In my previous post, I compared the difficulty of Japanese and (Mandarin) Chinese by looking at several aspects of the two languages. As I suspected, this drew out a large number of responses (or at least larger than what I’m used to in any case). However, I was surprised to see how civilized and thoughtful the comments turned out to be. So, I decided to do another language comparison, this time with Japanese and Korean. Before I start, I’d like to mention what I write here is strictly my observations and may not be entirely accurate.

Pronunciation

It is often said that Japanese and Korean are very similar languages. 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.

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. 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. This, I think, is the strongest argument for Korean being the harder language to learn. 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. And even then, it’s an educated guess at best.

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).

The writing system

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.

For Japanese, you have to memorize 46 separate characters (not including the obsolete characters) for each individual sound. 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. If you count the voiced consonants, small 「や、ゆ、よ」, etc., you only get a total of 102 sounds for learning 92 characters. That’s not a lot of mileage.

With hangul, you learn consonants and vowels separately and match them up like legos. You can combine up to a maximum of three consonants and one vowel. 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 also add yet another consonant to each of these letters to get an additional 16×4=64 letters. You can even add yet another consonant though the possible combinations are a bit limited for the fourth consonant. 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. In fact, I don’t even know the total number of letters in hangul. Imagine what a nightmare it would be if you had to memorize a separate character for each sound!

A sample of hangul
Consonants: ㄱ(g),ㄴ(n),ㄷ(d),ㄹ(r)
Vowels:ㅏ(a), ㅓ(uh), ㅗ(o), ㅜ(u)

Possible combinations include:
가(ga),거(guh),고(go),구(gu)
나(na), 너(nuh), 노(no), 누(nu)
다(da), 더(duh), 도(do), 두(du)
라(ra), 러(ruh), 로(ro), 루(ru)
각(gag), 간(gan), 갇(gad), 갈(gar)
각(gag), 간(gan), 갇(gad), 갈(gar)
곡(gog), 곤(gohn), 곧(gohd), 골(gohr)
국(gug), 군(guhn), 굳(guhd), 굴(guhr)
낙(nag), 난(nan), 낟(nad), 날(nar)… etc.

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. 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. 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.

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. For instance 「生」 and 「正」 are both 「せい」 in Japanese. However, the original Chinese pronunciation for 生 is “sheng” and “zheng” for 正. Similarly, in Korean 「生」 is “생” (seng) and “정” (juhng) in Korean. Japanese doesn’t even have a “uh” or “ng” sound. Let’s compare more kanji with the 「せい」 reading with the Korean version.

As 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. Most importantly, Korean has just one letter and one sound for each character just like Chinese. In Japanese, you often get two or even three letters because one wasn’t enough to pronounce all the consonants and vowels. What you end up in Japanese is a bunch of repeating, long, and hardly decipherable text without kanji.

I get a headache from just looking at this
しょうがくごねんせいにしんきゅうしたさいだいのメリットは、おとなのつごうでちゅうがくせいともこうがくねんともよばれるちゅうぶらりんのよねんせいからかいほうされて、どっしりこうがくねんのざにこしをすえられることだった。

Even with spaces, it’s not much improvement
しょうがく　ごねんせいに　しんきゅうした　さいだいの　メリットは、おとなの　つごうで　ちゅうがくせいとも　こうがくねんとも　よばれる ちゅうぶらりんの　よねんせいから　かいほうされて、どっしり　こうがくねんの　ざに　こしを　すえられることだった。

With hangul, because you have a lot more letters, the visual cues are a lot more distinct and there are fewer homophones. However, because the visual cues are not quite as clear as Chinese characters, you do have to learn where to put spaces. I think it’s a small price to pay for not having to learn 2000-3000 Chinese characters, don’t you?

You don’t need kanji/hanja in Korean because of the increased visual cues. But you do need spaces.

