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I actually use this sort of thinking when I learned Japanese and Mandarin simultaneously. I learned the sound laws so I could easily predict what a character would sound like in either language. For example, the character 必 is _hitsu_ in Japanese; knowing that _h_ typically becomes a labial consonant in Mandarin Chinese- _b, p,_ or _f-_ I could easily predict that the character is pronounced _bì._ You can also do this with Korean, where the _h_ also becomes _b_ and final _tsu_ consistently becomes _l._ It helped me memorize a lot of characters rather quickly.
Could you please recommend some resources for learning these sound laws? I'm also studying Mandarin and Japanese and have an interest in historical linguistics, so this sounds like exactly my kind of method!
I'd like some recommendations as well, and a bit more elaboration on these sound laws that you use (rn im learning mandarin and I want to learn korean as well)
The most important thing to know when learning how to speak another language is "phonetics", but you'll probably get bombarded by hundreds of technical linguistic terms if you search it yourself, so I'm gonna try to explain it as concise as possible. Certain sounds can be grouped depending on the how the sound is made and is different for every languages (some, like Mandarin Chinese or Thai, list their alphabets by sound). For example (somewhat simplified) : [LISTED BY BOPOMOFO SYSTEM] b - p - m - f sound is made at the lips #(labial consonant) d - t - n - l sound is made with the tip (apex) of your tongue #(apical consonant) g - k - h sound is made at the soft palate #(velar consonant) [try pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth and slowly move it back until you reach the soft spot (no bone); that's the soft palate] j - q - *x* sound is made by moving the tongue back and forth [creating the shshsh sound] #(alveolo-palatal affricate/ *alveolo-palatal fricative consonant* ) zh - ch - *sh - r* sound is made the same as j - q - x but with tongue curled a bit backward. #(retroflex affricate/ *retroflex fricative consonant* ) z - c - *s* sound is made by letting air go through your teeth with the tip (apex) of your tongue #(apical affricate/ *apical fricative consonant* ) [for affricate consonant you stop the air flow for a bit in your tongue before you let it out through your teeth, *for fricative consonant you don't have to stop* ] Most of the time, Chinese/Japanese linguistic resources are hard to find or just isn't available in English, so Wikipedia articles are probably your best friend. As for Chinese-Japanese vocab relations, this is a good starter en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary And also beware of false friend en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese%E2%80%93Japanese_false_friends
@it's mee not exactly. Unlike for example Italian, Spanish and Portuguese; Chinese, Korean and Japanese, except for certain vocabulary, aren't really related at all. They all belong to different language groups and have different grammar rules and applications.
@@superplaylists1616 Yeah but it's hard enough learning hanzi/kanji one reading at a time...imagine having to learn for both chinese and japanese. they're probably going to get burnt out very quickly
I did this 15y ago. I studied Chinese and Japanese at the same time, and they called me crazy, and I tried to convince everyone it was actually helpful and I didn't have problems with cross over info or whatever.
Hi everyone, I realised that I need to assemble a small team in order to produce these videos on a sustainable basis. (This is because I am a poor and overworked college student 😅.) I also want to pay my team because I believe that remunerating someone for their labour is the ethical thing to do. Therefore, I have created a little Patreon if any of you want to support this project! Perks include shout-outs at the end of future videos and monthly updates on what's going on behind the scenes. (I'm open to suggestions about any other perks that you might want as well!) I am currently the only source of information on this topic (808 commonly-used characters shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) available in English. I also think I am one of the few people in the world who has the skills to research this topic + cares enough to do it well. I don't want to over-promise, but I hope to build up a steady supply of videos and start uploading again by May. I also want to start a new series on the 658 shared *words* as well as covering Vietnamese and Cantonese. I do hope that you find this to be a cause worth patronising. Regardless, I am grateful that you are watching my videos and that you find them interesting ❤️ www.patreon.com/808cjk
Hey this sounds super interesting! If you need someone to help edit and put together videos, I do that professionally and would be willing to offer my services at a reduced rate.
I feel like in theory this sounds really effective, but in reality with this method it can become very easy to become a Jack of all trades but master of none. With Chinese, Japanese and Korean it might be best to learn one and then learn the other once you get to an intermediate level in the first one you pick, and then learn the third when you are advanced in the first and intermediate in the second. Or maybe even learn the third through the first one you learned.
okay cool this is what i was thinking maybe too. cause i wanna be close to fluent in only korean but later id like to learn some japanese for sure and then mandarin or chinese after.
@@n3wang3lz I feel that learning Chinese or Japanese first will be more beneficial than learning Korean first, so you can actually link the hanja to the words.
Fun fact: knowing one of these languages makes the other 2 a little easier (at least from my experience). I'm learning Korean, and I've noticed there are quite a few word that sound similar to Chinese words, which makes memorizing it a lot easier. I will say that between Chinese and Japanese though...it's really confusing. Japan's kanji has the exact same characters as Chinese along with the same meanings, but completely different pronunciation. That's pretty annoying to differentiate cause everytime I look at kanji, my brain takes too long to adjust. Hiragana is a lot easier to memorize, and katakana too (to some extent), but it's still that much harder simply because it's split into 3 different categories. Tbh, I never realized how difficult it is to learn a language if it doesn't have an alphabetical system. I grew up speaking Mandarin, yet when thinking about it from a more objective point of view, it's painful. So that's why I'd honestly say Korean is a lot easier. Sure, the grammatical stuff is more confusing, but patterns are much easier to pick up and it's a lot easier to read (because there's an alphabetical system). *In order of easiest to hardest, from my pov:* 1. Korean 2. Chinese 3. Japanese
Also with Japanese, Kanji have different pronunciations, onyomi and kunyomi, where the latter is closer to Chinese languages in pronunciation, adding a layer of complexity, or a layer of ease if you already speak Mandarin for example.
It's also much easier to learn korean if you speak cantonese. The korean words which have chinese roots sound more similar to the cantonese pronunciation, and the system of changing between the two is more consistent. For example, everything in canto that's like "ai" becomes "ae" in korean. If you listen to kpop, it's also the reason why the korean names of chinese idols sound nothing like the chinese version, and the chinese names of korean idols sound nothing like korean. Off the top of my head, a good example would be Chenle from nct, whose hanja translated korean name would be jinrak, but where tf did that k come from? In canto, it's sun lok. It's not perfect but usually the consonants are the same/similar. I think that might be evidence that canto is more similar to classical chinese when it was introduced to korea
@@lol-xz2fl Lol. Japanese didn't "adopt korean grammar". They are just both agglutinative languages and both uses politeness and particules. That's all.
