Is Japanese similar to Korean or Mandarin?
 

I'm taking Japanese in HS and would like to find this out in case I want to learn another language in the future. Although I doubt it for some reason, I've actually heard Korean and Japanese are very alike. Is this true? Also, seeing as Japanese kanji developed from Mandarin Chinese kanji, I'd assume they're written language systems would be very much alike excluding Japanese kana. So could someone please tellme? I'd appreciate it. ~Thanks.

As for Korean, I don't really know anything about korean.

But, with Mandarin, their writing systems are a bit similar because of the use of kanji, but the languages themselves are very, very different.

i would say mandarin

Japanese is grammatically similar to Korean.

And like what dougbrowne said, Japanese is sort of similar to Chinese because of the writing. But the Japanese also use Hiragana and Katakana, not just Kanji.

Korean and Japanese are a bit similiar. The Korean writing system is completely different. Old Korean characters were based on Chinese characters, but modern Korean was invented by the King, Sejong the Great, in the 1400's. The grammatical structure between the languages is pretty much exactly the same, since they are both based on Chinese sentence structure. I think both Japanese and Korean are more similiar to Chinese (specifically Mandarin) than they are to each other. If you were to learn another language, I would assume that Mandarin would be the (generally) more useful of the two. Then again, these are just my thoughts and it all depends on who you are.

Thanks, guys! :)

I taught Japanese to Koreans and Chinese for years. Japanese and Korean have almost identical grammar systems. However their grammar systems are very different from Chinese.

Korean students picked up Japanese relatively quickly, and Chinese students assumed they would and were suprised when they couldn't.

To sum it up:

Japanese vs Korean
+ Grammar is almost identical
+ Chinese derived words almost identical
+ Korean has quite a few words derived from Japanese
+ If you know Korean Hanja, Japanese Kanji should be even easier.
+ Japanese pronunciation is almost a subset of Korean alphabet so pronunciation should be easy.
- Native Korean and Japanese words are completely different

Japanese vs Mandarin
+ Japanese Kanji is easy to pick up although more complicated than Simplified Chinese
+ Some Chinese words are the same as Sino-Japanese words
- Native Mandarin and Japanese words are completely different
- The majority of the Chinese vocabulary exists in Japanese but some are not used in everyday speech, some are used under different context.
- Grammar is poles apart
- Mandarin has about 7 times more possible sounds than Japanese but some sounds in Japanese does not exist in Mandarin.

Example:
E: I take the train to commute to the office.
K:會社에 電車로 通勤합니다. (Office to train by commute)
J: 会社へ　電車で　通勤します。(Office to train by commute)
C: 我坐火車去公司上班。 (I take train go office work)

Grammar wise, Chinese is similar to English where as Japanese/Korean are exactly the same but miles apart from the rest.

Let's check the vocabulary: (K - J - C - E)
會社（회사） - 会社 - 公司 - Company/Office
電車（전차） - 電車 - 火車 - Train
通勤(통근) - 通勤 - 上班 - Commute
As you can see, Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese are the same, Chinese is struggling badly. 電車 in Chinese means the Tram, and 通勤 in Chinese is a very rarely used word for commute and the word 会社 doesn't even exist in Chinese.

Basically, if anyone can cram Japanese, it will be the Koreans.

Korean and Japanese are more similar than Chinese and Japanese.

Though eventually I plan to learn at least some of all three, and I am currently working on both Nihongo and Hangul, I am not sure learning them simultaneously is always a good idea.

Yes, there are similarities, but I find when I start to speak (as opposed to reading aloud) I am prone to use words from both languages in the same conversation. That's ok if the other person speaks both, but its a problem otherwise. Sumimasen and jeonmanhaeyo do not belong in the same sentence. :rolleyes:

But that may just be my own quirk. I had the same problem when I began studying German while writing a thesis in French. My professor was very amused by my sentence construction of either German nouns with French verbs or French nouns with German verbs. But I had a hard time stopping it till I gave up on the German.

