# Similarities to Japanese and Korean



## jana.bo99

Hello to all,

If I see good: Chinese, Japanese and Corean languages have great similarity.

When you speak, do you understand each other or not?

Thank you for answer.

jana.bo


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## glaspalatset

Not really. But since many of the words are of Chinese origin, we understand each other's written language to some degree. Like, Chinese people would guess what the headlines of Japanese newspapers mean.


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## Anatoli

glaspalatset said:


> They're not Chinese language per se, but, rather, the Korean/Japanese Chinese characters. (Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese) even though these specific characters don't differ from traditional and simplified Chinese.
> 
> But then, I wonder how many Chinese people understand this way of describing weekdays?




As for your 2nd question, maybe most Chinese don't understand, since this is now obsolete, hopefully some native speakers will join.

Note: This thread is split from http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=888278


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## samanthalee

jana.bo99 said:


> Hello to all,
> 
> If I see good: Chinese, Japanese and Corean languages have great similarity.
> 
> When you speak, do you understand each other or not?



The spoken form of these 3 languages are not mutually intelligible. The written form of these languages share similarities. As mention by glaspalatset, we can try to guess the headlines of one another's newspapers. But half the time, our guesses will be inaccurate or just plain wrong.


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## GEmatt

samanthalee said:


> The written form of these languages share similarities.


In modern times.  But the further back you go, the closer the written forms become, right?  I studied texts written in Classical Chinese by a Korean, from (I believe) the 19th century.  Or is this just the literati's _lingua franca_?


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## samanthalee

I think it was _lingua franca_. The Classical Chinese is to Korean and Japanese as Latin is to the Germanic languages.


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## glaspalatset

GEmatt said:


> In modern times. But the further back you go, the closer the written forms become, right? I studied texts written in Classical Chinese by a Korean, from (I believe) the 19th century. Or is this just the literati's _lingua franca_?


 
Even furthest you get Idu and Hyangchal, which transcribed Korean spoken words into Chinese alphabet (to put it simply). Few people ever fully understand this form of literature nowadays.


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## xiaolijie

samanthalee said:


> I think it was _lingua franca_. The Classical Chinese is to Korean and Japan as Latin is to the Germanic languages.


That is right, and the "漢文" that the Korean and Japanese (and others) wrote in those times were not even supposed to be their own language.


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## jana.bo99

Hello to all,

As I know, Chinese is one of oldest languages. That means the other two (Japanese and Korean) took something from China? Am I wrong or not?

jana.bo


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## Flaminius

samanthalee said:


> The spoken form of these 3 languages are not mutually intelligible. The written form of these languages share similarities. As mention by glaspalatset, we can try to guess the headlines of one another's newspapers. But half the time, our guesses will be inaccurate or just plain wrong.


Understanding (misunderstanding) between the written forms of the three languages is possible only because of the extensive use of Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean (the latter, I hear, is now increasingly written by Hangul only).



jana.bo99 said:


> Hello to all,
> 
> As I know, Chinese is one of oldest languages. That means the other two (Japanese and Korean) took something from China? Am I wrong or not?
> 
> jana.bo


Even if the writing systems are somewhat similar (in other words "they are using the same 'letters'"), this does not mean that the languages are similar.  Continuing your example from another thread, Spanish is no closer to Czech than to Russian just because the former uses a similar script.

Now, Chinese is one of the oldest recorded languages.  China's political and cultural dominance in history let neighbouring countries incorporate a lot of ideas, technologies, institutions.  They are evidenced by a huge loan vocabulary in their languages as well.


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## glaspalatset

Chinese characters (not the Chinese language) are integral part of Korean heritage, and yet we don't necessarily see those Chinse characters as having anything to do with China.

I believe the Japanese have similiar attitudes, they use Chinese characters extensively in addition to Hiragana and Katakana.


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## palomnik

glaspalatset said:


> Chinese characters (not the Chinese language) are integral part of Korean heritage, and yet we don't necessarily see those Chinse characters as having anything to do with China.
> 
> I believe the Japanese have similiar attitudes, they use Chinese characters extensively in addition to Hiragana and Katakana.


 
A very valid point.  Japanese and Koreans don't associate the Chinese characters they use on a daily basis with China any more than English associate their alphabet with ancient Rome, or modern Italy, for that matter.


