two branches of a single family that has no kinship with Chinese.


 
I have not heard of anything like that. As far as I know, Korean is a sort of isolated language.



vince said:


> Although there is no genetic relationship between Japanese, Korean, and the Chinese language family, there are a lot of cognates between the three, many of which are/were written with Kanji/Hanja/hanzi (Chinese characters).
> 
> IMO, it would be easier for a speaker of a southern Chinese language such as Minnan (Taiwanese/Hokkien) or Cantonese to learn these cognates since they have changed less (phonologically) than Mandarin has. That is, it's easier to recognize that a Japanese/Korean word came from the same origin when studying from Taiwanese or Cantonese than from Mandarin. One must still learn to distinguish native Japanese words from Chinese-based words written with the same Chinese character.
> 
> The reverse ought to be true, that is, learning Cantonese/Taiwanese from Japanese and Korean, but the only problem is that there are almost zero resources to learn any Chinese language other than Mandarin.


 
Are you talking of reading#writing only or speaking as well?

*xxx*


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## cheshire

I think the C-J connection is much more closer than that of C-K, because C and J share Chinese characters, which facilitates learning from one language to the other. 

As for Korean, you'll find not many Chinese characters in Korean magazines. It is because of Korean nationalistic education: they don't like Chinese influence on their culture. They have been teaching less and less Chinese characters in school, as a result less and less use of Chinese characters in day-to-day life. As proof, I think they don't like to see their city names written in Chinese characters. I'm imagining Koreans will find it much harder than us to learn and comprehend Chinese.


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## Setwale_Charm

Well, thanks to everybody, but this thread is actually meant for native speakers of the above-mentioned languages or somebody who knows the situation in those countries. I guess, I should have specified that. As for the perception of foreigners who study these languages, I think, I will open a different thread in order not to have a mess here.


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## Qcumber

Setwale_Charm said:


> Well, thanks to everybody, but this thread is actually meant for native speakers of the above-mentioned languages


 
I suppose you mean native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean who are not linguists. Yes, this is a very interesting approach. I hope you'll get many answers.

I once asked a Korean how Japanese and Korean compared. She answered they couldn't be compared because they are written with different syllabaries! She had never heard of phonetic / phonemic transcriptions and etymology was something she had never heard of.


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## Setwale_Charm

I am not sure I am getting your irony, dear Qcumber I hope that people here have on average given a bit more thinking to the matters of the language in their life that the person you talked to.  So hopefully, we will get some answers. I welcome all opinions but have a separate thread for the "outsiders" since I am interested in both the perception of nationals these countries and the foreign view.


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## Flaminius

Setwale_Charm said:


> If speakers of any of these had to study the other two languages, which do they consider easier and closer to their own?


Setwale, closeness of languages does not necessarily translate into the ease of learning.  An average Japanese may well be acquainted with some sort of Chinese grammar by way of Sino-Japanese vocabulary and structural characteristics of Korean grammar by way of equivalent characteristics in his native language.  Yet, they can be as good help as they are obstacles since the former is a very ancient grammar and the latter presents subtle differences that may lead to fatal errors.

Since the three languages are mutually unintelligible (at least in spoken forms) and there are few cognates between Korean and Japanese, the only tangible similarities amongst them should be found in syntax.  I would say Japanese and Korean are more similar to each other than to Chinese.  Chinese, however, is easier to learn for a Japanese, due to advantages that kanji knowledge accrues.  Also note that the more the number of learners is, the more resources are available for the language, which facilitate learning the language.  As I shall write below, Japan has more Chinese learners than Korean learners. 



> Which of the other two is considered more popular or more needed for career, life, communication?


Language proficiency tests can shed light on this question.  According to my cursory Web search on the situation in Japan, this year ca. 50 000 people took the Chinese proficiency test offered by 中国語検定試験協会, and ca. 26 000 the Korean one offered by ハングル能力検定協会 (another source says that 10% of the figure is likely be ethnic Korean).  If these figures can be taken as reflecting the number of learners, we can assume that Japan has more Chinese learners than Korean learners.

One Website commenting on the Korean proficiency test this year noted that 2002 was the turning point.  That year, FIFA World Cup was joint-hosted by Japan and South Korea.  The latter's government deregularised Japanese TV dramas and pop songs, which have thitherto been banned as Japanese mass culture products.  Korean movies and dramas found ways into Japanese market as well, which from then on is wanting for more.