太厉害了, 以后也要加油更新视频呀！native Chinese speaker here🙋, self studied Korean by English and self learning Japanese by Korean now, I tried to compare them for learning more efficiently same as you:) so interesting 😊
Oooh same here! I studied Japanese in highschool (I got offered to learn it for free so I took the chance), planning to learn Korean now! I'm also a native Chinese speaker but I'm not Chinese from Mainland China 🤣 so far I can speak and write Chinese, English, Malay and Japanese. I can understand a bit of Chinese dialects too such as Cantonese.
Native Korean speaker here, I grew up in a Chinese speaking country and taught myself Japanese, can confirm knowing Korean and Chinese makes learning Japanese so easy Kanjis are a breeze since I already read Chinese, just take note on minor differences, and for grammar there’s equivalents for basically everything in Korean
This helps! I’ve realised while learning Korean than there are many similarities in sentence structure or word construction in Chinese. Japanese is maybe harder due to the writing system but maybe easier to learn the sounds of the characters for English speakers as it isn’t a tonal language? Just thinking out loud, but I’ll see when I get to Japanese whether my theory actually holds up 😂
As a South Korean who can speak Japanese language and have learned the basics of Chinese language, I can definitely say this video is more than precise. Looking forward to your next video! +) A slight modification would be, however, the three major East Asian languages are the hardest language mainly for the navtive English speakers! As the linguistic distance between languages significantly influences the level of difficulty when you learn the other.
About the difficulty, you're correct. And as a native Hungarian i can say that Korean and Japanese are easy in the logic of their grammar (but japanese also easy in pronunciation) for us. So yeah, language difficulty is very much depends on what language the person already familiar with.
people who don't study japanese always talk about how kanji is the hardest part, and it is pretty difficult, but you just need to do the same thing for hundreds of times, which is finding the kanji, learning the reading and meaning, it's a lineal process and it's quantifiable, you can know how many kanji you know, and how many of them are in the jouyou kanji list, but when it comes to listening and grammar it is much harder, and I'd argue those two aspects are harder than kanji, as someone who has been learning japanese for 2 years
The grammar rules themselves are really simple, just need to listen a lot and repeat a bunch yourself to really drill them into your brain permanently. Kanji really was the easiest part 😂 just reading novels and checking the readings on google translate with my phone quick and going on with the story right away.
Awesome presentation, but I think it's wrong to make a parallel between Chinese Korean and Japanese and Romance languages, since Romance languages are one family and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are unrelated at their origin, Chinese vocabulary influence and writing system being the only thing in common. I would later say that the equivalent of Romance languages in East Asia is the Chinese language family.For example, Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Spanish.
Hello! That's a great point and you are absolutely right! I only touched on it briefly in the video when I mentioned that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean differ in their grammars and I could have been more clear about this point. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good way to learn grammar using the comparative method like in the Romance languages. However, I do think that learning the characters is the biggest issue in learning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean just as grammar is the biggest difficulty in learning the Romance languages, and so the comparative method is similarly effective here.
@@808CJK Even between these 3 East Asian languages, the level of difficulty is different. Chinese has easy grammar but hard writing system.Korean has much harder grammar, but learning Hanja is optional and Hangul alphabet is very easy.In Japanese, both the writing system and grammar are very difficult.I learned Chinese for more than 7 years and now when I read something in Japanese I can guess their meaning based on the Kanjis, even if I don't know how to pronunce them in Japanese.So the comparative method works, at least for writing.
True, I would rather study 3 sinitic languages than study it with Japanese and Korean, it would get a bit confusing because they not that similar at all, except Japanese is similar to Chinese in writing (usage of Hanzi), and Korean similar to Japanese in grammar
Because of the historical influence China had on Japan and Korea, and vice versa, it is reasonable that there is similar vocabulary between the three languages despite being from three separate language groups. I think you are being unnecessarily pedantic considering this is a video meant to help language learners rather than to discuss linguistics.
@@TaiChiKnees As a Korean heritage speaker and Japanese learner, I personally think it's important to identify the relationship between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese as being different from the relationship between Romance languages *especially* considering historical influence... I appreciate the original commenter pointing it out, as a lot of non-Asians, particularly non-East Asian people, are unaware that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese come from different language families in the first place and often compare the relationship to Romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, despite it being entirely different. I would even argue that ignoring the difference helps perpetuates the negative stereotypes that all Asians are the same. I don't think that the original comment takes away from a language learner's experience, rather I would think that someone who was uninterested in thinking about linguistics would simply brush over the comment and someone who was interested would be glad to read the comment, just like I was.
I’m studying Korean but doing Mandarin on Duolingo for fun while my son bugs me to Learn Japanese since he’s moving there. My main trouble in Korean is recalling vocabulary and have already noticed that similarities in some of the few terms I know in Mandarin or Japanese helps a LOT to remember Korean. And I only really need to recognize Chinese characters, not draw them. So any new pathway to reinforce a term in my brain will help. I look forward to your videos!
You should look up Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. Learning kanji through this method has helped me learn vocabulary faster since the words are built from kanji, and each kanji is associated with a keyword. So when I hear a new word I might be able to guess its meaning due to having formed these associations. When I see a new word I'm also able to guess its reading. I think this method would work well for learning Korean vocabulary. For example, 大 means big and is read as "dai“ and 学 means school and is read as "gaku." If I encountered the word 大学 for the first time I would be able to guess that it is read as "daigaku" and means college.
When starting to learn Korean, I already had some basic knowledge of Japanese and don't get me started on how confusing it was. The grammar is similar in some ways so switching a Korean word for a Japanese didn't seem like much of a problem to my brain haha I started to focus on Korean and only after reaching a higher intermediate level I began to learn Japanese again, from scratch and guess what. The process was way more pleasant because I had something to compare it to (Korean) and I did not get confused with vocabulary, since Korean is already so engraved in my brain. Never tried learning Chinese but I don't think learning it at the same time as the other two languages would be a good idea. Tbh even with the romance languages, I know French quite well and when learning Spanish it seemed quite confusing sometimes. It is true you can understand some of the other romance languages but learning all of them at once just results in a jumble of words from multiple languages that don't go together. That's just my opinion as an average language enthusiast and learner.. ^^;
Learning all 3 is fine, I do it too. However you have to keep in mind that unlike the Romance languages which belong to the same language family, Japanese, Korean and Chinese belong to different language families namely the Japonic, Koreanic and Sino-tibetan language families respectively. The Chinese characters are shared but Japanese uses Kanji different (Kunyomi/onyomi, some kanji only exist in Japan) than Chinese Hanzi and Korean Hangul is different too. It can end up causing more confusion if you don't keep that in mind.