TalnSG: I always confuse languages too >< Usually Japanese and Korean mush themselves together and I get a weird combination of the two that makes absolutely no sense. I agree that when learning them simultaneously it isn't that easy to keep them straight in your head. I also am learning German and French. One day I had a speaking exam in German, and I had just had French class the period before. Thankfully my German teacher understands French, so when I answered his "Wie geht es dir?" with "Bien, et vous?", he just laughed and told me to take a minute to flip the switch in my head to German.

I think Korean sounds more similar to Japanese than Chinese (it might also explain why I notice more Koreans being better at pronounciation). Some Koreans words seem to be shared with the Japanese, due to likeness of pronounciation, for example "washing machine" - 洗濯機（せんたくき）in Japanese and セータッキ in Korean.

Korean and Japanese are very similar. When I lived in Japan, some of my (native Japanese) friends told me tales of walking somewhere in Japan, hearing someone going off in Korean, and thinking it was Japanese until they realized they didn't understand anything the person was saying.

The grammar is very similar (sometimes I even hear things and recognize the patterns if not the meanings--the famous example is "nida" in Korean, which is like "desu" in Japanese, the copula). Additionally, the lilt (??) of the language is quite similar. Being a Japanese speaker who attends a university with a lot of exchange students and grad students from Korea, I've always thought that Korean sounds an awful lot like a Japanese person with a local anesthetic deadening their cheeks and tongue a bit to cause a shift in pronunciation.

In any case, the speech pattern of pitch rather than volume/stress as the primary I-don't-know-the-linguistic-term is native to both Korean and Japanese.

If someone says Chinese is more similar to Japanese than Korean is, they likely know only one of the three languages and have no familiarity with the other two. I've studied Japanese and Chinese, and, aside from a handful of kanji (recall that their writings systems have dramatically diverged since the simplified writing system of China and the post-WWII (I think this was when the change happened) writing reform in Japan), they are extremely dissimilar.

both korean and mandarin sound greek to me.

I bet you could Korean pretty quickly, though. It's probably the language closest to Japanese, grammatically speaking. I liken Japanese and Korean to English and Dutch/German, and Japanese and Chinese to English and Latin/Greek.

oh really? that's not good for me. i'd rather learn chinese than korean.

That's interesting, as I have taught dozens of Korean high school students Japanese and they pick it up pretty quickly, much to the chagrin of their Chinese classmates that think knowing kanji gives them a real advantage to learning Japanese, and then they are surprised by all the different pronunciations for the same character.

is that so? then Japanese and Korean must be more identical than I think they are. maybe our ancestors are like relatives huh?

As a Japanese native, you would know that better than I would.

You and me both, man.

大学生の頃、１学期中国語を勉強したんだけど、日本語 を専攻するためにやめちゃった。今は台湾人と結婚して いるので、中国語の勉強を続ければよかったっすね。

家内の家族との会話って...

幸いにも家内の祖母は日本の占領で日本語も話せる :)

well....many people say japanese and korean are similar. but i hardly believe that. to me japanese and korean look totaly different races. Korean look way too emotional and they are lacking of calmness. on the other hand Japanese are too shy and they are lacking of aggressiveness. i dont know what causes these differences if we used to share the same culture.

I think the question was about the languages, and not about the people.

oh cool! i'm always so impressed that old taiwanese speak fluent japanese. but that makes me sad at the same time. that's what's bad we left in taiwan. we snatched their culture away from them.

@MMM uum you're right. sorry that i was going away from the point

by the way, what MMM stands for? I know a hardcore house unit called Metal Minded Maniacs who used to be popular in japan. I'm just curious what MMM yours is

As a westerner the biggest difference I have learning the two is volume and accentuation.

Japanese is so much smoother and quieter for the most part. It almost requires me to focus with a different mindset to pronounce the words properly.

Korean is easier because the syllables vary in emphasis like they do in English and other western languages.

I think these 3 are different from each other. Maybe they are the same intonation but they have different accent, too. :) i prefer learning japanese, than any other language. :) I think it is much easier because I am inspired of Japanese culture and everything about Japan. =D

I'm currently learning all three languages, Japanese being my second language; Korean, my third; Chinese, my fourth and English, my native.

