Learning Japanese or Korean after studying Chinese

Language Learning Chinese
1

Have any of you attempted to learn either Japanese or Korean after studying Chinese? How much did your Chinese knowledge help you when studying either (or perhaps both) of those languages?

I am currently doing some minor Japanese studying and knowning Chinese characters is a great help form Kanji, not as great as I initially thought it would be, but it is indeed an advantage if you know a fair amount of Chinese knowledge. There are also some cognates that sound similar in both languages, but other than strictly vocabulary usage, Chinese doesn’t seem to help much.

Korean seems to be the same way. I don’t know much Korean, but the grammar is more Japanese in style, and knowing Chinese only seems to benifit you for some of the more obvious sino-korean words like Library, College, exercise, and the rarely-used hanjia.

I would like to hear some comments if you have tried studying either of these two languages or even different ones (like vietnamese).

When I return to Taiwan I am also consider studying these languages in some near-by buxiban that I might live in.

2

I thought I read that 80% of Korean vocabulary was Chinese loanwords. Could be wrong though.

3

People who know Chinese often think they will have some big advantage studying Japanese. I did. I was deeply mistaken. It was great to know the kanji, but you almost end up learning them again since you have to master all the pronunciations again. Plus they are totally different languages.

4

What he said. Knowing han4zi4 gives you a little boost, but everything else is so completely different that it’s a small boost indeed.

5

Yes, that’s what I quickly learned after studying a bit of Japanese. The chinese language helps just a little bit for the Kanji, but the kanji is used in different ways and different ways to pronounce it, they also use really uncommon kanji that the Chinese have stopped using, and some of the kanji are even written differently! (like black)

THat being said, it is still a tremedous advantage. I can look at something and actually guess some sort of meaning, which for the most part are not too far. I doubt any other student who hadn’t had some base for chinese characters could do that. I can also easily memorize (or have an easier time memorizing) compound kanji words. It also saved me the hassle of learning a lot of rudimentary words like sun, moon, river, and all the numbers. Lastly, it is very helpful because you know the radicals of each of the characters, and so have a much easier time looking up the kanji if you don’t undersand it.

But yes, it was a really sad day for me when I finally realized that actually knowing Chinese wasn’t going to magically translate into knowing all the kanji of Japanese.

I actually think it is more of an advantage to know English than to know Chinese when studying Japanese. This way, use know the katakana of a lot of things, like “best seller” and a bunch of car parts, and just about the majority of loan-words really.

I think the chinese characters in Korean follow much more similar useage to their original chinese form than the japanese kanji do.

Also smithgsj, from my understanding Korean has about 65% sino-korean words, (30% Native korean words, 5% loan words) but to be honest whenever I hear korean and study through the vocab, I only pick out a couple words that sound Chinese, maybe I need to study more Korean to know more!

6

Chinese is easy if you know Japanese first. C only has 1 reading (sound) per character. You can’t understand how wildly simple that is coming from J. “You mean one and only one reading?!?!?!” Disbelief. The J are so anal retentive. If the C changed pronunciation after a few hundred years, the J added a layer of new chinese character readings to J and kept all the old ones.

Korean is easy if you know Japanese first. J and K have the SAME grammar, and the grammar is what really overclocks your cerebral cortex in J. It is SO difficult to think backwards (required in J) until it becomes second nature.

IMO, minor help from C going to J, no help going from C to K.

The way to do it is J, then C or K. I did them J, C, then K. Doing them J,C,K gives you a great, immediate boost when you learn the complete (!!) K syllabary (hangul) in about 40 minutes, and that’s it. No 10 year study of radicals and how to use a character dictionary, and oh… that bushuu only has 2 strokes but it’s classified as if it had 3 because 1000 years ago it had 3 strokes.

7

As a Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese speaker, I find Onyomi is quite easy, while KunYomi is not. Many Japanese words originate from ancient Chinese, and many modern Chinese words are actually from Japanese, such as 電話 (telephone), 講座 (lecture), 哲學 (philosophy). For those words, Japanese is relatively easy for Chinese speakers at entry level.