This has led to massive increase of Korean learners in Japan.  During the 90s, the figures were in the order of thousands.  I am keen on knowing how the influx of Japanese mass culture has influenced language learners in South Korea.

Flam


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## dificilima

Setwale_Charm said:


> Well, thanks to everybody, but this thread is actually meant for native speakers of the above-mentioned languages or somebody who knows the situation in those countries. I guess, I should have specified that. As for the perception of foreigners who study these languages, I think, I will open a different thread in order not to have a mess here.


 
Many Koreans and Taiwanese learned Japanese during the colonial era prior to 1945. My grandparents spoke better Japanese than Mandarin, despite being native Taiwanese. To this day, Taiwanese contains many loan words from Japanese. I imagine there would have been some intermarriage going on as well.

I have heard that Japanese culture is not very forgiving towards immigrants from other Asian countries. They are expected to learn the language as soon as possible (unlike westerners) and some end up trying to "pass" as Japanese to avoid discrimination. That's probably a big motivator when it comes to learning languages.


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## jaxineau

dificilima said:


> Taiwanese contains many loan words from Japanese. I imagine there would have been some intermarriage going on as well.


not just taiwanese, but the mandarin spoken in taiwan is deeply influenced by japanese.

I speak Taiwanese Mandarin fluently and have some knowledge of Japanese (have been learning Japanese for years and passed my grade 3 proficiency exam). Although kanji are used in Japanese. A lot of the times the pronounciation and meaning are different. If a Chinese person were to read something in Japanese, he or she might be able to understand the theme, but definitely don't know how to read it or the details. The grammar structure too are quite different. Although both Japanese and Chinese only have past and non-past, Chinese does not conjugate verbs and does not always end in verbs, whereas Japanese does conjugate verbs and always ends in verbs (authenically speaking). They are two distinct languages. I don't know about Korean, but it has a totally different writing system comparing to Chinese and Japanese. From my understanding, they only use Chinese characters when there is a conflict in meanings or for names.


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## jun

I think this post might help answer the question: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=145223&highlight=Korean


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## 1000stars

My friends and family said that it is easy to learn Japanese when you know their neighbouring country language. I know Korean, is there similaries between the two language?
I realized some words sounds similar... and grammer structure is similar too. . .


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## eastlife

I am a native of Chinese. I feel Korean sounds very similar to Chinese, in terms of the pronunciation. Actually I used to think K is a dialect of Chinese that I didn't know. C and K share a lot of vocabularies, especailly nouns, even they are written differently. 
 
I can barely read some Japanese, because J is way too differenct from C, in terms of Grammar and pronuciation.Some J words are written as same as traditional Chinese, but they are pronuced totally different.


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## 1000stars

Yes, I agree with 'eastlife'. I have many Chinese friends, and they teach me some Chinese words, and most of them sounds pretty similar, except for the fact Chinese have acccents like music notes ^^. Its very interesting. However, I watch Japanese with subs, I can depict some of the words, because they have similar pronounciation. This is what I find. ^^
Chinese words and Japanese words look totally different and Korean words aren't not even close. I find, Chinese words have much more graceful lines, instead Korean words look like shapes, and Japanese are a bit of mix. But Koreans still use some Chinese character, because we follow their language a long time ago. That is what my parents say.


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## koreanclass101

I speak Chinese fluently, some Japanese, and have just started Korean.

The three languages _look_ different but Japanese and Korean are _very_ similar grammatically. 

Chinese (and specifically, its writing system) has a deep influence on both Japanese and Korean. - Although Korean spells out its characters instead of representing them visually, whenever a Korean person explains a word by saying "the first part means <something>, and the second part means <something> and they combine to mean <something else>" the chances are that the word is of Chinese origin, and those same two components mean the same thing, and put together mean the same thing in Chinese _and_ Japanese.

Knowing Japanese has given me a great advantage in learning Korean. Chinese hasn't been so helpful (but is useful). But Chinese is invaluable in my Japanese learning. 

The three languages aren't as close as, say 3 Romance languages, but are still helpful. Japanese and Korean are closer to each other than Chinese is to either.

