how different are Korean, Chinese, and Japanese?

Question

Are there any similarities?

Answer 1

They are very different and aren't related to each other.

Although, it is debated that Japanese and Korean may be related. And in my view, they might. They use politeness levels and honorifics (though Korean has more than Japanese!).

Japanese and Korean verbs conjugate while Chinese verbs do not.

Japanese and Korean verbs tend to end a sentence. Chinese verbs are somewhere in the middle.

Phonologically, Chinese has tones. Mandarin, particularly, has 4 while Cantonese has 9. Japanese and Korean rely on pitch accent.

In writing, Japanese mixes Chinese characters with its syllabic writing system. South Koreans use Chinese characters (North Koreans have gotten rid of them 60 years ago), though it seems like they use it sparingly these days. The writing system is rather unique and easy to learn.

Vocabulary wise, Japanese and Korean have a lot of Chinese words.

Anyway, here are some examples of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean so you can get an idea of how different they are:

English: I read this book.
Chinese: 我看過這本書了。 (wo kan guo zhe ben shu le)

Japanese: 私は、この本を読みました。 (watakushi wa, kono hon o yomimashita)

Korean: 저는 이 책을 읽었습니다. (jeoneun i chaegeul ilgeosseumnida)

Answer 2

For the characters you have there, the first one is Japanese, the second one is Chinese, and the third is Korean. The way you can tell is that Japanese has a lot of characters that are made up of only a couple of lines and have a lot of loops and curves. Korean characters have a lot of geometric shapes, like circles and squares. Chinese characters usually fill up a box, and are made up of several disconnected parts. Grammar wise, they're all pretty different. Chinese, the word order is pretty flexible and verbs are made out of context, but Japanese has a lot more grammar rules. I don't know about Korean. I speak Chinese, so I can tell when people are speaking that. The difference between Japanese and Korean is harder, but I can do it. It's hard to explain, but Japanese uses the sh sound a lot.

Answer 3

I will try to keep this short:

Koreans use a phonetic alphabet just like Japanese people do and come from Chinese letters. These letters are not readable by people that speak a different language. Japanese can't read Korean and vis versa.

The STRONGEST similarity lies in Korean and Japanese Grammar. They both follow a system of "particles" that act much like our prepositions (of to with ....etc) these particles are so similar that they still sound the same and serve the same functions.

Here are a few that are exactly the same


ga subject marker
yo emphasis
ka question marker

There are similar Nouns as well between Japanese and Korean

Here is one i can currently think of:

kaban briefcase / bag

Chinese is completly apart from these two. It is the parent language much like sumarian or phoenecian might be looked at from western language.

Japanese, in my opinion, is a middle point between asian languages. It has Kanji (Chinese characters) with some of the same pronunciations of words AND it has a phonetic alphabet like Korean (and now vietnamese as well)

On a side note, Japanese also have their own "kanji" that are used only by them.

The old way for writing Sushi for example is :

Sushi = Fish + Tasty

Kind of like how computer is "electric brain" in Chinese (i believe)

Answer 4

It's an interesting question. Chinese characters (ideograms) are used in all three - 100% in Chinese, a lot in Japanese and a little in Korean. In Japanese and Korean, phonetic alphabets are used as well (but not the same one).

Pronunciation and grammar are very similar in Japanese and Korean, but are totally different in Chinese.

All this means that a Japanese person (me!) can understand written Chinese to some extent without studying the language (but would not know how to read it) while he/she wouldn't understand a word of Korean, but Korean is a lot easier for him/her to learn than Chinese. Japanese are Korean are structurally similar enough that machine translation works pretty well (in contrast to, say, Japanese-English machine translation, which is useless.)

I remember once when I was drowsing, some politician was talking on TV. In my half-dream I wondered why I couldn't understand a word of it before I realized that he was speaking Korean, not Japanese. That's how similar the two languages are in pronunciation and intonation.

Answer 5

as far as I know, in Korean every symbol represents a letter and has a unique sound, so the groups of symbols make up a word, like in english, or spanish. In japanese there are two alphabet sets that have the same layout, they are hiragana and katakana. These alphabets are not ideographic, where each symbol does not represent an idea.

In Chinese, every symbol is in itself a word and has a unique meaning (this is for standard mandarin) thus the chinese language is called to be ideographic.

The Japanese alphabet Kanji follows the ideographic scheme from chinese.


This is what I could reply to your question. Any further information can be found at www.wikipedia.org.

See the Ideographic article.

Answer 6

if you're talking about the languages as opposed to the people, then there are similarities in terms of the characters they use (they have some common characters) but they are pronounced differently.

Answer 7

similarities: they are asians, & all roots traced back to china (example: eating habits, like chopsticks & bowls). confucianism/ taoism/ buddhism reigns (example: emphasized on fillal piety, etc)...

differences: differences in customs (due to their turbulent history in each individual countries), hence, the differences in languages (writings & pronounciations), etc...

Answer 8

lanuage wise, very differnt.