I don’t know many Korean words, but from I have seen, lots of Korean words seem closer to modern Chinese, while they sometimes use Japanese terms. If you read Chinese, check out this page: zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%9D% … 2%E5%AD%97

Yung-chung Lin

8

I know squat Japanese, but I can look at something in a magazine and get what it’s about, or look at a sign and figure it out. In Japan you can get by by writing stuff down.

Japanese and Chinese may be totally different languages, genetically unrelated even. But haven’t you noticed how the Taiwanese who speak Japanese (and Koreans who speak Chinese) actually, um, speak the languages. Far cry from the hopeless ungrammatical mumblings of even many teachers of English here. That’s gotta have something to do with the writing system

9

[quote=“smithsgj”]I know squat Japanese, but I can look at something in a magazine and get what it’s about, or look at a sign and figure it out. In Japan you can get by by writing stuff down.

Japanese and Chinese may be totally different languages, genetically unrelated even. But haven’t you noticed how the Taiwanese who speak Japanese (and Koreans who speak Chinese) actually, um, speak the languages. Far cry from the hopeless ungrammatical mumblings of even many teachers of English here. That’s gotta have something to do with the writing system[/quote]

I felt that the accents I hear in Japanese from the Taiwanese are just dead-awful though. It’s almost painful hearing Japanese from Chinese students, and on top of that they are awful at Japanese grammar and conjugations. Everything seems to be conjugated in the present masu form, and they hardly ever use the informal form because they find it “not necessary”. The only problem is that a weak understanding of the informal form makes it incredibly hard when conjugating other forms, the “tsumori” form (i intend to, etc) is one of many many examples of this.

10

[quote=“Rabidpie”][quote=“smithsgj”]I know squat Japanese, but I can look at something in a magazine and get what it’s about, or look at a sign and figure it out. In Japan you can get by by writing stuff down.

Japanese and Chinese may be totally different languages, genetically unrelated even. But haven’t you noticed how the Taiwanese who speak Japanese (and Koreans who speak Chinese) actually, um, speak the languages. Far cry from the hopeless ungrammatical mumblings of even many teachers of English here. That’s gotta have something to do with the writing system[/quote]

I felt that the accents I hear in Japanese from the Taiwanese are just dead-awful though. It’s almost painful hearing Japanese from Chinese students, and on top of that they are awful at Japanese grammar and conjugations. Everything seems to be conjugated in the present masu form, and they hardly ever use the informal form because they find it “not necessary”. The only problem is that a weak understanding of the informal form makes it incredibly hard when conjugating other forms, the “tsumori” form (i intend to, etc) is one of many many examples of this.[/quote]

Fair enough. I don’t know any students, but where we live there are a couple of biz types who deal with jp a lot, and visit. They sound really fluent to me (unlike their biz counterparts who spaek English for work). But it’s just an impression [edit: cos like I said I don’t know japanese), and there could be all sorts of reasons for it that I haven’t thought about.

I did meet a group of Koreans, teachers of Chinese, on an in-service course here. And they all spoke very fluently, some with distinct Taiwanese or mainland accents, acquired just during 2-4 years of postgraduate study in-country. There were some native Chinese speakers, family from Shandong, in the group, but I am discounting them. They had no problem listening to a series of lectures delivered in Chinese (both by native speakers and me), asking intelligent questions and even expressing disagreement.

Compare that to Taiwanese teachers with EFL higher degrees from the US: most of the time they are very disfluent, make lots of grammar errors and are conversationally quite inept. Generally incapable of stringing a question together or showing any signs of comprehension, when presented to in English.

11

II am Taiwanese and learning Japanese now. I think Chinese can help you learning japanes kanji.

12

Sandwhale, welcome to flob.
I think you mean to say, “I think knowing traditional Chinese characters can help you to learn kanji, but not the readings (phonemes) of the kanji.”

13

Heavens to betsy before we know it all the newbies will be signing up as whales. Tigerwhale, Ironwhale, Whale in Taiwan.

btw How do you get 2 whales in a mini?

Down the M4 and over the Severn Bridge.

14

I studied (and am still studying) Japanese before I started studying Chinese, and I can only say it is such a big help.