외모가 뛰어난 학생들이 그렇지 않은 학생들보다 학업 성적이 뛰어난 것으로 밝혀졌다고 10일 선데이 타임스, 데일리 메일 등의 언론이 이탈리아 연구팀의 연구 결과를 인용 보도했다.
(from naver.com)

I think it’s ridiculous when Japanese teachers don’t teach their students kanji or when somebody says that you don’t need to learn it. Yeah, you don’t have to learn it if you don’t mind being illiterate. Books, signs, restaurant menus, computers, everything has kanji in it and you don’t get the furigana either. But in Korea, you really don’t need to learn Chinese characters at all. Sometimes you might see it in parantheses on signs next to the hangul and newspapers may use some very simple characters such as 大 or 現 but it’s a supplement to hangul instead of the other way around. Just compare Yahoo! Korea to Yahoo! Japan. Not a single Chinese character in Yahoo! Korea. Yahoo! Japan? Too many to count.

Bottom line: In terms of simplicity in writing and reading the language, Korean wins hands down. Well-played Sejong the Great, well-played.

Grammar

So far, it seems like Japanese and Korean are totally different. So what the heck was I talking about when I mentioned that they were similar? Well, why don’t we take a look at how to say, “I went to school at 7:00.”

Japanese: 私は７時に学校に行った。
Korean: 나는 7시에 학교에 갔어.

Can’t see the similarity? Ok, why don’t we add spaces to the Japanese, replace the Korean with hanja, and use the same style for the characters.

私は ７時に 學校に 行った。
나는 7時에 學校에 갔어.

As you can see, the sentence structure is exactly the same. Indeed, Korean and Japanese grammar has the same general ideas including particles and the main verb always being at the end of the sentence. However, that’s like saying French and English grammar are the same. Once you get into the details, you’ll find all sorts of stuff that are completely different. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Particles

Particles in Korean are what you get if a bunch of people were to get together and say, “Hmm… Japanese particles are just too easy to understand. How do we make it harder to yet again confound those silly foreigners.” Then one of them will go, “I got it! Let’s change the particle depending on what comes before it!” Then the rest will go, “Oooh, that’s good.”

That’s basically how Korean works. The 「が」 particle in Japanese is either “가” or “이” depending on what it is attached to. The 「は」 particle is “은” or “는”, 「を」 is either “을” or “를”, and 「で」 is “로” or “으로”. Japanese students can now proceed to laugh at fellow students who chose to learn Korean instead.

Conjugations

Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Korean conjugation rules to really accurately compare the two languages in this regard. However, I do know one big difference is that Korean does have a future tense unlike Japanese. Also, I give you this entertaining excerpt from this site.

Past tense is another easy verb tense. Here is the basic pattern.

1.Take the dictionary form, drop the 다
2.Add the ending 어 or 아, which makes it the casual form (everything but the 요 at the end)
3. Add ㅆ under the last syllable
4. Add 어요 on the end.

먹다
먹 + 어 – 먹어
먹어 + ㅆ – 먹었
먹었 + 어요 = 먹었어요.

마시다
마시 + 어 – 마셔
마셔 + ㅆ – 마셨
마셨 + 어요 = 마셨어요

마시 + 어 = 마셔? I mean 마시 + 어 = 마시어 makes sense but 마셔? I don’t think my math is good enough to understand that. Also, notice how it says, “Add the ending 어 or 아” but neglects to mention how to decide which one to add. I’m sorry but this doesn’t look easy to me at all. But then again, when you have Japanese conjugation tables that look like this, maybe I shouldn’t complain.

Counters

Yep, both languages have them. And yes, it’s totally confusing for both languages.

Conclusion

In terms of difficulty, I think Japanese and Korean are at about the same level. Some parts are harder for Korean while other parts are harder for Japanese. However, considering the larger number of sounds and the different particles in Korean, Japanese is definitely the easier language to start in. If you’re not good at distinguishing new sounds and pronunciations, you’re definitely going to have a hard time with Korean.

In particular, that fourth consonant can get really silly. For instance, the word for chicken is “닭”, made up of ㄷ(d),ㅏ(a), ㄹ(r), ㄱ(g), and it’s supposed to sound something like “darg” but I can’t even hear the /r/ sound. And “없어” is supposed to sound like “uhbs uh” but to me, it sounds exactly the same as “uhb suh” (업서). Really, it’s just ridiculous.

However, once you master all the sounds and the basic grammar in Korean, you’re in for smoother ride the rest of the way. While Japanese students will be struggling with four different types of conditionals, looking furiously in the dictionary for the readings of 「大人」, 「仲人」, 「気質」, and 「問屋」, and trying to remember if it was 「静かな」 or 「静な」, you’ll be just sailing right by enjoying the benefits of having only one letter and reading for each Chinese character. You don’t even have to learn them, if you don’t want to.