@@danbo967 Also for the meanings it not always will work if you accidentally mix the chinese and japanese versions up. Especially with kanji compounds. And in lots of cases you can't really get a pass with changing up a single character either because they might have very different design in both languages.
For Chinese speakers who are currently studying Korean, check out《韩文单字语源图鉴》!! It points out the differences and similarities between these two languages, which helps to memorize the meaning of words
i started with japanese and picked up korean a little later. and the grammar is SO similar it's basically the same (on the beginner's level at least). i make crazy combination sentences way too often because of this... but on a side note even earlier i also tried learning chinese but stopped after a while because i couldn't keep up with the vocabulary... but because i memorised all the strokes and keys and the order in which they're written kanji is a piece of cake for me!
New videos coming out in May. Also, we have a team now! _____ Hi everyone, thank you for all your support. I am overwhelmed by all the traction that this channel has gotten and very thankful for all of your interest and support. Over the past month, I have been building up a team and refining the video production process. We have taken your feedback and will be moving away from the shorts format. Instead, we will produce normal, longer videos, which means I don’t have to speed-read through the script like an overcaffeinated Eminem. This also means we can go deeper into aspects of the languages and the cultures that were previously cut for time. For May, you can expect one new character video per week. We plan to gradually increase our capacity in the future so that we eventually release three videos per week. I would like to thank the team, without whom none of this would be possible. I cannot appreciate them enough for all the time and hard work that they are putting in! If you are interested in supporting the team for their time and hard work, please also consider supporting us on Patreon (www.patreon.com/808cjk). We are working on some exciting perks, but they will take some time to complete as we are still focusing on video production. In the meantime, you can rest assured that *all* Patreon proceeds will be distributed among the team for their incredible work. You will also get shout-outs in our future videos. Finally, here is a shout-out to all our team members! They are: AJ Alex Amberly AshElly Ha My Jacqueline Nate Theo Zhi Rui
@@luxraider5384 why would you assume he was talking about computer programming, under a video about spoken human languages? Context is important. And who would refer to Java as “J”? Why not assume JavaScript?
When other people ask if it is possible to learn bunch of languages at the same time, I answer them: _guys, did you learn (or do you learn) physics, chemistry, biology, math at school? Did you succeed? If you remember at least something, then of course it's possible to learn languages that way too!_
This mentality won't help you become fluent though. If you're native language is English and you learn French and Spanish at the same time that might work well, become they are at least related. Chinese and Japanese are completely unrelated though and are very grammatically different from English. In order to start understanding anime in Japanese, I've had to devote a lot of my free time to listening to audio and some reading, since knowing kanji has helped me learn vocabulary faster. I don't think devoting time to multiple languages at once is a good idea. You will get burnt out fast.
@@crimsonghost4107 Honestly, from experience, I think learning 2-3 languages that are not related to each other at all is easier for me and keeps me from burning out (because I can just change which one I study each study session and it will surely be completely different). Learning very similar languages confuses me since they have similar grammar and vocabulary rules, but they are slightly different and I can accidentally mix them up. That mix-up doesn’t happen when learning 2 very different languages (like Mandarin Chinese and German, lets say), and helps keep things fresh and distinct.
Except the way you learn in school is incredibly inefficient. it'll take you a year or more to learn the stuff you could learn in less than a week if you focus on one, plus people tend to forget most of it after a couple months. Not a very convincing argument tbh.
My experience with learning languages taught me I do better when learning more than one language at once anyway, and I also noticed similarities between Thai and Chinese as well. I will also be able to remember "20" in Thai and Korean bc they're pronounced nearly the same! Learning multiple similar languages at once also kinda does a sort of extra repetition with the words you're learning that will also help you remember them. I love this!
this is such an interesting video! im fluent in cantonese, mandarin and english and im currently learning japanese. sometimes when im watching anime/japanese shows/kdramas, i notice how i could actually understand select terms that have pronunciations similar to chinese and i thought it was just a conspiracy theory i had in my head due to the sheer amount of shows i would watch ?? on a completely unrelated note, my first japanese word i learnt from listening to my japanese-speaking aunt talk was actually denwa (telephone) because it had a similar pronunciation to telephone in cantonese (dinwaa) or mandarin (dianhua). so then 5 year old me was like nah this gotta be a joke and i thought i was a language genius bc of that LMAO
I’ve been comparing the languages as I’ve been learning Korean this past year!!! I didn’t even know I could use this method and it seems very promising!!! I was planning on learning Japanese after Korean, but I have a (what I think to be) solid framework of Korean - my speaking ability is limited but I can write and comprehend more than I can speak. Sentence structure is the biggest challenge, I think. That and the fact that Korean and Chinese are tonal languages while Japanese isn’t tonal (just like English isn’t tonal). And, of course, the writing systems. I’ve been wondering about Hanja since I heard and read about it while watching period K-Dramas and it would be great to learn more about it here! LOVE THIS CHANNEL!
I started trying to learn Chinese on my own after several years of taking Japanese classes. I found that each language aids the learning of the other, especially with recognizing the meaning of characters. To see a video that explains this phenomena is very exciting!
First language: Vietnamese Second language: English Attempted to learn: 1) Korean in middle school but stopped after learning the writing system and having trouble with the sentence order 2) Mandarin in high school but stopped after having trouble with tones in pinyin being completely different from Vietnamese tone accents I guess it’s time to relearn those two and add Japanese into the mix since I’m visiting Japan at the end of the year. 🤷🏻♀️ Might as well since I have little bits of everything from four years of high school French and one year of college German and ASL. Being interested in languages makes this challenge sound really fun so I’m looking forward to learning these 808 words!
Im learning Korean, I want to learn Chinese and Japanese but I was holding off in fear of confusing myself but I think I might try learning them all together
@Citrus idk, tbh I don't really care if they are similar or not, because at the end I dont want to write kanji or Chinese or hangeul, writing is not and reading is not my aim, all I want to know is how to speak and understand that language, because I wanna understand the dramas and series
@Citrus easy to you, to me there are alot of new sounds since im not a native English speaker, so pronunciation is so difficult, Japanese to me is easier, there's only one character that makes an unfamiliar sound, other than that we have it in my language
As someone who wasnt very fluent in English, I can say that Comprehensible Input works. Being an indian who studied in an english-medium school, i had a basic grasp of English, but wasnt exactly the most fluent in it. it was during covid times that my English got more proficient, so lets say that before covid, my skills were a ten, but after covid, they became a straight 1000. i used to watch English movies all day long, and words that i didnt know started making sense if you look at the context that they are used in. this technique really does work. it was subtitles for me that really helped. now, as a basic korean learner, i have started to watch a lot of k-dramas, and i mean a lot. and obviously yes i listen to kpop (not bts or blackpink tho) and i can say that i am making progress, slowly but surely. the problem is me using English subtitles. if i switch it to korean, then i could be pretty proficient in it. but what you really need, its a basic understanding on vocabulary of any language you want to learn. without vocabulary, you cannot do anything and believe me when i say this. so dont switch to subtitles on the language youre learning immediately, learn how to read it and some common vocabulary.