Having learnt Japanese for quite some time before starting Korean made the process easier. The grammar is almost identical, though there are some differences here and there, and the words of Chinese and foreign origin are similar sounding. Although the alphabets of each language differ, the sounds are relatively the same and a Korean person should be able to pronounce Japanese almost perfectly, while a Japanese person might have trouble getting rid of the tendency to add a vowel after a consonant.

I've been learning Chinese for a little over three months, but the grammar is vastly different from Korean and Japanese; much closer to English, in fact. Mandarin generally uses simplified characters in writing, whereas Japanese will use a mix of simplified and traditional characters. When learning both languages, the distinction may be difficult to make at first.

Mandarin and Japanese pronunciation is extremely different due to the fact that Japanese doesn't have the sounds that Mandarin does, so similar sounds need to fill the space. Also, the Chinese origin words were brought into Japanese at a time when both languages were vastly different from what they are today (and the fact that there are many different Chinese dialects with different sounds must be factored into the equation).

Simple Answer: Japanese and Korean are closer as languages than Japanese and Chinese are.

I have to admit, i haven't read through the thread before making this post, so if what I mention here is a duplicate, just ignore it

I want to point out several things. Mandarin is not a Language, its a dialect. There is no writing system as mandarin. There are 2 major Chinese dialect: Cantonese and Mandarin, and 2 writing system: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

Taiwan is a remote island from China, they speak Mandarin and uses the Traditional Chinese writing System

Hong Kong is a small Province that is ATTACHED to mainland China, they speak Cantonese and uses the Traditional Chinese writing system

The rest of China speak Mandarin and uses the Simplified Chinese writing system

Kanji is a mix of both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, there are also characters that doesn't exist in the Chinese language at all.

Pronunciation though, I personally think that its closer to Cantonese: For the number 9 (九）- Japanese is Ku (Kyu), Cantonese is "Gau", while Mandarin is jiu.

But there are also Kanji that is pronounced completely different from its Chinese counterpart: The family name 林 - Hayashi in Japanese, Cantonese is "Lum", while Mandarin is "Lin"

So when we want to talk about similarities, it will really depend on what aspect of the language we are referring to. Sentence structure and the use of grammar, I think Korean will be the closest. Writing and pronunciation, probably Chinese is closer....

just my $0.02

This is very misleading. Yes, some linguists argue that Mandarin and Cantonese are merely dialects of "Chinese," but you basically do away with all meaning of the word "dialect" if you treat them as mere dialects of Chinese. The are mutually unintelligible and don't even really share the same writing system (yeah, they use hanzi, but there are some Canto hanzi that don't exist in Mandarin, and they're all pronounced very differently and the sentence structures are often different).

The writing systems are different enough (no, written Mandarin is not the same as written Cantonese despite what you may read in some intro book on Chinese language), the vocab is extremely different in pronunciation, etc.

The only reason people ever consider calling Mandarin and Cantonese "dialects" is because they are both spoken in China. Mandarin and Cantonese are more different than Swedish and Danish and Norwegian (if you speak one of these three, you can understand the other two very easily).

They also speak Taiwanese. My wife and her family speak both Mandarin (with a Taiwanese accent) and Taiwanese (Hokkien).

One example doesn't make your suggestion correct. And linguists would tell you "kyuu" is closer to "jiu" than "gau" anyway.

And 林 is also read "rin" in Japanese, so there goes your theory that Cantonese and Japanese are more similar than M and J.

I think this is very correct!

I am Chinese, and I grew up speaking and reading both systems, so my knowledge wasn't from an INTRO BOOK.

You need to look at the history of the language itself. Mandarin was only used in a very small area back in the days, its originated form Beijing. Your example of Hokkien is not correct, Hokkien is a modified form of a dialect known as "Fukien", which is from the "Fukien" province of China, and you should ask your wife again, the "Hokkien" should be what is commonly known as Minnan. Its still only a dialect. In school, the type of "Cantonese" that people are taught (Writing and reading) share the same grammar, structure and meaning as their "Mandarin" counter part. Any Chinese character thats used in Cantonese and not in Mandarin are considered Slang.