运动 (yùn dòng) ＝ 運動 (un dou) = 운동 (uen dong)

First is Chinese, second Japanese, last Korean. (The Korean romanization is just a guess, but suffice it to say it sounds similar to Chinese and Korean!)


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## Setwale_Charm

Thanks, koreanclass, this is all very interesting and useful to know with regard to somebody else`s experience.


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## lijunjing

I think I am responsible for settle this question because I am proficiency in these three languages as well. It is not diffcult to learn any other two languages if you can manipulate one of the three, as they difinitly have many words similarly in both writing and pronounciation (although Koreans seems different they just created some symbols to read the Chinese characters correctly with the Japanese word expression style ). Why Korean use Japanese expression method for Chinese characters because the ocupied history in the first half of 21th century
Japanese and Korean all derived from Chinese, the common use of the Chinese characters is the evidence. Japanese and Korean people all wrote Chinese before half of 19th century. Recently the Japanese more and more use Karagana(片仮名）as the political tendency (jump out of Asia into the Europe), the same as Korean people in recent years happed when the economy booming aroused nationalism looked up.
That's why the language teaching curriculum put them together. You will find it would be interesting to learn the three. In one word, if you learn Chinese well, the other two will be easily achieved because Chinese is the origin,is the root. If the root planted in your mind, then you will have much fruit to harvest.
.


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## Frank06

Hi,


lijunjing said:


> Japanese and Korean all derived from Chinese, the common use of the Chinese characters is the evidence.



I am sorry, but this is not quite true. The gigantic amount of loans (and characters) tells us a lot about cultural contacts, but nothing about the origins of Korean and Japanese.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## lijunjing

I am a student majoring in East Asia's languages, and I quite learned these three languages as well.
The Japanese and Korean definitely have much similar intelligibility, that's because they all learned the Chinese writing system and pronunciation borrowing.
If you have the ability to research in these three languages, you will surprised that they have so much phonetic intelligibility and Japanese and Korean just like two dialects of Chinese, especially the Korean. Why the Korean and Japanese have similar grammatical expression because the Japanese colonial policy when occupation before the half the 20th century.
By the way, I dare not to igore the self-determination development of the three.


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## lijunjing

I use the word "derive" and "Origin" maybe somewhat extremist, but you should look into the fact that Japanese and Korean not jsut loan Chinese writing system, but also the pronunciation borrowing and expression way changing if you can research on the three.
For example the word "group":
集团-Chinese;  集团-Japanes; 집단-Korean,
The pronunciation of these three words are almost the same. The Korean Syllables are just made up to corect the reading of the word 集团 in recent years.


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## Frank06

Hi,


lijunjing said:


> I use the word "derive" and "Origin" maybe somewhat extremist,


No, you use it in an ideosyncratic way.



> but you should look into the fact that Japanese and Korean not jsut loan Chinese writing system, but also the pronunciation borrowing and expression way changing if you can research on the three.


So what? This doesn't allow us to say nonsensical things as "Japanese and Korean all derived from Chinese".
This would be the same as saying that Persian is "derived" from Arabic, English from French (or Latin) etc.

Frank


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## Frank06

Hi,


lijunjing said:


> The Japanese and Korean definitely have much similar intelligibility, that's because they all learned the Chinese writing system and pronunciation borrowing.


Apart from one minor detail: I never ever came across a Korean who "spontaneously" understood Japanese (nor vice versa).



> If you have the ability to research in these three languages, you will surprised that they have so much phonetic intelligibility


What's "phonetic intelligibility"?



> and Japanese and Korean just like two dialects of Chinese, especially the Korean.


Come again?



> Why the Korean and Japanese have similar grammatical expression because the Japanese colonial policy when occupation before the half the 20th century.


What do you mean by "similar grammatical expression"?



> By the way, I dare not to igore the self-determination development of the three.


What do you mean by "self-determination development"?

Frank


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## Budz

Really, there's not much point replying to the strange post.  If Korean and Japanese are dialects of Chinese then English is a dialect of Italian - after all there are many Latin derived words in English.