As a Chinese learner, I believe Chinese has an easy grammar structure that English speakers can pick up quickly-the characters, unfortunately, tend to overwhelm most. I would say Japanese and Korean are more similar in grammar and writing overall since they have set scripts (unlike Chinese), their sentence structures are similar (SOV) and they use particles which are also used in Chinese, but less frequently and not in the same ways.
Amazing!! Thank you so much for making this! I am a native Cantonese/Mandarin speaker trying to learn Korean from hanja but there are not a lot of existing resources for learning from this route. Your channel and the pdfs you linked are game changing for me.
Very interesting! I'm studying Japanese at Uni, but I've come across a lot of Chinese in various online spaces, and knowing Kanji definitely helps understanding the gist of what's going on, but having the appropriate pronunciation would obviously be even better! It's always super interesting to me when I can make out similarities in certain words like 練習, 天国, or 大王...
I found this video and this was really gaming changing for me, I'm a Brazilian who learned English and Spanish by my own, and since I like anime and kpop, I'm also studying Korean and Japanese, but I also like a lot the Chinese language, and I've noticed that a few things that I know in Korean helped me in Japanese, and also things that I've learned in Japanese helped me in Korean, but I though that was something from my head, it's good to know that is not hahahaha thank you for the content!
Now this is what I call proper TH-cam algorithm suggestion! This is the kind of content I would like to see on my feed. Congrats on starting your channel 👏
I can attest to this video as Vietnamese since I discovered this comparitive method through pure intuition that 1:1 conversions for reading and listening of words are true for many words between Vietnamese and Japanese
Great video! I'm currently learning Vietnamese and Japanese after learning Chinese, and I think this will be a really helpful method to incorporate into my learning. Thanks for sharing this!
Reminds me this story from a friend. When his family moved to Canada from Japan when he was kid, his Japanese dad and a Chinese neighbor were having trouble communicate as they were both not fluent in English, in the end the dads some how figured out to use written Chinese characters to communicate.
I think comparing Chinese/Japanese/korean to Romance language is a bit too extreme. The comparaison would be good for Mandarin/Cantonese/Vietnamese But Korean/Japanese have their native language root, which is distinct from Chinese, but due to Chinese influence, they assimilated a lot of words and characters into their initially different language. The fact that Korean/Japanese have a different sentence structure than Chinese make it more obvious. For example in Korean there is a distinction between sino-korean words, and native-korean words. So, I would say that the comparation could be Italian vs German, Many german words come from Latin, they use mostly the same alphabet but one is Germanic and the other is Latin and for german speakers, it's not too difficult to distinguish which words are germanic and which words are latin.
Oui c'est précsément ce que je dis. L'allemend a quelque mots de latin mais ce n'est pas une langue latine. De la même manière, le Coréen a des mots de chinois (les mots sino-coréens) mais l'origine de la langue n'est pas le chinois.
In Chinese view, Korean and Vietnamese are much more Sinolized than Japanese. I can speak Japanese and I know they can use native Japanese with a few Chinese-root vocabularies in daily life, but as I know in Korean or Vietnamese, they can't yet. Such that, for K and V speakers, learning Chinese might be much more easier than J. ( and as I know almost all native level Chinese learner from country out of China are from these 2 countries )
@@nyleeu2632 I agree for vietnamese, which is close to cantonese, they even have tones (although different from mandarin) and the language structure is very similar. But I disagree about korean being 'closer' to chinese than japanese. They both have the same percentage of chinese loan words (한자어/漢語) in their language and they are both very different from chinese in the sense that they are agglutinative SOV languages (chinese isn't like that at all). Meaning that Koreans and Japanese do construct their sentences and words in a VERY different way than Chinese. Regarding writing, I would say that Japanese is closer, as they still use 漢字 to the point where Japanese and Chinese can actually communicate together through writing. Which is not possible for Koreans. the usage of 한자 is very limited and only a very limited list of "important" 한자 are taught at school.
@@amadexi What you say is expression "Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese are diffierent languages", And I totally argee that, but grammar like SOV or SVO don't that improtant. I'm guessing you're Korean, as far as I know Jeju used to have a large Mongolian population living on the island during the Mongol Empire, and there is still a huge difference between the Jeju dialect and standard Korean today, but I think whoever it is acknowledges that they are closer to Korean than Mongolian. The fact that modern Korean has almost abandoned Chinese writing does not change the fact that it is actually closer to Chinese than Japanese, and modern Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, but it is clearly closer to Chinese than to French. Strictly speaking they are even closer to ancient Chinese than to today's Mandarin, as the Chinese language itself is gradually changing itself through the culturally central effect of the capital.
This is an idea I've had for a while. I would keep a notebook, and each time i learn a new Chinese character, i would find the Japanese equivalent and note pronunciation, difference in writing and definition. I never got to it because i just don't know where to start.
I’ve been learning Japanese for about a year now, and I always wondered if getting to know more Kanji would make it easier to learn Chinese as well - since the characters were originally adapted from Chinese. This answers my question and makes me want to learn the other languages as well. Super excited to dive into these videos! Thank you ☺️
The difference is understanding the languages as relationship modeling rulesets, rather than data sets. Shared language family means shared data with similar modeling rules. Relying on the shared data reduces one of the greatest bottlenecks (downloading data to your brain). This is a fascinating project, really looking forward to the series.
English speaker here, i lucky already have a good feel with Japanese so I have started to lightly dip my toes into Chinese and Korean. Its very interesting too see the characters change
I’m a Chinese native speaker and I self learned Korean by myself with the help of my Chinese knowledge. Now, I’m trying to learn Japanese and I’m having troubles with writing form for it which are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Even though its a different set of writing form compared to Chinese and Korean, I still have some help with the help of my Chinese knowledge as I can understand the meaning of some Japanese Kanji which have similar meanings to Chinese words. GOODLUCK to those learning this 3 language at the same time
I studied Japanese all four years of college, then ended up moving to China after graduating. Unfortunely my Japanese has deteriorated into nothing, I still occasionally remember a new Mandarin word easily because of it's phonetic similarity to Japanese. Thinking about the Sino-Japanese vocab and how most of the modern science words are related either in pronunciation or hanzi/kanji, I'm excited to see a channel like this grow and teach me. Gah I'm so excited!