This post doesn’t have anything directly to do with Japanese. It’s more like a personal blog entry, just to talk about the things on my mind lately. You see, I have spent a lot of time writing about Japanese in trying to convince the Internet that it is actually a very easy language to learn in many respects. The grammar rules are very consistent and logical, and kanji can really help you speed up your vocab memorization. But is Japanese actually easy, relative to other languages?

About a month ago, I started doing language exchange with a Chinese person every Sunday. It’s quite interesting because I teach her English, she teaches me Chinese and all of this is done in Japanese. It works well because she is quite fluent having lived in Japan for many, many years.

Now, Chinese is supposed to be like the holy grail of foreign languages, image-wise, for us Americans. Or maybe it was Japanese? Well, we probably don’t even know the difference. Anyway, if you tell your friends and family that you’re learning Chinese, they’ll probably go all “ooh”, “ahh” and “damn, you’d have to be some kind of a freak genius to learn that”.

Chinese characters don’t impress or scare me though, having learned Japanese. In fact, I was actually wishing for Chinese characters when I was studying for the GRE because all those stupid words started to look the same. And on top of that, now that I’m studying Chinese, I can’t help but get the feeling that Chinese is like the easiest language in the world. Of course, I’m still a complete beginner but from what I can tell, Chinese is just so much simpler than Japanese.

Of course, comparing the difficulties of two languages will always be impossible because so many things depend on the person learning the language. But still, it’s fun to try because it usually brings out heated arguments and one-upmanship, which is basically the whole point of the Internet. So here we go.

Conjugations

Because Chinese has nothing but Chinese characters, there are no conjugations of any kind whatsoever. This means that you miss out on all the fun you get to have with okurigana.

For instance, if you want to negate something, just add 「不」. It doesn’t matter if it’s an adjective, verb, or noun. It’s almost too easy.

Chinese
好。- Good.
不好。- Not good.

In contrast, Japanese has separate rules for two types of adjectives, nouns, and two types of verbs. You also have two exception verbs and two exception adjectives. English is probably even worse because you need to match the right tense to the subject and other stuff I probably couldn’t even explain.

This tacking on character trick works for all sorts of things that would be complicated grammar in any other language. You want to say something is “too much”? Just add 太. So since “small” is 小, too small becomes 太小. You want to say, “not too small”, just add 不: 不太小! You want to say that you’re in the process of doing something? Add 在. With Chinese, using a character based writing system actually makes sense! You can’t make this stuff any easier folks. You don’t have to conjugate and then conjugate the conjugation, and then conjugate the conjugated conjugation like you do in Japanese.

Language gone wrong

行きたくなくもないけど、行けなくならなかったら、行かないよ。
- I wrote this and even I don’t know what it means.

Still, I’m expected the other shoe to drop as I learn more Chinese. There has to be a price to pay for not having conjugations. For example, I’m already confused about 了 because it supposedly expresses a completed action but I see it in non-completed actions as well. I’ve also seen past actions without 了. I don’t get it.

Tones

A number of people have told me about how tones are so difficult in Chinese. I don’t really remember what they said, but I vaguely remember something about my mom being a horse or something. Pretty rude, if you ask me.

Now that I’m actually learning them, I don’t think tones are that difficult. I mean there’s only four and I have a sneaking suspicion that the second is pretty much the same as the third. I heard that Taiwanese has 7 tones. Now that sounds difficult. I don’t even know how that is possible. Is tone 7 like the chromatic scale or something? I can see the teacher saying, “No, idiot! Your tone is completely wrong! It’s supposed to be a harmonic minor, not melodic! And the third is flat!”

Anyway, I think having all the tones decided makes things clearer than Japanese in many ways. Japanese people have this strange belief that Japanese is completely flat but in reality, if you don’t get the intonation right, you sound like crap. If Japanese is completely flat, how come you can get an accent dictionary that shows the pitches for each word? With Japanese, the only way to get that perfect native intonation is to just imitate native speakers. Not very helpful, I know, which is why Chinese is easier to understand because it’s all laid out for you.

