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Mandarin, Japanese and Korean?
What is the mutual intelligibility among them? What languages can you compare them to in terms of mutual understanding? Spanish and French? English and German? English and Russian? Just curious.
I just finished seeing a South Korean film (Failan) where the female protagonist is Chinese and she emigrates to South Korea, and no one can understand a word she says and she also struggles with Korean. Are the two languages really that much different? what about Japanese and Korean? Mandarin and Japanese?
4 Answers
- 디아나Lv 67 years ago
Really are very different languages, it sounds quite different.
In order of difficulty, easy to difficult I would say: Korean, Japanese, Chinese / Mandarin or Taiwanese. Asian languages are hard for Americans and Europeans, as is difficult for Asian to learn Spanish or English because writing is something complicated.
The Korean language, you can distinguish the reading because it has signs with circles: 안녕하세요!
The Japanese have some Chinese signs, but the letter spacing is pretty: こんにちは!
Unlike the Chinese, the lyrics are quite complicated and are so close together you can barely distinguish. 您好!
The Korean pronunciation almost always ends in vowels "or" "a" "e"
안녕하세요! Annyeonghaseyo! Hello.
The Chinese pronunciation almost always ends in vowels "i"
^^
- 5 years ago
If you decide on to learn Chinese then you should know that Chinese language is without a doubt one of the hardest languages for westerners to learn, and up until finally now finding out to talk Chinese to a level of proficiency outdoors of the classroom setting has been almost unattainable but not if you pick a program
- 7 years ago
The 3 are different.
I'm learning Japanese and when you see Korean and Chinese compared to it, they are totally different.
My friend is studying all of these.
She told me Korean grammar is similar to Japanese grammar but writing scripts, no.
People often don't understand the difference between Japanese and Chinese.
Japanese adopted kanji (Chinese characters) but also two other wiring systems.
Japanese has hiragana and katakana then kanji.
My Japanese experince: the pronunciation of words is similar but the grammar can be hard but fun at the same time :P but similar to Chinese and Korean there are no spaces.
It seems really hard but amazing to study.
Source(s): Been studying Japanese for over a year - tl;drLv 67 years ago
They is no mutual intelligibility whatsoever.The speakers of these languages understand each other no better than you as an English speaker would understand any of them.
I know that in the West, these three cultures tend to get lumped together as "almost the same", and it is a fact that culturally and historically their languages have borrowed from each other, but the languages are simply not similar.
Think about English and French, some estimates put the number of words shared etymologically between the two languages at over 70%. Consider the following two words:
mon frer--brother, from Latin "frater", exists in English as "fraternity", means "brotherhood"(formal)
mon amie--friend, from Latin "amicus", exists in English as "amicable", means "friendly" (formal)
There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples like this, but regardless, unless you have studied French, you have no hope of even beginning to understand French writing or speech. You might make a few educated guesses, and some of them would be close to the mark, others would be way off, as words have evolved differently in the two languages.
For example:
toilette--French--a room for applying makeup and preparing one's hair (a small room containing a "toilet" was usually attached).
toilet--English--(BrE)--a room housing a toilet bowl, (AmE) a toilet bowl.
Chinese and Japanese share some of the same words, 文字 from "Cymro's" example means "writing/words" both in Chinese and Japanese, they are even written the same. However, they are pronounced completely differently: “wénzì” (not 人物--a "character" in a book or performance) and "bunpō" respectively.
Tere is also 小人. In Japanese it is a formal way to refer to Children (vs. adults: 大人). In Chinese however, 小人 means a small *minded* or petty person.
Korean and Japanese share many of the same words, many owing to the recent historical occupation of Korea by Japan, and forced language study.
However, and finally, the languages remain completely distinct grammatically, phonetically, and semantically.
It is not a case of Spanish and Italian or Norwegian and Danish, where speakers can gist along and pick out whole words or sentences, the languages are distinct. Tell your friends.