I’ve been interested in Japanese for a long time but felt it would be too difficult to learn, so I would just learn Korean and maybe learn Japanese later, but with this channel I can change my interest in Japanese into interest in Korean through their shared aspects. I’ve also been wanting to learn the history of Kanji and how it split from Chinese while preserving the Chinese characters in most of its nouns.
3:30 That’s because they aren’t like the Romance languages at all. They don’t share a common writing system except perhaps Kanji. They are from three different separate language families, there don’t descend from one mother tongue.
omg i've been convinced of this for months and i was so happy to have confirmation when I saw the title of your video! I've been trying to learn Japanese for years (but self-teaching is very slow because i don't have a schedule for that haha), I started learning Korean on my own as well (but the tried and true method of listening to music and series is on my side this time) and I've been learning Mandarin since September through school. All that to say that not only did I note all the similarities and influences between these languages, but I realised that for example, knowing a few things about hanzì through Japanese has helped a lot in my Chinese classes. This is the only video i've seen from you so far but I am definitely going to keep up. Thank you so much for this initiative and I hope it thrives!
The scope of this channel is incredible. I have very little money because i am going through rehabilitation after my brain cancer, but if I had any, I would spend it on you. I look forward to using this amazing ressource to learn the three languages. Thank you so much for putting all this work in!
I just happened to stumble across your channel, and I'm super excited!! I've been studying Korean, Japanese, and Chinese for a few years in my spare time (so progress has been slow, unfortunately) - but this is one of the things that fascinates me! I love learning about the history and the overlaps of these languages. I can't wait to watch more of your videos. Thank you for creating a resource to meet this need in the language community. I also appreciate the way you organize and clearly articulate your thoughts and the information. It makes the subject easy to follow and understand.
Very interesting and helpful project for everyone who is willing to learn these languages, learning 漢字 may not be the very first step for beginners but they definitely are very useful tools on the way to being a fluent speaker.
Currently learning Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Esperanto, Polish and Korean at the same time. This video really helped out a lot! Looking forward to more videos.
I was born speaking English and French, aunt taught in Japan and taught me Japanese, other aunt who traveled extensively taught me some Spanish, I thought Italian sounded cool so I started learning that and started realizing the similarities and that is how I became obsessed with learning new languages even just a little bit and now my brain is so jumbled with different languages that I know to varying extents that I can no longer properly speak any of them 🤣🤣🤣
This is probably the most logical videos I've ever watched about methods for learning languages. As a native french, I found spanish a lot easier to learn and understand comparing to english. When I started to learn spanish in middle school, I was able to have conversations about a lot of topics in less than 6 months while it took me years for english. And people around didn't understand why I struggled in english and why I thought spanish was easier since english is known for being a simple language comparing to romanian languages (for example only one way to use verbs for each pronoun vs 6 different ways for each verbs). But the answer is simple : it's because it looks like french and I learnt it just by comparing it to french. I wanted to learn some japanese, chinese and corean for years but i never tried cause I thought I was too ambitious. After watching your video, I hit the suscribe button and I think I will start my learning journey with your videos. Thank you for that :)
I'm native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, and can read and write traditional Chinese - I had no idea that trilateral dictionary exists, this will actually make life so much easier. Also gonna follow along the rest of the videos :) Really wished they'd made a traditional Chinese version of that dictionary, though, as some simplified Chinese characters still makes me scratch my head.
I looked for such comparative materials and couldn't find. Mostly I had to check wiktionary, that works great, but you have to look up one by one. Finally you are doing the job that was missing. Subscribed.
As a native speaker of two romance langages, that's true. I can understand every other romance langages speaker if they speak clearly, slow and with a simple vocabulary. That work really good because I've even learn English like this (That's not a romance langage, but It's really similar and has some origins in French that is a romance langage). As you can see I'm not the best in English, I sure that I've made at least one or two mistake and my sentences may sound not natural, but I can express myself !
This is true! English is my L2 and sometimes its grammar helps me understand my L1 (Spanish) better. Never thought of applying this method to these languages, I was planning to first become as fluent as possible in Mandarin and then take up Korean but this might be better! Thank you
You absolutely are a pioneer in this field in the east Asian language, I have known some stuff like learning western language like this, but I didn't get it in the Eastern one.
Tysm for this channel. I'm brazilian(portuguese native) and I'm a begginer student of Chinese and Korean. Eager to see more of your videos 감사합니다 Obrigada!
Quite interesting fact about the Romace languages. I'm Brazilian, and we call them Latin languages (or languages from Latin countries), but I didn't know it was how they were called in english ^^
@@will7922 Comum? Posso perguntar de onde você é? Pois onde moro nunca vi esse termo, e quando nos referimos ao português antigo utilizamos o termo arcaico para isso
Em português também dizemos "linguas românicas" (por que elas vieram do Latin que era falado em Roma). O "romance" em "romance languages" também vem de "Roma"
L1 English speaker, ethnically Chinese, so I've been speaking Mandarin (casually) my whole life. Also, I grew up in a mostly korean neighborhood and have been studying Japanese. From what I can tell the overlap in C/J is in characters (kanji), pronunciation and grammar (K/J) and learning all 3 kind of simultaneously is amazing! Lots of overlap-- like how Hangul and the Japanese scripts use a phonetic system whereas Chinese doesnt... but lots of other stuff is very culturally interesting to see the comparison!