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## jedediah

glaspalatset said:


> Chinese characters (not the Chinese language) are integral part of Korean heritage, and yet we don't necessarily see those Chinse characters as having anything to do with China.
> 
> I believe the Japanese have similiar attitudes, they use Chinese characters extensively in addition to Hiragana and Katakana.



Anything, that is, except the name. (Just to be precise)


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## avlee

samanthalee said:


> I think it was _lingua franca_. The Classical Chinese is to Korean and Japan as Latin is to the Germanic languages.


Agree.
But nowadays, as I've been told, South Korea is attempting to use their own characters only. They plan to eliminated Chinese characters from their language. While North Korea remains unmoved. 
The only meaningful and readable thing in Korean to me is their names.


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## jana.bo99

Hi samanthalee,

"I think it was lingua franca. The Classical Chinese is to Korean and Japanese as Latin is to the Germanic languages"

You probably think (lingua franca) Romanic languages: Italian, Spanish and French? 

I know from experience:
One person speaks Italian and other speaks Spanish. You believe or not there is normal conversation, what means they understand each other. Writing is totally different.
Very strange (I was there) but very true!

jana.bo


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## Zulis

jana.bo99 said:


> If I see good: Chinese, Japanese and Corean languages have great similarity.



Simply put, no.


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## kirsitn

jana.bo99 said:


> You probably think (lingua franca) Romanic languages: Italian, Spanish and French?



Lingua franca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca


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## samanthalee

jana.bo99 said:


> One person speaks Italian and other speaks Spanish. You believe or not there is normal conversation, what means they understand each other. Writing is totally different.
> Very strange (I was there) but very true!



What you have described is very similar to what goes on when the Chinese from different regions speak in their local languages (officially called the Chinese Dialects).
Let's use the situation with Latin as analogy. The Classical Chinese can be equate to Latin, and so the Chinese "Local Languages" are equivalent to the Romance Languages, while Japanese and Korean are equivalent to the other languages using Latin alphabets.

A French and a Spanish can barely understand each other in conversation, but can read each other's text to some extent. Similarly, the Chinese "Local Languages" are not mutually intelligible in their spoken form, but they can read each other's text to some extent (though it has to be noted that as far as I know, only Cantonese and Taiwanese have written forms, other Chinese Local Languages only have spoken forms).

A Malay and an English cannot understand each other in conversation. They also cannot read each other's text, even though both Malay and English writing systems use the same 26 alphabets. Similarly, a Japanese and a Korean cannot understand each other in conversation, neither can they understand each other's text, though their writing systems are derived from Chinese Characters. And of course, the native Latin speakers (if any still exist) will not understand English or Malay. Similarly, the native Classical Chinese speakers (if any still exist) will not understand Japanese or Korean.

The term "_Lingua franca_" when used in Italian may mean "Frankish Language", but when used as a borrowed term in English refers to a _de facto_ common language. By the way, the term _de facto_ is used in its English sense here, not the Latin sense.


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## Anatoli

> ...A German and a Swedish cannot understand each other in conversation. They also cannot read each other's text, even though both German and Swedish writing systems are derived from the Latin alphabets...


This analogy is not quite right, Samanthalee. They are both Germanic languages and have _some_ similarities in the roots of the words, not only the common alphabets, it helps to learn each others languages, although it's not so much mutual intelligibility.


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## samanthalee

Anatoli said:


> This analogy is not quite right, Samanthalee. They are both Germanic languages and have _some_ similarities in the roots of the words, not only the common alphabets, it helps to learn each others languages, although it's not so much mutual intelligibility.



Ah yes, you are right...would it help if I use... English and German?


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## Anatoli

samanthalee said:


> Ah yes, you are right...would it help if I use... English and German?


Better English and Malay - really unrelated languages, as English is ALSO Germanic. 

As for similarities. 大丈夫, indeed means different things in _modern _Chinese and Japanese but it helps to know that in both Japanese and Chinese the 2nd part: 丈夫 (jōbu / zhàngfū) means a brave man, hence the new meaning in Japanese. There are many examples of these discrepancies. 

勉强 [benkyō] means "(to) study" but in Mandarin 勉強 / 勉强 [miǎnqiǎng] means "do with a difficulty" or "force somebody", the history can be guessed.

