![]() I get a headache from just looking at this ![]() What you end up in Japanese is a bunch of repeating, long, and hardly decipherable text without kanji. In Japanese, you often get two or even three letters because one wasn’t enough to pronounce all the consonants and vowels. Most importantly, Korean has just one letter and one sound for each character just like Chinese. Let’s compare more kanji with the 「せい」 reading with the Korean version.Īs you can see, out of seven characters that have the same reading in Japanese, you get a total of five different pronunciations in Korean, three of which do not even exist in Japanese. Japanese doesn’t even have a “uh” or “ng” sound. Similarly, in Korean 「生」 is “생” (seng) and “정” (juhng) in Korean. However, the original Chinese pronunciation for 生 is “sheng” and “zheng” for 正. For instance 「生」 and 「正」 are both 「せい」 in Japanese. In Japanese, due to the limited five-vowel, consonant+vowel sounds (with the only exception of 「ん」), a lot of words end up with the same pronunciation. How does this make Korean easier than Japanese, which doesn’t need to deal with all these extra sounds to begin with? And my reply to that is, you don’t need hanja (kanji) in Korean. You may be thinking that in the end, all this means is that there are a lot more sounds and more letters to go with them. ![]() Hangul, like the English alphabet allows you to write a lot more sounds with a smaller number of characters while still maintaining the unambiguous 1 letter = 1 sound aspect of Japanese. Imagine what a nightmare it would be if you had to memorize a separate character for each sound! In fact, I don’t even know the total number of letters in hangul. If you consider the fact that hangul has a total of 19 consonants and 21 vowels, you can appreciate just how many sounds Korean has over Japanese. You can even add yet another consonant though the possible combinations are a bit limited for the fourth consonant. You can also add yet another consonant to each of these letters to get an additional 16×4=64 letters. For example, if you learn 4 consonants and 4 vowels, you can combine each consonant to the vowel to get 4×4=16 letters. You can combine up to a maximum of three consonants and one vowel. With hangul, you learn consonants and vowels separately and match them up like legos. If you count the voiced consonants, small 「や、ゆ、よ」, etc., you only get a total of 102 sounds for learning 92 characters. Since you have both hiragana and katakana, that amounts to a total of 92 characters that you have to memorize just to write 46 sounds. Now the comparison get more difficult because Koreans have invented an ingenious little writing system called hangul to cleverly handle all those different sounds in Korean.įor Japanese, you have to memorize 46 separate characters (not including the obsolete characters) for each individual sound. With Japanese, though you sound like crap without the proper pitches, you can still make yourself understood with even the worst accents (most of the time). And even then, it’s an educated guess at best. Because anytime somebody wants to try out a Korean phrase learned from a friend, I need to have it repeated about 5 or 6 six before I can tell what he is trying to say. This, I think, is the strongest argument for Korean being the harder language to learn. This means that in order to learn Korean, you not only have to learn most of the sounds in Japanese but also additional sounds, many whose difference I can’t even tell. With the exception of the /z/ consonant sounds (which Koreans usually can’t pronounce), the sounds in the Korean language are a superset of the sounds in Japanese. Now this is true to some extent but you can’t forget that Japanese and Korean have completely different writing systems and more importantly, the sounds that go along with them. It is often said that Japanese and Korean are very similar languages. Before I start, I’d like to mention what I write here is strictly my observations and may not be entirely accurate. So, I decided to do another language comparison, this time with Japanese and Korean. However, I was surprised to see how civilized and thoughtful the comments turned out to be. As I suspected, this drew out a large number of responses (or at least larger than what I’m used to in any case). In my previous post, I compared the difficulty of Japanese and (Mandarin) Chinese by looking at several aspects of the two languages.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |