From: Paul Battley Date: 2004-10-07T22:07:27+09:00 Subject: Re: Bit of the Matz Interview (in Rubyist Magazine) On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 12:24:49 +0900, Ryo Furue wrote (among other things): > Korean and Japanese are *very* similar in grammar and in pronunciation. > So, if you speak Korean, it shouldn't be very difficult to learn to > speak Japanese. Although I have only superficial knowlegde about > Korean, everyone who knows both languages well says the same. The grammar is definitely close, but I'd disagree that the pronunciations of the two languages are "*very* similar". True, Korean pronunciation is closer to Japanese than, say, English or French. But Korean has many more vowel sounds than Japanese, although I suspect that the differences aren't easily noticeable to a native Japanese speaker. For example, both "Ichon" (the name of a station in the centre of Seoul) and "Icheon" (another town, 60km to the south) would be pronounced as "ichon" in Japanese, which could lead to some confusion! On the other hand, Koreans have a hard time with Japanese "tsu" and "z" sounds, which unfortunately sounds rather like the pronunciation of young Japanese children! For an English speaker, most of the sounds of Japanese are fairly easy to pronounce; "tsu" and "ryo" etc. (hint: it's not pronounced "Rio" :-) seem generally to be a problem, though. However, since about 80% (I seem to recall) of the Korean vocabulary is Chinese-character-derived, and the situation in Japanese is about the same, there are a lot of similar words between the two languages. It's possible to work things out in the "other" language if you take account of some simple rules (not an exhaustive or scientific list; just off the top of my head): Korean (official RoK romanisation) <-> Japanese (Hepburn romanisation) eo <-> e ~l <-> ~tsu h~ <-> k~ (sometimes) ~ng <-> long vowel ~k <-> ~ki or ~ku e.g. (dots added at Chinese character boundaries for clarity) ji.ha.cheol <-> chi.ka.tetsu (subway) hak.saeng <-> gaku.sei (student) do.seo.gwan <-> to.sho.kan (library) mu.seon <-> mu.sen (wireless) yeok <-> eki (station) If you take account that a voiced consonant at the start of a Korean word is actually pronounced unvoiced (d -> t; j -> ch) then they sound quite similar. Personally, speaking Japanese but little Korean, I find the lack of Chinese characters ("hanja" in Korean) more confusing, even though hangeul (the Korean phonetic writing system) is very easy to learn and read. If you go to Tapgol Park (aka Pagoda Park) in Seoul, you can see the Declaration of Korean Independence, written in mixed hangeul-hanja script. Generally, however, you won't see much mixed script in either Korea these days. When Chinese characters are used in Korean, though they are the complex, traditional kind, which means that they are often difficult for Japanese to read. (Japanese uses many simplified characters, which are simplified differently to the PRC, but that's another story.) Sometimes, Koreans use the traditional characters when writing Japanese, such as in restaurant menus and on some of the Japanese signs at Incheon airport. I suppose that it must be confusing for the Japanese, who generally are not familiar with the old forms. > Unfortunately, that doesn't mean you can easily learn to read and > write Japanese even if you read and write Korean fluently. The > problem is that the Japanese language uses Chinese characters > extensively, while modern Korean is usually written without Chinese > characters. I know this from Korean friends of mine who speak fluent > Japanese and yet have difficulty in reading and writing Japanese. Chinese characters are hard, no matter what you do, although they aren't as crazy as they seem at first: they are essentially "spelled" from slightly more than 200 different components ("radicals"). Once you've learned the components and their variations, it gets a lot easier. Personally, I'd advise you to concentrate on learning speaking first: it's a lot easier to learn to read a language when you already understand it. Paul.