The formal words in Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese have a huge layer of common words but the reading or pronunciation is very different, though.

Japanese has usually 2 readings of any given character, the 音読み "ON-yomi" may remind Chinese or old Chinese but 訓読み KUN-yomi is a native Japanese reading. The pronunciation names based on the 2nd method are not only unrecogniseable, they have nothing in common with the Chinese pronunciation, so "Suzuki-san"  (鈴木さん) when he arrives in China becomes "Lingmu xiansheng", his names is pronounced based on the character readings, not the original sound.

With the Chinese names in Japanese, it depends. They are also distorted but sometimes to the minimum. _Zhang Ziyi_ (章子怡) stays "Chan Tsiyi" (チャン・ツィイー) like many movie stars and her name will be usually written in Chinese characters. But Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 / 胡錦濤 can become "Ko Kintō" or stay as "Fu Jintao", the 1st reading is based on "ON-yomi" but the latter is the "imitation".

The common vocabularies between Chinese and Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese measure from 40 to 60%, it's quite a lot. Chinese and Vietnamese are also similar grammatically, so if they still used Chinese characters, one might think it was a Chinese dialect. Both Japanese and Korean have a grammar, which is very different from Chinese. They make NEW words using Chinese components (like Chinese), some Japanese words travelled back to China and became absorbed as if they were made in China.

A Chinese person can guess what an article says, since many words, especially _nouns_ in Japanese characters may coincide with Chinese: 首都, 通勤, 時間, other words may have characters but the word order and inserted Hiragana/Katakana will confuse, Japanese/Korean has been heavily influenced by English, which made them further from Chinese (s.: 电话). So 電話 means "telephone" in Chinese and Japanese but Japanese don't use 電視 for TV, it's "terebi" (from English "television").

http://www.tv-asahi.co.jp/ann/news/web/index.html


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## jana.bo99

Hello Samanthalee,

Thank you for explanation.

I know that there is similarity between some Slavic languages (if I listen good Bulgarian or Czech, I can understand); between Italian and Spanish (Romanic languages - only conversation) and I understand Dutch if they speak slowly (Dutch is for me some mixture between German and English - Germanic languages). 

It wouldn't be bad to know, where from come all languages!

Greetings,
jana.bo


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## Mugi

Anatoli said:


> Japanese has usually 2 readings of any given character, the 音読み "ON-yomi" may remind Chinese or old Chinese but 訓読み KUN-yomi is a native Japanese reading. The pronunciation names based on the 2nd method are not only unrecogniseable, they have nothing in common with the Chinese pronunciation


-> but the kun-yomi is _usually_ a native reading; some exceptions that jump immediately to mind are 馬 uma, 梅 ume, 竹 take, 麦 mugi, and 銭 zeni, which are all attested Chinese derivations.



> so "Suzuki-san" (鈴木さん) when he arrives in China becomes "Lingmu xiansheng"


But if he were to travel to Taiwan, may just as likely be called "Su-zu-ki桑 sang4) 



> But Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 / 胡錦濤 can become "Ko Kintō" or stay as "Fu Jintao", the 1st reading is based on "ON-yomi" but the latter is the "imitation".


 Almost always (99% of the time?) given the on-yomi reading (i.e. Ko Kintō). Korean names on the other hand tend to be transcribed.


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## popolvuh

glaspalatset said:


> Not really. But since many of the words are of Chinese origin, we understand each other's written language to some degree. Like, Chinese people would guess what the headlines of Japanese newspapers mean.


 
Agree.

But we cannot understand most of the Japanese when they are talking. The pronunciation is different althought sometimes we use the same caracters. On the other hand, same caraters in these two languages are not necessarily mean the same.

As for Korean, if we don't learn this language, we cannot understand a single word. It's writting is very different from the Chinese caracters.


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## kareno999

avlee said:


> Agree.
> But nowadays, as I've been told, South Korea is attempting to use their own characters only. They plan to eliminated Chinese characters from their language. While North Korea remains unmoved.
> The only meaningful and readable thing in Korean to me is their names.


I think you got the picture upside down.
Actually North Korean has complete eliminated Chinese characters from their language while in South Korea, they are still taught in schools and used in newspapers and magazines, but to a very limited extent.