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## lijunjing

Thanks for your comments.
I think each protolanguage do has exclusive symbols used for their comunication, this formed their regional languages. They are merely an agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that symbol, while these symbols have the properties of  arbitariness and onomatopoetic dimension, so if all of the regeonal people changed their whys of certain symbols (i.e. the soud of one word), the language was also changed accordingly, especially when a language borrows so many words from other language. Just like Japanese from Chinese (by the way, the ancient vowels of Japanese just simulated from the ancient Chinese characters) English from French etc.
In this way, the word "derive" may was difined properly against modern languages said above, as we all use the mordern language respectively from their protolanguages, for example, even Chinese, the modern Chinese was so different from ancient way, so the people can't understand except years of training.


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## lijunjing

In some way, if a language borrows too many words with simulated-to-the-same writing and pronunciation, why can't say it is a dialect of the latter one?
The English borrows 50% percent, but the Korean borrows 75% percent and more, this number can exceed some dialects of Chinese.
The self-determination development means a little different after the borrow using process.
The similar grammatical expression means express similarly in everyday life.


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## Budz

Perhaps you should also post a version of your messages in Chinese.  At the moment parts of the messages are rather cryptic.

Let's see, you're saying that some Chinese dialects aren't even 50% Chinese?  Which ones are those?  Given that there is no such thing as a Chinese language - only dialects - how can you say what is Chinese and what is not?  Remember that even Mandarin is just a dialect of Chinese.

You also need to be careful when using the word dialect.  I know Chinese love to say that Cantonese, for example, is not a language but a dialect.  But this is really using the word 'dialect' in a different manner than we use it, otherwise Danish, Swedish and Norwegian would not be three languages but three languages of Scandinavian.  You can't have dialect mean one thing when speaking about Chinese and another when you speak of European languages.


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## lijunjing

In fact I am just a student, I have not a clear finitude under "dialect". In some way I just poured out my "feeling" about it as the overwhelming similarities. Sorry for the misleading.
I said the number exceed of some dialects was meaning the 75% and even one. The Cantonese was liked by overseas Chinese which not liked by most Chinese, that's because early years many Chinese from Guangdong province went abroad, especially the southeast Asia. Anyhow it is a dialect which retained most ancient Chinese, so it mostly like Korean.
I don't konw the European languages well and I even don't know what the exactly English difinition of "dialect" and "Language"...so I will research on it and found it is a interesting thing.
Anyhow, this thread is talking about "is it worth learning?", so I suggest you learning if you interested in Korean even East Asia culture and fashion.


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## nort9111

I'm Korean and have studied both Mandarin and Japanese for 4 years, also lived in HongKong(but didn't really learn Cantonese) for 3 years, but all these happened more than 10 years ago so my explanation might be a bit vague.

First Chinese comes from a very different language family from Korean and Japanese. Though there isn't a solid theory of language origin or relationship between Korean and Japanese, I feel the two languages have enough similarity (even without the Sino-Kor/Jap loan words) to be seriously 'might' belong to a single language family.



From my personal experience :

1. Korean and Japanese are almost 90% same in grammar. Chinese grammar is more like English in word order.

2. Korean and Japanese pronounciation are more closer than Chinese. The only reason why Cantonese and Korean sound similar is because the pronounciation of Sino-Korean loanwords didn't change much from it's original sound of the time it was brought in to the Korean language, and Cantonese sounds hasn't changed much either.(compared to Mandarin)

3. Both Korean and Japanese use many many many Chinese origined loan words. (Making the two languages even more similar) Regarding the 3 languages :
1) Some still share the same meaning and character,
2) Some have same meaning but the character has changed, 
3) Some words have minor different meanings but still is writen by same character,
4) Some have same meaning but different uses within the language and share the same character/ or the character has changed,
and so on, so on.......... (the most confusing part when I learned them)

4. Japanese still heavily uses Chinese characters(kanji) in their script so if you learn Japanese there is no way to avoid them. In Korean they(hanja) are only used to differenciate two words that sound the same, but because of this reason the Chinese characters used in Korean tend to be on the complicated side. (North Korea don't use any Chinese characters) Both Korean and Japanese students are expected (required?) to learn about 1800-2200 chinese characters around the time graduating from high school. I personally think you need to know at least 4000 characters if you are to read a Japanese newspaper and know every character. (Of course you can understand the article as a whole even though you might not know a word, because it is possible to accurately guess the meaning of the word)
One thing more complicated in Japanese compared to Korean is, in Korean the chinese hanja is nearly always read by the Sino-word way. In Japanese the same kanji can be read in different ways according to the whole text. 
An example is the kanji/hanja for water. In Korean the character is always pronounced 'soo' by it's Chinese-origined pronounciation. The native Korean word for water is 'mool' and is always written in Hangul script. In Japanese the Chinese kanji is used for both the Chinese-origined 'sui' and native Japanese 'mizu'. So you really have to learn when to read it as 'sui' and when to read it as 'mizu'. 
If you learn Chinese, you need to learn more than 4000. =(