Even so, to make the comparison fair, I need to mention that tones in Chinese can sometimes change. I’ve figured out that while 不 is usually fourth tone, if the next character is fourth tone too, it changes into the second tone. I don’t know if this is a rule, just something I’ve noticed along the way.

不知道。- bù zhī dao.
不是。- bú shì.

Kanji

Aaaahhh, kanji, my favorite topic. With a language like Chinese, it actually makes sense! Kanji is great as long as you don’t totally f***k them up like the Japanese did.

I think a small number of characters have maybe a max of 2 readings. Even then, it’s because it means something completely different like 觉, which is “jiào” when it means “to sleep” and “jué” when it means “to think”. Let’s compare that to Japanese, which for instance has like a million readings for 「生」. What the hell, 「なま」 doesn’t even originate from Chinese! Why the heck do you write it in Chinese?!

Chinese is so much simpler that it wins hands down over Japanese here. It’s not even a contest. The only beef I have with Chinese is simplified, traditional, blah blah, blah… just pick one! Don’t make me have to learn both! The Japanese government can successfully mandate a new set of characters and they don’t even have a real army. Why can’t you?

Counters

Whoever invented counters should be shot. They add nothing useful to the language yet is such an enormous pain in the ass. It’s like a disease that somehow managed to permanently spread itself through all of East Asia. The worst part is, all the counters, for some reason, are all completely different for each language. For clothes, it’s 件 for Chinese and 着 for Japanese. It’s insane.

Still, if I had to compare, I would say Japanese is worse because they have all those crazy irregular readings like 「ついたち」, 「ひとり」, and 「はたち」. But then Chinese has 两, which is not as bad but still really annoying. I can never tell whether its going to be ニ or 两.

Conclusion

I haven’t seen too many comparisons of Chinese and Japanese, probably because the extremely small number of English speakers who know both probably aren’t wasting their time with blogs. So, while I am still completely new at Chinese, here are my thoughts on the topic. If you are trying to decide which language to learn, maybe this will help you decide.

In my opinion, Chinese is really easy and approachable for beginners as long as you’re not tone-deaf. I can say with confidence that it’s a lot easier than Japanese in the beginning. There are so many traps that you can fall into with Japanese in the beginning that just doesn’t seem to exist in Chinese. Common pitfalls include learning only hiragana/katakana or even just romaji, overusing the topic particle, learning the polite and dictionary forms backwards, thinking that 「だ」 is the same as 「です」, etc., etc., etc.

With Chinese, while you have Pinyin, I think Chinese teachers are much better at making sure students learn kanji. Plus, I haven’t seen too much regarding politeness levels outside of 你 vs 您 (so far). I doubt that Chinese has about 10 different ways of saying “sorry” like Japanese. （ごめん、ごめんなさい、すまん、すまない、すいません、すみません、申し訳ない、恐縮です、恐れ入ります）

Still, I’m going to hold off on making any definite conclusions because I have the sneaking suspicion that Chinese seems easy only in the beginning, kind of like my experience with Spanish. If it’s one thing I learned, it’s that there’s no free lunch in language. If one thing is easy, it’s going to make something else hard.

Will from nihongojouzu.com did an email interview of me several days ago so if you are remotely interested about where I come from, here it is:
http://www.nihongojouzu.com/2006/04/learner_stories.html

Hmm… is this bad taste to link to my own interview?

Anyway, he also has neat tips such as how to put Japanese notes on your ipod so why don’t you check it out?

On a sidenote, I will put up the third skype lesson details this weekend and email the participants. Unfortunately, next, next Sunday is no good for me because I have to go to work!!

I originally wrote this for my blog and I thought I’d copy and paste it here because frankly, writing is a lot of work and stealing my own work is a lot easier. I hope you find it amusing and if you don’t, well, I won’t lose any sleep over it. I’m thinking of following up with a more serious description of the Japanese language but since that, again, involves work, I won’t make any promises.