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## jana.bo99

Hello to all,

- The formal words in Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese have a huge layer of common words -

When I see all four languages they look to me like written over there (almost all the same). 

It means if I could write Chinese, then I can write other three as well?

jana.bo


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## jedediah

A side note: The modern Vietnamese writing system is actually derived from Latin alphabet, though Chinese characters were in widespread use in history. 

It definitely helps if you can write Chinese but I don't think this will get you very far. 

I'm a native Chinese with no training in Korean or Japanese language. To me, written Korean looks no more familiar than any other foreign languages. On the other hand, Kanji (name for Chinese characters in Japanese) is still used in modern Japanese writing system, so I can more or less guess the meaning and "redraw" the Kanji part relatively easily.  

This is an ever-interesting topic and I wish people who speaks Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese can weigh in and help us to know to which extend you may understand the other languages without any training.

Cheers.


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## Anatoli

Jedediah. Of course Korean and Vietnamese will look foreign to you because of the script but if you knew that a huge number of these were written in Hanzi (Chinese characters), then you would recognise them. The pronunciation was borrowed from Middle Chinese at various periods but adjusted and largely distorted. The Vietnamese have abolished the Chinese characters, Koreans have reduced the usage and is now more difficult to trace the origin because the pronunciation is different. The Japanese still use a lot of characters but many complex or rarely used characters have been replaced with phonetic syllabaries.

Even if we take a simple and the most commonly known word 漢字, simplified to 汉字 (mainland China) and pronounced as [Hànzi] in standard Mandarin:

*Vietnamese*: Hán tự - this is how it is written these days, although it _was_ written 漢字 before but pronounced as Hán tự (I can't help you with the pronunciation but it's different from Mandarin).
*Korean*: 한자, was always pronounced as [Hanja], it is written in *Hangul* now but _was_ written as 漢字 and is _can_ be still seen like this (seldom).
*Japanese*: It is _usually_ written as 漢字, pronounced [Kanji], _can_ be written as かんじ (*Hiragana*) or カンジ (*Katakana*) for learning purposes.

This is an example of a borrowed word. This word was borrowed in full by all 3 languages, adjusted to the pronunciation of the local language of that period but there are many other situations where _native_ words are written using Chinese components, the pronunciation then has nothing in common with the original Chinese pronunciation.

EDIT:
Fixed the wrong character


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## DavidCornell

Since we are talking about similarities, then there are different ways of being similar.

First, in terms of language family, Chinese and its dialects (Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc) are related to Tibetan Burmese. They all form a language family called Sino-Tibetan, comparable to Indo-European. Then Sino-Tibetan has two immediate branches, i.e. the Chinese languages and Tibeto-Burman. Japanese and Korean are either isolated languages or related to the Tungusic languages, e.g. Evenki.  In this way Japanese and Korean might be related, but that is again very debatable. Therefore in terms of historical linguistics, there is no genealogical relations between these three languages.

Second, in terms of linguistic borrowing, these three languages share a number of similarities. Japanese and Korean used to borrow a large number of words from middle Chinese, e.g. the Tang Dynasty. The borrowing spans over a few hundred years, so the pronunciation would correspond to different layers in the history of the Chinese language. For example, in Japanese, it has been said that there are two layers of Chinese words. Even today, the pronunciations of many such words are still more or less understandable among these three languages. For example: Samsung (try to read the Chinese characters in Cantonese, and you'll see the similarity). This is one source of mutual intelligibility, but it is on a word or even morpheme level. In speech, a speaker of one of these languages might only pick up a few words. As for the writing system, Chinese characters are very helpful. The same is true with Vietnamese and, to some degree, even Thai. But all these are just linguistic borrowings, (including words, and sometimes even grammatical constructions).

So indeed these three languages share many similarities, but they are not related in historical linguistic terms.


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## Anatoli

"Samsung", meaning "tristar" is a good example.
Original Korean: 삼성, also written as 三星
Mandarin: 三星 Sānxīng. In Cantonese, it's roughly "Samsing"
In Japanese it's normally transliterated as サムスン [samusun] but can also be written in Kanji: 三星 with the same pronunciation. Strictly speaking  the pronunciation  is not  accurate, it would be "Sansei" if it  followed Japanese ON-yomi (音読み) rules. 

