Korean vs Japanese vs Chinese

Korean vs Japanese vs Chinese, ever wonder what the similarities and differences are between these three languages and how should we go about learning them? To what extent can learning one help you with the others? Let me share my experience in learning these three Asian languages.

How I Learned Mandarin, Japanese and Korean

Mandarin Chinese: Intense and Structured

I spent almost a year studying Mandarin full time in Hong Kong. It was 1968 and I was a young Canadian diplomat (Canada was preparing to recognize the People’s Republic of China).

My routine consisted of three hours of one-on-one tutoring with a Chinese teacher, five mornings a week. This was followed by four or five hours daily devoted to reading, listening, and learning characters. This took place in Hong Kong, which was not a place where Mandarin Chinese was spoken, especially not in those days. This was not an immersion environment.

It took me somewhat less than a year to reach a level where I could pass the British foreign service exam for Mandarin. This meant that I could read at quite a high level, books, newspapers and the like. For our exam, we were required to translate newspaper editorials from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English, as well as compose a diplomatic note in Chinese. Here you can read a post about “How to learn Chinese“.

Japanese: Independent and Immersed

My experience with Japanese was different. I learned the language entirely on my own while living in Japan. I had the advantage of knowing Chinese characters, which are also used in Japanese where they are known as Kanji. I ended up living in Japan for nine years. Within a year of studying on my own, mostly listening and reading, I was able to start using Japanese with business contacts.

Over the nine years that I lived in Japan, my Japanese ability continued to improve. I used the language daily and took every opportunity to read and listen. Eventually I became a better speaker of Japanese than Chinese. My knowledge of Chinese was of considerable benefit in learning Japanese, as I will explain later.

Korean: A More Challenging Task

I have been studying Korean in Vancouver off and on for a few years. I mostly use LingQ. This means that I am on my own, as was my experience in learning Japanese, but I don’t have the benefit of being immersed in the language.

Chinese Characters Are Key

With Chinese and Japanese reading presents an immediate problem. Until you have learned quite a few Chinese characters, you cannot read anything very interesting or meaningful.

While learning Chinese, I made a special effort to learn the most frequent 1,000 characters. I had paper flashcards for these. My learning strategy was to write these characters out on the squared exercise books that Chinese schoolchildren use.

I developed a primitive spaced repetition system, wherein I would write each new character out seven to 10 times, down the extreme left hand column of my exercise book. Then I would write the meaning or pronunciation three or four columns to the right. I would then pick up another flashcard and do the same, and a third and a fourth and so on. Soon I would run into the pronunciation, or English meaning, of the first character. I was forced to try to remember it, hopefully before I had completely forgotten it.

Whether I remembered the character or had to look it up, I then would write this first character out another five to seven times. Then I placed it a few columns to the right again. At first, I would continue this process for 10 new characters daily. I eventually increased the number of characters I studied daily to 30.

My retention rate was something less than 50%, perhaps closer to 30%. I would daily add back in characters previously studied. However, by doing this every day, the first thousand characters eventually more or less stuck with me. This was a good investment of my time, since I was able to use my knowledge of Chinese characters in my Japanese learning.

In some ways, Korean is the easiest of the three Asian languages to read, because the writing system is an alphabet. Korean is written in Hangul, an original and unique Korean phonetic script. At least 50% of the words, however, are clearly identifiable as being of Chinese origin.

Reading Complex Material

I like to read authentic material in a language in order to learn, newspapers, books and the like. To do this requires a fairly rich vocabulary. For Chinese, I needed between three and four thousand characters. I explained above how I learned the first thousand. Thereafter, I tended to learn new characters mostly from my reading and writing, writing them out a few times on a piece of paper. Of course, I continued forgetting them, but by forgetting, rewriting, relearning, and seeing them again in different contexts, eventually they started to stick.

As with much in language learning, things become easier as you progress. You start to recognize the different components of the characters that repeat in different combinations within the characters. When you first start out it seems like an impossible task to remember 10, 12, 13 or more different strokes for just one character. After a while you really start to enjoy the characters and how they express ideas and concepts.

No only do the components of the characters repeat, the characters themselves are used in a variety of combinations with each other to express what we consider to be words. Thus, once you have acquired a certain number of characters, it becomes easier to build up your vocabulary. With the characters that you know, you can often guess at the meaning of new combinations of characters that you encounter in your reading.