5. Learning the Japanese Kana and Korean Hangul, there isn't much difference in difficultness. Both are totally different from Latin alphabet so you just need to put some effort in memorizing them. For fast learners, you can master both script in a single day. (Even non-asians can do it!!)




My opinion, if you are good at learning foreign grammar, Korean-Japanese-Chinese is the recommended order. If you feel the Korean-Japanese type grammar is a bigger problem than learning a bunch of Chinese characters, Chinese-Japanese-Korean order is what I recommend =)


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## lijunjing

I prety agree what "nort9111" said above. That is a perfect summary of correlation and differencies between the Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
But to my opinion, Chinese-Japanese-Korean order is more applicable:
1. Chinese characters are more difficult than Japanese "katagana" and Korean "Hangul" in writing, but if the fact that both the three languages use Chinese characters is inevitable, why not learn Chinese first? Then it will very helpful in learning Japanese and Korean. Of course the meaning of some words may different in Japanese and Korean, but most of them share the same or related meaning, that' not a obstacle in reading if you can manipulate the use of the word.

2. Chinese grammar is easy like English, and even you overturn the sequence of the sentence, no problem for others to understand.

3. If you learn a language in deep, you will incharmed by the culture or history of the country, because most history books or culturl famous spots were written in Chinese, so learn Chinese first will help to learn the Cultures of the respective countries.

Please comment


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## rocky007

thanks for the info.


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## irairae

The term <<dialect>> cannot be used if the languages genetically unrelated. Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and Korean is language
isolate, or belong to Altaic language family.
It doesn't matter the number of loanwords. 

Grammatical similarities between Korean and Japanese are few relation with colonial rule. Japanese influnence into modern Korean mainly concentrated on lexicon.(Mainly Sino-Japanese words) and some of them also influenced into chinese. For example, in the official name of your country 中華人民共和國, 人民 and 共和國 are from Sino-Japanese words. Basic grammatical features of Korean kept up from ancient Korean till modern Korean.(Such as SOV word order,vowel harmony, agglutination) These features are not in Chinese but Altaic languages(Mongolian,Manchu,Turkish...) exist.

Some of your comment really embrassing me, expecially it absolutely nonsense to say such like the number of Chinese loanword in Korean exceed Chinese dialect. Because in the case of any dialect of Chinese, the lexicon of one dialect is not borrowed words, but native words itself.


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## Sapphiro

irairae said:


> The term <<dialect>> cannot be used if the languages genetically unrelated. Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and Korean is language
> isolate, or belong to Altaic language family.
> It doesn't matter the number of loanwords.
> 
> Grammatical similarities between Korean and Japanese are few relation with colonial rule. Japanese influnence into modern Korean mainly concentrated on lexicon.(mainly Sino-Japanese words) and some of them also influenced into Chinese. For example, in the official name of your country 中華人民共和國, 人民 and 共和國 are from Sino-Japanese words. Basic grammatical features of Korean kept up from ancient Korean till modern Korean.(Such as SOV word order,vowel harmony, agglutination) These features are not in Chinese but Altaic languages (Mongolian,Manchu,Turkish...) exist.
> 
> Some of your comment really embrassing me, expecially it absolutely nonsense to say such like the number of Chinese loanword in Korean exceed Chinese dialect. Because in the case of any dialect of Chinese, the lexicon of one dialect is not borrowed words, but native words itself.


 
Sorry but that part you mentioned about "中華人民共和國" being Sino-Japanese words is totally untrue, those are traditional Chinese characters.
(I register this forum just to clarify this; PS. I'm a Singaporean Chinese myself so I'm bilingual in both Mandarin and English, better with my Mandarin though.)

As far as I know, the Chinese language has never been modified since thousands years ago, the only changethat had occured was the simplification of Chinese characters introduced by China.