---
Another good example where a name is similar in all three languages is "Hyundai", Korean 현대 (Revised Romanization: Hyeondae or McCune-Reischauer: Hyŏndae). It is written as 現代 in Chinese characters - "modern times", "contemporary age", the characters are immediately recogniseable by Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.

Mandarin: Xiàndài  (simplified: 现代)
Japanese: Gendai, the company name, though is written ヒュンダイ [Hyundai] or 現代. The transliteration follows English, not the original Korean pronunciation. I would spell it ヒョンデ to render the Korean pronunciation more accurately.

Well, the more Japanese words are written in Katakana (片仮名) and Koreans stop using characters and use Hangul, aka Onmun (谚文/諺文) instead, the more the CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) language links are broken.

Vietnamese has abandoned Chinese characters, and the writing of these modern brands in Vietnamese follows English romanisation, although the syllables may be adjusted to the Vietnamese phonetics. Like Chinese, Vietnamese has a limited number of pronounceable syllables/sound combination and the actual spelling may be ignored/sacrificed and pronounced as if the words were still written in Chinese characters, if you know what I mean. 

---
IMHO, when there's more communication, then those similarities may become obvious and some characters or words experience revival or mutual borrowings. Funnily, in Hong Kong and Taiwan Japanese language is popular and is considered fashionable. Sometimes, the character 駅 [eki] is used instead of 站 [zhàn], meaning a station.
(駅 is a Shinjitai (新字体), Japanese simplified version of 驛 [yì], in PRC it was simplified differently: 驿.)
Also, Japanese Hiragana (平仮名) letter の [no] is sometimes used instead of 之or 的. Pronunciation is irrelevant here, the meaning of the Japanese letter is "belonging", used like 的 in Chinese.


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## Anatoli

Mugi said:


> But if he were to travel to Taiwan, may just as likely be called "Su-zu-ki桑 sang4)



I am interested in this, Mugi, could you elaborate, please? Well, 桑 is phonetical, how do they write the name "Suzuki" in Taiwan, always in 罗马字?

I found this interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin#Loan_words

See: 歐巴桑,  歐吉桑.



> -> but the kun-yomi is _usually_ a native reading; some exceptions that jump immediately to mind are 馬 uma, 梅 ume, 竹 take, 麦 mugi, and 銭 zeni, which are all attested Chinese derivations.


That's what I said, so we agree?


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## D--

The degree to which a Chinese reader can guess the meaning of a Japanese sentence varies wildly. Many things in Japanese which do have a 漢字 rendering are often not written using the 漢字 anymore, 有る being the first example I can think of. The use of カタカナ to stand in for various nouns which may or may not have a 漢字 alternative further complicates things.

When you get down to it, a Chinese reader sees a Japanese sentence with 100 percent of the particles missing, no recognition of verb tenses, the absence of any emphatic endings and a sentence pattern that is uncommonly used in Chinese (Subject, Object, Verb).

Flipping things around, a Japanese reader would be equally lost when reading modern Chinese. Many character combinations have entirely different meanings in each language. The earlier example 丈夫 is only one of many. Verbs are also wildly different between the two languages, and many basic Chinese characters, even in 繁体字 form, were never borrowed into the Japanese language.

So while a Japanese reader may be able to pick out a few nouns and a character that _might_ be a verb, he still cannot grasp the bulk of modern Chinese writing without some degree of training in the language. The grammar is just not there. While Japanese has 的 (〜てき), it lacks the possessive function it has in Chinese, where a Japanese writer would use の. This goes right down the list for most grammar points.

To put this in perspective, it would be like seeing "The bus departs from in front of the bank at noon." as "??? ... noon ... bank front ... go away."

Yes, that's picking out a little bit of the sentence, but you have to see that a dramatic chunk is being lost.

That said, a Japanese speaker may be able to read classical Chinese better than a modern Chinese speaker. Most of the time, the meanings for 漢字 retained in Japanese are close to those meanings used in Tang Dynasty, the time when the greatest borrowing took place. When I first started to learn Chinese after years of Japanese, I found 文言文 quite easy to understand -- but a modern newspaper or book was entirely incomprehensible.