The written system is not call Mandarin, there is no such thing as written Mandarin, its Simplified Chinese. The reason why they call it Simplified Chinese because it was modified from the original "Traditional" Chinese, this was done within the last 100 years (Since 1956ish to be exact), they were once written the same way.

Ok, I accept your argument that I was using just one or 2 character as an example, I didn't say I was correct either, everyone is just posting base on their opinion, myself as well. As I said, I grew up speaking both Cantonese , Mandarin, and some very limited Japanese. And base on my limited knowledge of Japanese, I just find it closer to Cantonese

EDIT: Have a look at these 3 wiki sites:

Mandarin Chinese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Just read the first 2 paragraphs....

Simplified Chinese characters - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Read the introduction.

Chinese language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

3rd paragraph:

Standard Chinese (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese , referred to as 官话/官話 Guānhuà or 北方话/北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan),

Honorific system in Korean is rather simplified as it doesn't have the humble form and is almost absent compare to Japanese.

Japanese use the passive forms of the verb extensively. Korean has two forms: one is an introduction from Japanese during the Japanese colonial age and the other one is to modify the causative form of the verb. To say this bluntly: the first form is often used in manual instructions and the latter one is more natural in everyday speech and writing. Some linguists say the latter form resembles the one used in spoken French. Oh yeah. I taught Korean to a few Japanese students in the past. They had a hard time learning the latter form.

And one more thing. The Korean equivalent of the Japanese -wa postposition functions a bit differently compare to Japanese.

Yeah. Hope that helps.

What do you mean by the humble form? I can think of Korean humble form as "주세요, 드리다," (or perhaps since it rather exalts the hearer rather than humbling the speaker it might not be truly humble?)

Fair enough, and to be fair, I was a bit rude in my post. We're both arguing from valid positions and both of our staked-out positions are backed up by mountains of linguistic scholarship. It's not a settled issue at all.

This may be correct, but I don't know how it's related to what I said. Feel free to explicate.

I may have made a mistake in giving it the name Hokkien. We just call it "Taiwanese" in my family. My wife speaks a language that is unintelligible to Mandarin-only speakers. It is spoken in Taiwan and her parents raised her speaking it (as it were, her father was a diplomat from Taiwan who speaks multiple languages, so I value the family's opinion on matters of language).

Honestly, we're really playing at semantics. It is not a settled issue of linguistics in either direction. Many linguists would say Mandarin/Cantonese/etc. are dialects of Chinese, but many would say that, because the are mutually unintelligible (which they are very much so!), they are absolutely different languages. I fall into the second camp. You fall into the first.

I really think it's silly to call Mandarin and Cantonese the same language because they are mutually unintelligible. My wife speaks natively (among other languages) Taiwanese and Mandarin. She cannot understand Cantonese at all. That being said, I have never met an English speaker whom I cannot understand with a slight bit of effort, and that includes people speaking Geordie and the English of certain areas of Louisiana (two of the places in the world with the most "non-standard" accents I've ever heard of). There probably close to a billion Chinese who cannot understand both Mandarin and Cantonese (only understanding one, or none, of these two), even with a lot of effort.

Well of course in a school run by Mandarin-speaking Beijing party elites, the Cantonese grammar taught in school would be Mandarin grammar with a different accent. But, as has been confirmed by multiple friends from Guangdong and Hong Kong, the "Chinese" subtitles at the bottom of movies that is supposed to be standard across all dialects is more than a few times not correct grammar to a Cantonese speaker. It reads like Mandarin to them, and they will tell you "this is not Cantonese; we do not speak/write that way."

All this being said, I don't place much stock in this sort of evaluation of language. I have never studied any French, Italian, or Portuguese, yet I can read all three to a certain degree because I studied Spanish and am a native English speaker.

Even intelligibility is a difficult metric to use well. My wife also speaks Spanish natively, and when we watched The Passion of the Christ (which is in Latin), she turned to me and told me she understood a bunch of it! If I am remembering correctly, she can also understand Portuguese without ever having even studied it for one minute. (This comports with my experience; I can read a bunch of Portuguese simply because I speak Spanish and they are quite similar—I would argue they are more similar than Cantonese and Mandarin!)

