Job Discussion Forums

[Debalky]

Can someone tell me why Japanese and Chinese writing characters looks so similar, yet Korean writing looks strangely different?

[Wolf]

Because Japanese writing is Chinese writing.

Many years ago, the Japanese borrowed the Chinese language for use at court. Over time they began to use the Chinese writing system to write in their own langauge (for which they had no written form.) The two Kana scripts are derived from Hanzi/Kanji (as Chinese characters are called).

In Korea they used to use the same (Chinese) system. I've talked to Koreans who tell me that over the past few decades Chinese characters have fallen out of favor. The Koreans have a script known as Hangul (um . . . that's what they call it in Japan.) It was invented by this famous Korean guy - and that's what gets used by and large these days.

In a nutshell.

[naturegirl321]

Chinese and Japanese writing evolved over hundreds of years. Korean writing is relatively new and was made scientifically. There are three parts to each character, one is where your tongue is placed in your mouth, sorry, but I don't know what the other two are.

[cabbagehead]

Sorry.. .this is job related?

Actually, Korea still uses Chinese characters although I think they are phasing them out in favour of more Hangul. Gordon perhaps you know more about this...

As for Japan, it needed a writing system about a thousand years ago, borrowed China's and subsequently modified it. To someone familiar with Japanese writing, Chinese does not actually look that similar. Chinese characters often look more complicated to me than Japanese ones.

Also, Japanese characters are interspersed with hiragana, a separate script that evolved from the original Chinese ones and is used to mostly indicate grammatical particles and verb endings among other things.

[Debalky]

Thank you gentlemen,
very nice, and prompt. Sorry about putting this on the job related forum wasn't paying attention.

[Wolf]

[Roger]

If you travel in Korea you will notice that place-names are in Chinese characters only!

[cabbagehead]

Wolf, yeah you're right. I didn't express myself very clearly

What I meant was that with experience you can tell the two languages apart whereas a newby would think they both look like bundles of spaghetti (well that's what they looked like to me six years ago!)

I'm kind of curious to see what my Japanese skills would do for me travelling in China or Taiwan actually. Haven't made it past Taipei airport yet though. Good to hear of your experience.

[Gordon]

A Korean woman in Japan told me that it took her 2 hours to learn Hiragana and Katakana (2 of the 3 Japanese alphabets).

[Seth]

Now you're getting into the weirdness that is East Asian language supremacy. China, Japan, and Korea each think their language is the most difficult, scientific, beautiful, etc. Koreans and Japanese, mostly, Chinese to a lesser extent. Koreans will often say their language is the most 'scientific' and only they can learn it because of their evolved brains, and I've heard that Japanese think about the same thing. They also think Westerners' brains are too small to learn their languages.

So for a Korean to say she learned hiragana and katakana in 2 hours isn't surprizing. I'm sure she didn't, she's just asserting her language supremacy to save some face. I've also heard of Koreans saying Chinese characters came from Korea, not the other way around, which is also obviously false.

[kimo]

Wolf said:

[Wolf]