Wow, this is so cool. Thanks for putting this idea into action. Ever since I've gotten into kpop I've been connecting Korean and the Chinese I learn at school and also talking about kanji with my brother who learns Japanese and making connections like these are really really helpful and interesting to me, but it's so hard to find definitive or just any answers at all with these things so thank you so much and I will definitely be watching your videos going forward. ✊🏼
It's a cool idea but I noticed that some of the Japanese characters in the book are simply words that came from the Chinese spelling but are used to spell out native Japanese words. For example, 出来 would be「しゅつ・らい」or「しゅったい」if it was a loan-word like 출래 in Korean. But it is simply used to spell a native Japanese word (でき）so I don't think that counts. You're looking at these languages from a very literary perspective. In my opinion, it only counts if it uses both the spelling and the sino-pronunciation (音読み), not just the spelling.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED, THANKS, I'LL KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON YOUR CONTENT I think analytical study involving multiple languages of the same group and explaining their origins is the best way to learn them, I've been learning English since a very young age and know some latin from my native language's scientific terms and other latinisms. This allows me to read and understand a large portion of the French, Italian and Spanish texts I encounter and it can be super handy in some cases
I think this sounds very interesting and promising! the main issue I've noticed, is how you are delivering it. I am personally not a fan of the youtube short, i rarely check those, i hate how youtube is using it ( wish it at least would only show you the current channel you are looking at instead of random stuff after the video you clicked on). There's probably people that don't mind it, honestly. But the views speak for themselves, a lot of views on this, and yet little to no views on the instructive content. I noticed there's small compilation you've made that compile some already viewed content, but the thumbnail makes it confusing, and the title grows too long for it to all show up to be readable (for instance, putting your channel's name in the title isn't necessary, since people can scroll down to see it is you, or you can put a transparent watermark on the video itself), in the end the video feed section of your channel looks cluttered with no clean and easy way to notice what is new and what is a re-upload but compiled. Thumbnail are very important and people will see the thumbnail and even click the video before even reading the actual title. To put all the chance in your bag, you should work on making good thumbnails picture for each video uploaded ( if you go with regular video instead of shorts). it doesn't need to be over the top, but clean simple and straight to the point can go a long way. Another thing would be to avoid putting information at the bottom of the screen, as a non-english speaker, i often have subtitles on for instructive videos to make sur i understand correctly, if subtitle are available, and the information becomes hidden with the subtitle as a consequence of this. for the compilation video, i feel like having all 3 video side to side fills the void the shorts makes, but it doesn't translate well since it is an information video. I think if the subject of the conversation changed, it shouldn't have the previous one still lingering. As a symbolic, having one presented at a time, and moving to the next (can also have the youtube cut in the timeline, so people can easily navigate in it between subjects) , represent taking your time, and its like cooking the main dish first and moving on afterward to the dessert, instead of doing the whole meal at same time, in a way. Don't want the main dish and the dessert in the oven at same time, taking the flavor of the other dish together. Can put a conclusion at the end to revise what was in the video too, it can also make the video closure more natural that way, up to what you feel like. If you already are aware of the next video's subject, you can also say it at the end of the video, that way people can look forward for next video, though this require certainty of your choice, else it can deceiving for viewers. I hope you will read this and find it useful in any way, Good luck!
Hi there, thank you so much! This is extremely extremely useful and I will definitely take this into account for future videos 😀. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts!
I'm living in Vietnam and learning Vietnamese a little bit each day, self-studying, not formally. Recently, I started studying Korean too and I'm noticing so many similar words between the languages. I understand that each of these languages exist in their own tree, but there are naturally many transferred words between the cultures and languages. The learning curve into Vietnamese is rather steep but, as the only SE-Asian language that uses a Latinate script as its official written form, it could be a useful stepping-stone for people who have zero experience with other such languages. The Vietnamese language is extremely diverse, absorbing multiple ethnicities' languages from throughout the region, including previously very-isolated mountain dwellers, and some Khmer language influences. The documentation of the language is also lacking, for example, there seems to be no formally-produced dictionary of the central-Vietnam vocabulary, with "official" Vietnamese focussing solely on the Hanoian form. Thus, using Vietnamese to ladder into these other SEA languages may not be so helpful but, if used in a strictly academic sense with pre-defined lists of comparable words and their morphological differences, it could be a useful key. It should be noted that Vietnamese is indeed its own language family, but it does contain a large number of Sino (Chinese)-origin words, many of which are in common daily use and often are used as the more formal form of a word, much like French-based English is the foundation of things like contracts and other legal speak. The Sino-Viet words are the ones most likely to be comparable to CKJ. Learning how the IPA works and exploring with controlling all aspects of the mouth has also been massively helpful for me. Armed with that, I was able to learn Vietnamese pronunciation in just a few weeks (although, living here, I'm always working on improving it), and I learnt Hangeul in a few hours and Korean pronunciation in a few days. Not to suggest that I'm perfect at it or even good, but the IPA base enabled my brain to make sense of it extremely quickly. In combination with my Vietnamese foundation, I now have a mental map of pronunciations of multiple languages, and am starting to recognise common pronunciation shift patterns between Vietnamese and Korean. Doubtless, learning Chinese pronunciation will fill the transition between these shifts because any shared vocabulary likely originated in one of the Chinese languages. As Mr. 808CJK mentioned, the comparative resources for CJK are not written in English, which is what led me to write this comment. Learning Vietnamese gives me the simple transition into SEA language concepts via the Latinate script (basically the Roman alphabet plus modifications: a â ă e ê o ô ơ u ư đ & tones on the vowels a á à ả ã ạ), and then learning Hangeul is simple because it is actually just a 2D alphabet. Once inside the SEA linguistic constructs (different to one another but seemingly relatively similar when compared to PIE languages) via Vietnamese and Korean, I imagine that mapping the vocabulary pronunciations to kanji and hanzi will be much simpler than coming directly from a Romance language. Additionally, for myself at least, reading block symbols is mentally complex and my eye movements (saccades, the way that eyes move rapidly between points, Google it for more info) are not yet trained for such reading. Transitioning from Vietnamese pronunciation and vocab into Korean pronunciation with Hangeul seems like it would be a good method to graduate my saccades and block-symbol processing unit, in preparation for grasping logograms (kanji, hanzi). This looks like a long path into it. It suits me because I'm living in Vietnam and I'm busy with other things, so, a slow but steady approach is fine for now. If you're interested in tapping into SEA languages immediately and you have no experience with CJK writing scripts, Vietnamese is immediately readable and thus rememberable, even if you can't pronounce it yet. For example: park : công viên : 공원 [gong-won] student : học sinh : 학생 [hag-saeng] animal : động vật : 동물 [dong-mul] singer : ca sỹ : 가수 [ga-su] chemistry : hóa học : 화학 [hwa-hag] room : phòng : 방 [bang] bread : bánh mỳ : 빵 [ppang] (from French "pan") (mỳ means wheat) Of course, Hangeul has RR (Revised Romanisation), which is certainly helpful, although I found it interfering with my Hangeul reading development. Additionally, many of the letter combinations wreak havoc with English digraph recognition, which took me a jolly-long time to disconnect from! Regardless, RR certainly helps to get into SEA languages via Korean :) eo is /ʌ/ (my brain wants to say eyoh) ae is /ɛ/ (my brain wants ehh) e is /e/ (my brain wants ee) eu is /ɯ/ (my brain wants ew)
Thus was so nice to find! I've been going back and forth between Korean and Japanese for various reasons so I was kind of doing this already but having videos that explain them without me having to look up all these things is amazing. Thank you!