As for dialects within Chinese, a lot of modern speakers cannot understand various 方言. Even here in Beijing, many city residents cannot understand some of the more intense 方言 spoken by elderly people who live in villages on the outskirts. The best comparison I have found to understand how mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects are is to look at Romance languages. If Latin used ideographs rather than an alphabet, and if this tradition had continued, you would have a similar situation to Chinese dialects. The written forms would be very, very similar, though the spoken forms would be mutually unintelligible.


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## palomnik

Anatoli said:


> Chinese and Vietnamese are also similar grammatically, so if they still used Chinese characters, one might think it was a Chinese dialect.


 
I beg to differ, Anatoli.  Vietnamese grammatically has little in common with Chinese, outside of the fact that they both manifest an analytical structure.  IMHO spoken Cantonese and Mandarin have a vast amount more in common than Vietnamese and any Chinese dialect.  Even the tonal structure is built around different assumptions.

And now that I'm sufficiently off topic, I will close.


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## Anatoli

I wasn't insisting, I said one _might_ think. I agree with what you are saying. It all depends on how much imagination the people who determine the border between dialects and languages would have in this case. There was a long discussion about Vietnamese as a candidate for a Chinese dialect on Chinese-forums.com.


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## Mugi

Anatoli said:


> I am interested in this, Mugi, could you elaborate, please? Well, 桑 is phonetical, how do they write the name "Suzuki" in Taiwan, always in 罗马字?
> 
> I found this interesting:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Mandarin#Loan_words
> 
> See: 歐巴桑, 歐吉桑.


Either romanized or left in characters. And yes, these two terms are the most common employing 桑, but you can attach it to any name as you would attach さん in Japanese. The interesting thing is that this habit originated in Taiwanese, but the characters adopted to represent the sounds follow their Mandarin pronunciations.



> That's what I said, so we agree?


I'm sure we do agree, although I don't think you have pointed out that some "kun-yomi" are actually of Chinese derivation, as opposed to being of native Japanese origin, which is what my comment was. (But perhaps I didn't read the previous posts carefully enough.)


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## Mugi

D-- said:


> If Latin used ideographs rather than an alphabet, and if this tradition had continued, you would have a similar situation to Chinese dialects. The written forms would be very, very similar, though the spoken forms would be mutually unintelligible.


Actually, the written forms of Chinese dialects are not necessarily as similar as one might think - it depends on what is being said. Take the following example using typical renditions:
Mandarin:   他要喝什麼? 
Cantonese: 佢想/要飲乜嘢?
Hokkien:     伊想卜啉啥物?
Hakka:       佢愛啉乜介?


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## jsrwang

Mugi said:


> Actually, the written forms of Chinese dialects are not necessarily as similar as one might think - it depends on what is being said. Take the following example using typical renditions:
> Mandarin:   他要喝什麼?
> Cantonese: 佢想/要飲乜嘢?
> Hokkien:     伊想卜啉啥物?
> Hakka:       佢愛啉乜介?


Actually, at least from a (Hong Kong) Cantonese point of view, standard written Chinese is used in all but the most informal settings such as instant messaging, advertisements, comics, etc. 99% of the written Chinese encountered daily is in standard Chinese. So if we were to write something in standard Chinese, someone from the opposite end of China would be able to understand quite well, and vice versa (disregarding the problem of simplified/traditional characters). One interesting consequence of this is that subtitles on TV don't exactly correspond to what is being said, because the subtitles are written in standard Chinese, most of the time. This also means that any literate person anywhere from China can understand what is going on by reading the subtitles even if they don't understand Cantonese.


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## Mugi

jsrwang said:


> Actually, at least from a (Hong Kong) Cantonese point of view, standard written Chinese is used in all but the most informal settings such as instant messaging, advertisements, comics, etc. 99% of the written Chinese encountered daily is in standard Chinese. So if we were to write something in standard Chinese, someone from the opposite end of China would be able to understand quite well, and vice versa (disregarding the problem of simplified/traditional characters). One interesting consequence of this is that subtitles on TV don't exactly correspond to what is being said, because the subtitles are written in standard Chinese, most of the time. This also means that any literate person anywhere from China can understand what is going on by reading the subtitles even if they don't understand Cantonese.