[Japanese and Korean borrowed words from the traditional Chinese writings, but the Chinese themselves simplified their written language to simplified Chinese after that
The same character usually have the same meanings but different pronunciation in Japanese and Korean.]


The official writing system used in China is the simplified Chinese, while Taiwan is still using the traditional Chinese writing system. (But recently I've heard of news that China has intentions to use back the traditional writings). Needless to say, the Chinese-loaned words in Japanese are of the traditional Chinese characters.

Example:
English: Chinese (as a racial group context)
Traditional Chinese: 華人
Simplified Chinese: 华人



中国 (zong guo) refers to China (PRC), written in simplified Chinese.
中國 refers to the same thing except written in traditional Chinese still used in Taiwan. (Although in Taiwan, they would refer China as "mainland" (大陆)"


There's a confusion between the two though, since in official context both "China (mainland)" and "Taiwan" are referred as China.

China - People's Republic of China (PRC) [Commonly referred as just "China"]
Taiwan -Republic of China

If you don't believe me, you can go wikipedia and search for "Republic of China" and "People's Republic of China". (I can't post links with 0 post)


Taiwan(RPC)= 中華民國 (reads as "zong hua min guo", written in traditional chinese)
China (PRC) = 中华人民共和国 (reads as "zong hua ren min gong he guo" written in simple chinese)
[You can assume anyone who knows Chinese knows to read the two different versions]

"中華民國" is the traditional writing for the same word "中华民国".


Hope I clarified some doubts.


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## Frank06

Hi,



Sapphiro said:


> As far as I know, the Chinese language has never been modified since thousands years ago,


Can you please explain what you mean by this?

Frank


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## Sapphiro

> Can you please explain what you mean by this?
> 
> Frank


 

Means that our language has never had any addition of new word characters since it's creation unlike English.. but that's as far as I know, I might be wrong on that somehow.

Btw, simplified Chinese and the traditional Chinese are the same language, except simpler writings for some of the characters which were too complicated.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Sapphiro said:


> Btw, simplified Chinese and the traditional Chinese are the same language, except simpler writings for some of the characters which were too complicated.


Characters/scripts aren't languages. But anyway, this is getting off topic.

Frank


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## Sapphiro

No no, it's relevant so you know they are actually traditional Chinese words and not originated in Japanese.


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## irairae

Hi Sapphiro,


> Sorry but that part you mentioned about "中華人民共和國" being Sino-Japanese words is totally untrue, those are traditional Chinese characters.


I think you mixed up or confused the difference concepts such as character and word. (中華 is not Sino-Japanese origin,
it's from Classical Chinese of course)
----------------------------
Chinese character(漢字,汉字)
set of character(字體，字体)
Chinese word(漢字語,辞汇)
----------------------------
Yes. There are three different writing sets in modern Chinese characters. In mainland China, they use simplified character, and in
Taiwan,Hongkong and Korea(occasionally) they use traditional character. and in Japan they use simplified version of its own.
龍(Traditional) 龙(Chinese simplified) 竜(Japanese simplified)
But, what I want to say, is not Chinese character,but for Chinese word or lexicon. The word "人民" and "共和国" are Sino-Japanese origin. It is translated words by Japanese scholars during the Meiji era derived from the English word "People" and "Republic".　In east Asia, there is not such a politcal system or concept before, thus, there is no such words in Classical Chinese. Actually <民國> is Chinese translation of <Republic>, but I think Chinese government couldn't choose
the name because it preoccupied by Taiwan. 
Japanese scholars translated these Western concepts using by "Chinese root word(character)". And these words imported other
counties(China,Korea,Vietnam) by their students sent by government.

警察(<Police) 經濟(<Economy) 社會(<Society) 民主(<Democracy) 主義(~ism)
are another example of such a Sino-Japanese origin neologism, and the amount of such lexicon are not small share in modern chinese.(Korean and Vietnamese too)These Sino-Japanese neoligism called Waseikango(和製漢語) in Japanese.
You can find an article in Chinese wikipedia about 和製漢語.

Latin and classical Greek are classical languages of Europe, and its direct descedent are Italian and modern Greek.
The "telephone" invented in America, and it named by Greek root tele(遠)
and phone(音)in <English language>. So, we can say it as Greco-English
word. And modern Greek word for telephone is Τηλέφωνο[teelefono], and
it borrowed from English.