I'm Native Chinese. I speak Chinese as my main language and learned English as my second language. It was till 2017 when I started learning Korean. At first it was hard but as soon I got the hang of it I started trying out on Japanese, which I started just last year. I thought Japanese would be hard but it really isn't for me. At first it's because Japanese tend to have a similar grammar structure like Korean so I got the hang of the grammar structure pretty quick, also it was pretty easy for me to figure out what some sentence might mean just by looking at the kanji and kind of connecting it to Chinese character and it actually made it easier for me to learn and memorize those words the Japanese way. Also after knowing Chinese and Korean I noticed there was a lot of words that sound the same too in all three of the language so that was also pretty easy, including some Japanese word that sound like the same in English. I guess knowing Chinese english and Korean really helped me a lot on learning Japanese to be honest and I think that would apply to other languages. The more language you learn, the more easier it is to learn other languages that is quite similar to the language you already know.
My Dad used to learn a bit of Japanese, and he would joke around saying that it couldn't decide to plagiarize who, so they copied both English and Chinese XD Nowadays I just grab some Japanese things, look at some familiar words and try and guess what the hell is that
all of these languages are totally separate. the only similarity might be syntax, and even then that’s a coincidence. even though they’re all east asian and very close together, each are definitely separate. the three similarity is the use of Han, called Hanji or Hanchi in Korean, and Kanji in Japanese. Definitely a good idea to learn these separately. Best of luck.
I am currently learning Japanese and Chinese at the same time… I am quite fluent in Chinese already but I was afraid of diving into Japanese while being in the midst of learning Chinese …. This video has added to my confidence. Thank you . I am interested in your research as well.
I learned that learning these languages together my brain grows bigger and I can retain the information better do to the information confusion. Information overload. Or Cerebral CYBER COMPLEX
Are you are using simplified Chinese Characters - what's used in Mainland China? You could throw Traditional script in too, then you could comprehend most script in Taiwan too :)
I’ve been learning Chinese for a few months and listen to jpop+consume a lot of Japanese media so the idea that that can all automatically become comprehensible input for me is really cool! And something I hand thought about befote
I'm really glad I came across this! I want to Learn Chinese, Korean and Japanese for a while now, and while my Korean is in the intermediate level just from my exposure through media, the others haven't really moved forward. This gave me an insight.
@@orangee9487 if you know atleast how to read and write urdu then, you can learn those 2 languages a bit easily... Arabic and farsi words in urdu are used at bit advanced level...(farsi words are tho more common than arabic!) While if you know urdu from hindi that might not help! Whatsoever! You can still learn them from scratch!...
@@blbubble2106 thanks for your suggestion! Wall I can read and write Arabic but my vocabulary is literally zero!! On the other hand I can speak Urdu fluently (know the grammar too) but can't read them😅 totally weird, right??😂😂
I am just that: born Korean, lived in China for 6+ years as a teen, and learned English and Japanse on the way. Korean (mother-tongue), English (Toeic 975), Chinese HSK (new 6/ old 10), JLPT (N1), JPT 875.. Thanks for the Interesting video.
一千我自己学习了日和韩文，现在在大学我学习中文 - 我找真容易。taught myself some japanese and Korean in the past and now doing mandarin - there are so many similarities that sometimes you understand words/phrases without noticing. would love the time to carry on with them until I can speak each of them confidently such an inspiring video btw :)
![One, Person, Ten | 一, 人, 十 | 808CJK #001-003 [Compilation]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xdn7FOE3wXI/mqdefault.jpg)
![One, Person, Ten | 一, 人, 十 | 808CJK #001-003 [Compilation]](/img/tr.png)
A spreadsheet with the 808 characters is available at our Patreon page for free! If you find the information helpful, please consider becoming a Patreon patron, even if it is just at the free tier :)
www.patreon.com/808cjk
I actually use this sort of thinking when I learned Japanese and Mandarin simultaneously. I learned the sound laws so I could easily predict what a character would sound like in either language. For example, the character 必 is _hitsu_ in Japanese; knowing that _h_ typically becomes a labial consonant in Mandarin Chinese- _b, p,_ or _f-_ I could easily predict that the character is pronounced _bì._ You can also do this with Korean, where the _h_ also becomes _b_ and final _tsu_ consistently becomes _l._ It helped me memorize a lot of characters rather quickly.
Could you please recommend some resources for learning these sound laws? I'm also studying Mandarin and Japanese and have an interest in historical linguistics, so this sounds like exactly my kind of method!
I'd like some recommendations as well, and a bit more elaboration on these sound laws that you use (rn im learning mandarin and I want to learn korean as well)
Please share your ressources with us 🙏
The most important thing to know when learning how to speak another language is "phonetics", but you'll probably get bombarded by hundreds of technical linguistic terms if you search it yourself, so I'm gonna try to explain it as concise as possible.
Certain sounds can be grouped depending on the how the sound is made and is different for every languages (some, like Mandarin Chinese or Thai, list their alphabets by sound).
For example (somewhat simplified) : [LISTED BY BOPOMOFO SYSTEM]
b - p - m - f sound is made at the lips #(labial consonant)
d - t - n - l sound is made with the tip (apex) of your tongue #(apical consonant)
g - k - h sound is made at the soft palate #(velar consonant)
[try pushing your tongue against the roof of your mouth and slowly move it back until you reach the soft spot (no bone); that's the soft palate]
j - q - *x* sound is made by moving the tongue back and forth [creating the shshsh sound] #(alveolo-palatal affricate/ *alveolo-palatal fricative consonant* )
zh - ch - *sh - r* sound is made the same as j - q - x but with tongue curled a bit backward. #(retroflex affricate/ *retroflex fricative consonant* )
z - c - *s* sound is made by letting air go through your teeth with the tip (apex) of your tongue #(apical affricate/ *apical fricative consonant* )
[for affricate consonant you stop the air flow for a bit in your tongue before you let it out through your teeth, *for fricative consonant you don't have to stop* ]
Most of the time, Chinese/Japanese linguistic resources are hard to find or just isn't available in English, so Wikipedia articles are probably your best friend.
As for Chinese-Japanese vocab relations, this is a good starter
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
And also beware of false friend
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese%E2%80%93Japanese_false_friends
@@condric1423 Thanks for the guidance!