You're quite right - the key point being that "Cantonese" is not being written in "Cantonese", but being translated into Standard Chinese. So in fact written forms of Chinese dialects are not as close as what most people think - in almost all situations, what is being written isn't the dialect in question, but standard Chinese, albeit sometimes with a local flavor. Even writing 北京話 as it's spoken differs quite noticeably from Standard Chinese, to the extent that I remember 10 odd years ago many friends in Guangzhou wouldn't watch soap operas set in Beijing because the subtitles tended to be very close to what was actually spoken, with too many local colloquialisms written as is (i.e. not translated into Standard Mandarin). Even if they could follow 80%, there was still too much dialogue that they weren't sure about or couldn't understand at all to make watching the program enjoyable.


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## jsrwang

Mugi said:


> You're quite right - the key point being that "Cantonese" is not being written in "Cantonese", but being translated into Standard Chinese. So in fact written forms of Chinese dialects are not as close as what most people think - in almost all situations, what is being written isn't the dialect in question, but standard Chinese, albeit sometimes with a local flavor. Even writing 北京話 as it's spoken differs quite noticeably from Standard Chinese, to the extent that I remember 10 odd years ago many friends in Guangzhou wouldn't watch soap operas set in Beijing because the subtitles tended to be very close to what was actually spoken, with too many local colloquialisms written as is (i.e. not translated into Standard Mandarin). Even if they could follow 80%, there was still too much dialogue that they weren't sure about or couldn't understand at all to make watching the program enjoyable.


It is true that there can be a big vocabulary difference. I have run into that problem myself, while visiting websites from mainland China. But at least for us we don't use so much regional-specific vocabulary (in the context of subtitles or in general), so as to pose too much of a problem for those coming from outside of Hong Kong. There are after all a large number of people living there who come from other parts of China. So I suppose this is not so much a general phenomenon as a particular situation in this case.


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## Aoyama

This thread is mixing a lot of arguments which may need some clarification (if I may say so, with all modesty) :
- the initial question started with the *Similarities between Japanese and Korean* 
it is true that there are similarities (though still debated among scholars) between Japanese and Korean, it is said that they belong to the same group of languages, the syntactical order is similar, some words are also similar (most are not).
This being said, Japanese and Korean are NOT mutually intelligible, even superficially, as would be Spanish, Italian and French or (separately) English and German or some other languages with geographical proximity like Polish, Czech , Ukrainian and Russian, Arabic and Hebrew etc, all of which admiting a various degree of mutual intelligibility.
- Chinese belongs to a _completely different group of languages_ , the syntactical order in the sentence is completely different from that of Korean and Japanese.
Nevertheless, there are (somewhat paradoxically) a lot of _common points _between Chinese and Japanese (and also Korean) : both use ideograms (though Japanese uses also it's own two syllabaries, inspired by Chinese script), Japanese can also _read_ Chinese to some extend, but cannot speak it without proper learning. The same is true for Chinese with Japanese, though I would venture that it might be easier for a Japanese to read Chinese than the contrary.
One special feature may be worth noting in the relationship between Chinese and Japanese : it is the only example in the world (to me) of a nation (Japan) willingly and voluntarily accepting , adapting and codifying the influence of another language on its own language without force, invasion or occupation. Japan being an island never invaded nor occupied until 1945.
Relations and evolutions between Chinese, Japanese and Korean would require a lengthy development that would surpass the limits of this thread.


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## yui.hime

jana.bo99 said:


> Hello to all,
> 
> If I see good: Chinese, Japanese and Corean languages have great similarity.
> 
> When you speak, do you understand each other or not?
> 
> Thank you for answer.
> 
> jana.bo



not really. though they have the same origin


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## Anatoli

What a cute answer


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## Aoyama

What a _kawai_ answer, rather ...
A miracle in concision ...


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## catherine1999

jana.bo99 said:


> Hello to all,
> 
> If I see good: Chinese, Japanese and Corean languages have great similarity.
> 
> When you speak, do you understand each other or not?
> 
> Thank you for answer.
> 
> jana.bo


 
We have no idea about what they're talking about,but We can read English to some degrees.Just similarity in form,but far different essentially.


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## xiaolijie

Anatoli said:


> What a cute answer


Of course, and it must be from someone with Chinese and Japanese as native languages.


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