So you think Japanese is hard?
Most of you have probably already seen this amusing description of the difficulty of Japanese. Well, here is my counter-argument of why Japanese is so much easier than English

Why Japanese is approximately 1.342×10^6 times easier than English
So you’re all bruised up from having engaged in a 2 hour royal rumble match with your Japanese teacher in which you failed to convince her to curve your grade even after 2 DDT’s and a Moonsault off the top rope. Well, what you need realize is that you’re a big sissy (yes, you) for not realizing just how easy Japanese is to learn. But after reading this, you’ll understand why your massive beer drinking is the root cause of your bad grade and not some intrinsic difficulty of the language.

1. Pronunciation is easy because Japanese people have a tongue disability
Japanese people can only make about 102 sounds. No, really. As a result, it’s incredibly difficult for Japanese people to correctly pronounce other languages. This is why simple English words like, “TV” sounds like “terraybi” in Japanese.

On the other hand, much to your benefit, pronouncing Japanese is a cinch. Unfortunately, your brain has been so thoroughly messed up by English that for some reason “karaoke” looks like “kery-okay”. I mean look at the word “thoroughly”, just look at it. Does the spelling make any sense? So the next time you ask in Japanese, “Where is the elevator?” and the Japanese person smiles and says, “yua japaniizu bery guddo” and just walks away, you’ll know that it’s really your fault he thought you were speaking in Swahili.

2. Grammar is easy because Japanese people are mind readers
In Japanese, there’s something called 以心伝心, which basically means that Japanese people can read each other’s minds, thereby creating a hive consciousness that is currently plotting to take over the world with giant robots. That’s why Japanese doesn’t have a singular/plural distinction and only past/non-past tenses. There really isn’t any sentence structure to speak of for that matter, either. You might think that leaving the subject and object out of a sentence would make it too ambiguous to say anything. Ahh, but you’re forgetting that Japanese people can read your mind. As a result, you don’t have to worry about subjects, objects, participles, sentence order, subject-verb agreement, articles, prepositions, pronouns, and pretty much the rest of English grammar.

For instance, if you wanted to say, “Hi, I’m looking for a cheap place to stay,” all you have to do is say, “Me…”, trail off into silence, nod, and point knowingly to your head. The Japanese person will nod knowingly back and then go back to whatever he was doing. In all likelihood, that’s probably his way of saying, “Back off you foreign infidel, you shall not have my daughters!” But you should have expected that since you were probably thinking nasty thoughts about his daughters.

3. Spelling is easy because it’s impossible
In Japanese, you don’t have to worry about spelling because each sound has a corresponding letter. Most words consists of 2 or 3 Chinese characters anyway. You might complain that it’s so hard to figure which Chinese character to use but since no one actually knows how to write Japanese without a computer, you don’t have to worry about it. Not to mention the fact that Japanese classes and textbooks don’t use Chinese characters because of the fear that it’ll make your head explode (which I imagine would create a huge headache for the janitors).

4. Japanese people are friendly to foreigners and are willing to help
In the unlikely event that you find yourself in a bind, you can easily ask any Japanese person for assistance and she’ll gladly oblige. The only catch is that you’ll have to be fluent in Japanese since Japanese people can’t speak any other language. (See the first reason) Also, when I said foreigners, what I really meant was white (and possibly black) English-speaking foreigners. That’s because Japanese people will only give you the time of day if they think it’ll land them some free English conversation practice.*

For some reason, most Japanese people are brainwashed from childhood to have an irrepressible desire to learn how to speak English. This is quite sad because it’s practically impossible considering how much more difficult English is compared to Japanese. But that doesn’t stop them for trying for 10 or 20 years. What results is a very interesting language that, unfortunately, no one understands. So remember, as long as you are either 1) fluent in Japanese, or 2) own a 200 processor Beowulf cluster that can parse Japanese English into real English, you should have no problems finding help.

Conclusion
I hope I have convinced you with my clear and concise arguments that Japanese really is just about the easiest language there is to learn. While this amusing essay makes quite a few jokes about the difficulty of Japanese, I just wanted to clear the air with a somber discussion of what Japanese is really like.

Author’s Note
I would like to clarify that I am, in no way, trying to prove that learning Japanese will make your teeth crooked and turn ugly colors. If that’s what you were thinking, you totally missed the point of this treatise.

*Then there’s the type of Japanese people who are so terrified of speaking English that they run away from you as if you were the living dead. I left that part out because it would disprove my argument, which I was told never to do in High School English class.