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## yuniaus1023

I have not heard of anything like that. As far as I know, Korean is a sort of isolated language.



===================================
This is out of issue but I personally wanna point it out. 
(though not offend at all)
You could describe it as 'unique', but used it as 'isolated'.
How it is negative expression! isn't it? 
It is about the country's culture. It is not that bad to show some respect.


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## Frank06

Hi,


yuniaus1023 said:


> This is out of issue but I personally wanna point it out. (though not offend at all)
> You could describe it as 'unique', but used it as 'isolated'. How it is negative expression! isn't it? It is about the country's culture. It is not that bad to show some respect.


Language isolate is a technical linguistic term. 


> A *language isolate*, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language.


So it's not about the country's culture neither does it express a lack of respect.

Frank


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## yuniaus1023

Hi,

language isolated is a technical linguistic term. 

So it's not about the country's culture neither does it express a lack of respect.

Frank

=======================
Hello Frank06.
Usually 'isolated' has being used some negative meaning in general. But in technical linguistic term, it doesn't mean it. Ummmm......that actually comes to me interesting. Thanks for pointing it out. Cheers.


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## ytuberes

I am a native Korean speaker. It is generally believed that Japanese is easier to learn than Chinese for Korean people. Japanese and Korean has much more grammatical similarities compared to Chinese.


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## Faef

yuniaus1023 said:


> I have not heard of anything like that. As far as I know, Korean is a sort of isolated language.



Many linguists think it's a language isolate (not "isolated"), meaning they don't really know how to classify it. Many others think they both belong to the Altaic group.

Korean shares many features with Japanese. If I compare Korean and Japanese with the languages I know (many Indo-European, to Uralic, one Altaic, and Mandarin), they definitely look like brothers. The question is: Were Korean and Japanese one single language long, long time ago, or were they two different languages that have influenced each other later on?

Me think they were one single language long, long time ago, but no one can't be 100% sure either way.


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## terredepomme

Modern Korean and Japanese may share a lot in grammar but if you look at pre-modern texts, not so much.
(Although still fairly a lot in common.)


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## terredepomme

> The question is: Were Korean and Japanese one single language long, long time ago, or were they two different languages that have influenced each other later on?


It's really hard to confirm that because Korean and Japanese share almost NO basic vocabulary which is one of the most important factors when geneologically classifying languages into a single group.
For example, German and English are obviously cognate languages because most of its basic vocabularies are phonetically similar. Buch-Book, Haus-House, Mann-Man, etc.
But when it comes to Japanese and Korean, only the Sinitic loanwords are similar, and the "native" words are completely different phonetically. So it's quite tough to make any sort of comparative appraoch to this.
The only basic word that would be similar is the "island": Seom(Kor) and Shima(Jap). But honestly I think this is a coincidence.
Just look at their counting systems. Their Sinitic ways of counting are fairly similar:
K: Il, I, Sam, Sa, O...
J: Ichi, Ni, San, Shi, Go...
But if you look at the "native" ways of counting: 
K: Hana, dul, set, net, daseot...
J: Hito, Futa, Mi, Yo, Itsu...

There is an archaic language once spoken in Korea, the Gogureyo language, which is supposed to bear some resemblance to Old Japanese. For example "three" "five" and "seven" in Goguryeo language are "*mit", "*ucha," and "*naneun," compared to Jap. "mi," "itsu," and "nana." A rabbit is "*usaxam" compared to Jap. "usagi."

But there are problems to this as well. First of all we do not know if Modern Korean derived from the Goguryeo language. Long time ago, the Korean peninsula had several countries whose languages were not mutually intelligible. Did they belong to a single family? We can't be sure. Also the Japanese isles had many countries(kuni) with many different languages such as the Ryuku language. 

It is quite difficult to make a linguistic history out of all this because they were seldom written, the classic Chinese being the literary language, and the few written evidences are in Chinese characters, so we can only make out approximate pronunciations.


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## zweibarren

...and how does Ainu fit in?


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## terredepomme

> ...and how does Ainu fit in?


Ainu is COMPLETELY different from Japanese, let alone Korean or any other languages known, grammatically, phonetically, and lexically. It does not even have many sinitic words. It is indeed a language isolate. Compare it to Basque in Europe.


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