Of course, Grammar not really, but isn’t the main problem in Chinese, Korean or Japanese the vocabulary?
And if you take the Chinese loanwords (or the ones ported back again from Japanese to Chinese) into mind, this makes it just much more easier. If you learned it before, you can so easily just learn one additionally pronounciation and be done with it. This is not just the writing, it’s also the pronounciation, even if it is different

J 圧力 あつりょく atsuryoku Ch 壓力 yālì K 壓力 압력 (similar, maybe more to Japanese than to Chinese)
J 躊躇 ちゅうちょ chūcho Ch 躊躇 chóuchú K 躊躇 주저 (also something similar, but my Hangul are too bad and I don’t know any transcription)

And I think, there are soo many more examples. If you are seeing it from a higher, written language, it is so helpful. Maybe it is not helpful for the basic stuff (because 吃 won’t help you for 食べる), but after some time, I think it is really helpful.

I can see that in my Chinese class: I can learn Vocabulary so much faster than the ones who didn’t study Japanese or Korean before.

15

Hmmm. I learnt Chinese for a year or in high school before embarking on a self-taught Japanese adventure (culminating in me heading off to Japan for exchange two years later and passing Level 2 then Level 1 JLPT. All the while I kept taking Chinese in high school. Actually, my main motivation for learning Chinese to the point I have now is the (questionable) logic of ‘I’ve been learning Chinese longer than Japanese, but my Japanese is far, far better - this is strange’.)

Learning Chinese helped in the sense that I never felt that ‘fear’ of Kanji that most Japanese students seem to have - I jumped straight into the kana/kanji mix, rather than bother with all these nicely-spaced-by-particle hiragana sentences they give you in the textbooks.

In terms of vocab it helps somewhat - but I’d say it actually tends to give you a bit of a strange vocabulary in Japanese. You know how Asian ESL speakers will say ‘ask’ when they first start learning English, yet French ESL speakers will usually say ‘enquire’ ? Same diff. Chinese speakers like to use lots of overly-complicated compound words in everyday vernacular. All they’re doing is translating everyday words into Japanese as they speak, but it still sounds odd.

Also, Japanese people don’t think like Chinese people. This means that when you speak you will phrase things differently to how people phrase it in Chinese. It took me a while to figure this out (both ways - improving my Chinese meant I realised that many Japanese sayings/phrasings are actually very similar to the English). I’m too tired to think of examples now @.@ sorry for being lazy >.<

I did Korean for a year the first time I tried uni; it was fun! Easy to learn to read, and I passed the whole first semester after attending only 4 or so classes and then guessing all the words (because the grammar was so similar to Japanese, and a good chunk of the words are somewhere between Japanese and Chinese, and Australian universities are champions of the multiple-choice exam). Didn’t work for the second semester though.

And yeah, Taiwanese people have a unique accent when they speak Japanese (in 99% of cases, fluency/grammatical accuracy has nothing to do with this). It could be a throwback to Taiwanese though, as I have a friend with fabulous Japanese (again, self-taught - good speakers always seem to be self-taught with Japanese) who can’t speak Taiwanese and doesn’t seem to have the accent. I haven’t done a proper survey so can’t really say though.

16

I went the other way, as some others here have done. I spent some time in Japan and learned Japanese long before I started learning Chinese. It was a huge help for me, and probably the reason my Chinese writing is miles above my speaking. Like someone else said, it was a huge gift to me that Chinese characters usually only have one reading - much unlike Japanese, where they usually have at least two (the sound from the original Chinese and the sound from native Japanese), but sometimes as many as five or six, if you include archaic readings.

Since learning Chinese though, it is very clear the strong associations the languages have. I think it’ll give you a bit of a boost in strange character pairs, that, when I was learning Japanese with no other asian language experience were deeply confusing. Some easy examples of similarity:
可愛い（かわいい）and 可愛 for cute
椅子 （いす） and 椅子 for chair
料理（りょうり）and 料理 for cooking or cuisine
修理（しゅうり）and 修理 for repair
For me at least, when I learned these in Japanese, it made no sense to me why they chose those character pairs, when separately the characters had completely different meanings than when they were paired. Now I know that they were just ripped completely from Chinese. In this way, the two have almost reinforced each other at times, as I am actually much better with remembering hanzi than kanji for some unfathomable reason. You’ll have no help with grammar or pronunciation from Chinese, as they’re very different. At least take solace in Japanese’s very easy pronunciation.