I absolutely understand the history behind all this. I only called the writing system "Mandarin" in my previous post because I took the position that Cantonese and Mandarin are languages and not dialects. It was merely a rhetorical choice on my part. :)

Fair enough. Japanese kanji readings did come out of multiple dialects because of the kanji importation and language exchange over hundreds of years from different regions of China, before either modern Mandarin or Cantonese existed!

[/quote]With a bit of effort and access to a scholarship database, I could provide voluminous linguistic papers debating this topic and coming down on my side of the issue. I hope you will accept a bit of return fire in the form of wikilinks instead :)

Cantonese grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and other pages on WP:
Cantonese grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In any case, I'm sorry I likely sounded hostile in my previous post. You're a good, intelligent poster, and I took a very rigid stance against your position after a very long flight.

*offers handshake*

No offense taken, don't feel that way at all... just an intelligent discussion, and I doget upset at people calling Simplified Chinese "mandarin"... .. thats just simmply how we were taught.... its Simplified and Traditional Chinese...

The relation is that, we are discussing whether its a dialect or a language. And there are also relation to the writing system, which I will try to explain.

China, is a country, consisting of multiple provinces. No debate, we all should agree to that. Mandarin, represent ONLY a small region, relative to the whole of China. Mandarin was the selected dialect as the national LANGUAGE, but its not THE language use by all Chinese. Provinces tend to have their own local dialect, just like how Beijing has Mandarin. And many choose to not use Mandarin to communicate

We cannot call the writing "Mandarin", and the reason is the same as above, there are provinces that uses the exact same writing system - Simplified Chinese, but they do not pronounce it the same as Mandarin. In that case, what do we call their writing? Its definitely not Mandarin, because the original intention was to tie "mandarin" to the dialect itself, but since they don't speak it, are they still writing in "Mandarin"??

And I agree, Cantonese and Mandarin are definitely NOT the same thing. For sure its not, they are 2 very distinctive dialect, belonging to one language group - The Chinese language...

Edit: One more thing, about your comment of the subtitles. The thing you have to understand is that, Cantonese are not spoken the same way as how Cantonese people would write, not officially anyways. I think thats where the confusion stems from. Spoken Cantonese contain a lot of slang, slang that is not used in formal literature. One example. The English word :Them, in Traditional Chinese its written as "他們" - "Taa Moon", in Simplified Chinese its written as "他们" - Tah Mun. Notice that they are very similar, with the only difference being the second character, and they sound very similar. This is how it will be written in any formal (and proper) literature by ALL Chinese, either in the Simplified or Traditional.

BUT, when people speak, only the Mandarin speaking crowd will use Tah Mun, the Cantonese crowd will "Kui Dei". Which is written - 佢哋. This is pure slang, and is not use in any written literature. Hence any Cantonese people will tell you that its different, because it is. But realistically, these 2 character, together or individually, does not carry any meaning of "Them" or "They" when written in any document, and should never be used as such, in fact, the second Character didn't exist until recently (I had to use a special input software to get this)

Another example: Tire (car tire), in Traditional Chinese its written - "輪胎" - lun tai, in Simplified Chinese - "轮胎", loon tai, as discussed above, it will be written as such in official documents, but Cantonese speakers will not read it as such, and will pronounce it as "車呔" - Che Tai. The second character are pronounced the same, but if you notice its not the same as either the simplified or traditional version.

Lets look at the example of a full sentence: The weather is great today

In Traditional Chinese: 今天的天氣很好 - Gum tin dic tin hei hun ho
In Simplified Chinese: 今天的天气很好 - Jin ten de ten chi hun hau

Again, this is how it will be written in proper literature. But Cantonese speaker will not say it like that, it will be 今日幾好天 - Gum yat gei ho tin

In this particular case, its not slang, its not not proper enough to be used in any literature or document.....

That's because the Korean honorific system only has the respective form. The humble form died out around the early 20th century unless you watch Korean historical dramas.

One more thing. Korean has a mirative mood for expressing new information just like Turkish.