It is true that Chinese Japanese speakers sound different from Native or English Japanese speakers. Their word selection is like they’re translating Chinese characters over into Japanese sometimes, using archaic or complex words that no one really uses that often. Which may or may not be better than the English speakers’ habit of using a lot of katakana English words. :slight_smile:

17

I’m going in just the opposite direction:
can handle a good bit of Japanese and will now focus on Chinese.

So far, I find Chinese a bit easier for me than Japanese was. Reasons being:
1a) Although Chinese has more hanzi than japanese has kanji, the hanzi generally have limited pronunciations. This isn’t the case with Japanese, where a kanji can have 7 or more different readings. So with Chinese, a hanzi is generally related to 1 spoken word, whereas in J it can be many many many spoken words.

1b*) Although Chinese DOES has more hanzi than J has kanji, to be considered fluent in reading and writing, both use around 2000, and when you learn the first 1000 you can understand around 80% of all that is written.

  1. Japanese grammar is just damned hard and the native speakers and professional community are incredibly anal about using the grammar with 100% accuracy (similar to Germans, perhaps?). Additionally, to speak in the honourific, you are almost learning a completely new language. Additionally 2, if you have complete command of the grammatical elements, you are still 100% screwed if you don’t know the proper cultural contexts in which to use specific degrees of politeness (which equate to different conjugations completely).

  2. With Chinese, although it is tonal and that is hard to get your hands around, each word has a clear starting and ending point, whereas in Japanese the monotony and constant tempo of the language make it difficult to know where one word starts and one word begins.

In short, though, there is still an advantage from speaking nearly any Asian language compared to not speaking one, when trying to learn another~ and atleast knowing Chinese going into Japanese, you will generally understand the BASIC meaning of what is written on street signs and kanban~

18

I think studying any one of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean makes studying one of the others easier. (Still, it’s not like the help you’re going to get with Italian if you’ve already studied Spanish.) If you study in a class of other English-speakers, as I did, you will clearly see that knowing Chinese first is a big help. I could figure out the meaning of short paragraphs while my classmates were still struggling with hiragana. Lots of vocabulary in all three languages is obviously related. I also found having studied Chinese a big help in learning to read Japanese - I may not have known how to pronounce a certain kanji, but I certainly knew what it meant.

19

[quote=“mrcapitul”]
2) Japanese grammar is just damned hard and the native speakers and professional community are incredibly anal about using the grammar with 100% accuracy (similar to Germans, perhaps?). [/quote]

I like that :sunglasses:
Maybe because I’m German :laughing:

20

[quote=“Rabidpie”]Yes, that’s what I quickly learned after studying a bit of Japanese. The Chinese language helps just a little bit for the Kanji, but the kanji is used in different ways and different ways to pronounce it, they also use really uncommon kanji that the Chinese have stopped using, and some of the kanji are even written differently! (like black)

THat being said, it is still a tremedous advantage. I can look at something and actually guess some sort of meaning, which for the most part are not too far. I doubt any other student who hadn’t had some base for Chinese characters could do that. I can also easily memorize (or have an easier time memorizing) compound kanji words. It also saved me the hassle of learning a lot of rudimentary words like sun, moon, river, and all the numbers. Lastly, it is very helpful because you know the radicals of each of the characters, and so have a much easier time looking up the kanji if you don’t undersand it.

But yes, it was a really sad day for me when I finally realized that actually knowing Chinese wasn’t going to magically translate into knowing all the kanji of Japanese.

I actually think it is more of an advantage to know English than to know Chinese when studying Japanese. This way, use know the katakana of a lot of things, like “best seller” and a bunch of car parts, and just about the majority of loan-words really.

I think the Chinese characters in Korean follow much more similar useage to their original Chinese form than the japanese kanji do.

Also smithgsj, from my understanding Korean has about 65% sino-Korean words, (30% Native Korean words, 5% loan words) but to be honest whenever I hear Korean and study through the vocab, I only pick out a couple words that sound Chinese, maybe I need to study more Korean to know more![/quote]

are you for real?

i am fluent in both english and chinese.

i can guess the meaning of a passage written in japanese because of the similar chinese words. i cannot for the life of me guess a passage written in korean. not even a single korean word. none of them can be read by a chinese speaker.