I'm currently learning Korean, japanese and Chinese at the same time. These was very helpful information. Looking forward to more videos.
@it's mee Korean, Japanese and Chinese alphabets are pretty different and identifiable once you get to know the languages
@it's mee not exactly. Unlike for example Italian, Spanish and Portuguese; Chinese, Korean and Japanese, except for certain vocabulary, aren't really related at all. They all belong to different language groups and have different grammar rules and applications.
@@superplaylists1616 Yeah but it's hard enough learning hanzi/kanji one reading at a time...imagine having to learn for both chinese and japanese. they're probably going to get burnt out very quickly
im not trying to leanr any of these langauges but i watched this video anyway lmao idk why
Same!!
I did this 15y ago. I studied Chinese and Japanese at the same time, and they called me crazy, and I tried to convince everyone it was actually helpful and I didn't have problems with cross over info or whatever.
How much year you spent to become fluent in both languages
Hi everyone, I realised that I need to assemble a small team in order to produce these videos on a sustainable basis. (This is because I am a poor and overworked college student 😅.) I also want to pay my team because I believe that remunerating someone for their labour is the ethical thing to do.
Therefore, I have created a little Patreon if any of you want to support this project! Perks include shout-outs at the end of future videos and monthly updates on what's going on behind the scenes. (I'm open to suggestions about any other perks that you might want as well!)
I am currently the only source of information on this topic (808 commonly-used characters shared between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) available in English. I also think I am one of the few people in the world who has the skills to research this topic + cares enough to do it well.
I don't want to over-promise, but I hope to build up a steady supply of videos and start uploading again by May. I also want to start a new series on the 658 shared *words* as well as covering Vietnamese and Cantonese.
I do hope that you find this to be a cause worth patronising. Regardless, I am grateful that you are watching my videos and that you find them interesting ❤️
www.patreon.com/808cjk
I hope you get more views and Patreon! Cuz I'm going to rely on you😂. I'll support you when I get a job. But I'm still a highschool students rn..
All the best
I'm really interested but I need to study for university entering exams😭😭😭I'm 受験生...sorry🥺
Hey this sounds super interesting! If you need someone to help edit and put together videos, I do that professionally and would be willing to offer my services at a reduced rate.
@@typhonxyz Hi Eagle, that would be really great! Could you email me at 808cjk@gmail.com and we can discuss this more?
I feel like in theory this sounds really effective, but in reality with this method it can become very easy to become a Jack of all trades but master of none. With Chinese, Japanese and Korean it might be best to learn one and then learn the other once you get to an intermediate level in the first one you pick, and then learn the third when you are advanced in the first and intermediate in the second. Or maybe even learn the third through the first one you learned.
okay cool this is what i was thinking maybe too. cause i wanna be close to fluent in only korean but later id like to learn some japanese for sure and then mandarin or chinese after.
@@n3wang3lz I feel that learning Chinese or Japanese first will be more beneficial than learning Korean first, so you can actually link the hanja to the words.
"a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one"
@@n3wang3lz isn't mandarin a dialect of chinese?
I’m not trying to be an absolute master, I just wanna be able to communicate :)
Fun fact: knowing one of these languages makes the other 2 a little easier (at least from my experience). I'm learning Korean, and I've noticed there are quite a few word that sound similar to Chinese words, which makes memorizing it a lot easier. I will say that between Chinese and Japanese though...it's really confusing. Japan's kanji has the exact same characters as Chinese along with the same meanings, but completely different pronunciation. That's pretty annoying to differentiate cause everytime I look at kanji, my brain takes too long to adjust. Hiragana is a lot easier to memorize, and katakana too (to some extent), but it's still that much harder simply because it's split into 3 different categories. Tbh, I never realized how difficult it is to learn a language if it doesn't have an alphabetical system. I grew up speaking Mandarin, yet when thinking about it from a more objective point of view, it's painful. So that's why I'd honestly say Korean is a lot easier. Sure, the grammatical stuff is more confusing, but patterns are much easier to pick up and it's a lot easier to read (because there's an alphabetical system).
*In order of easiest to hardest, from my pov:*
1. Korean
2. Chinese
3. Japanese
Also with Japanese, Kanji have different pronunciations, onyomi and kunyomi, where the latter is closer to Chinese languages in pronunciation, adding a layer of complexity, or a layer of ease if you already speak Mandarin for example.
It's also much easier to learn korean if you speak cantonese. The korean words which have chinese roots sound more similar to the cantonese pronunciation, and the system of changing between the two is more consistent. For example, everything in canto that's like "ai" becomes "ae" in korean. If you listen to kpop, it's also the reason why the korean names of chinese idols sound nothing like the chinese version, and the chinese names of korean idols sound nothing like korean. Off the top of my head, a good example would be Chenle from nct, whose hanja translated korean name would be jinrak, but where tf did that k come from? In canto, it's sun lok. It's not perfect but usually the consonants are the same/similar. I think that might be evidence that canto is more similar to classical chinese when it was introduced to korea
i think that japanese has all the difficult stuff from chinese such as kanji and has the difficult grammar system from korean
Anways, the "exact same meaning" part for JP kanji is not really true in lot of cases especially in compounds.
@@lol-xz2fl Lol. Japanese didn't "adopt korean grammar". They are just both agglutinative languages and both uses politeness and particules. That's all.
太厉害了, 以后也要加油更新视频呀！native Chinese speaker here🙋, self studied Korean by English and self learning Japanese by Korean now, I tried to compare them for learning more efficiently same as you:) so interesting 😊
wow so you speak Chinese korean and English? Did you learn English through studying korean?
@@mingu6815 no😂😂😂 English is a compulsory subject from primary school in China, I just learn it from school and cram class.
Oooh same here! I studied Japanese in highschool (I got offered to learn it for free so I took the chance), planning to learn Korean now! I'm also a native Chinese speaker but I'm not Chinese from Mainland China 🤣 so far I can speak and write Chinese, English, Malay and Japanese. I can understand a bit of Chinese dialects too such as Cantonese.
@@AmIWhatIAm sameeeeeeeeee
wow exactly the same as me! i'm also a native chinese & english speaker learning korean and japanese :)
Native Korean speaker here, I grew up in a Chinese speaking country and taught myself Japanese, can confirm knowing Korean and Chinese makes learning Japanese so easy
Kanjis are a breeze since I already read Chinese, just take note on minor differences, and for grammar there’s equivalents for basically everything in Korean
I’m learning korean, and it seems like it’s the most different from japanese / chinese at least for reading
There are only 3 Chinese speaking countries I can think of, China, Taiwan, Singapore…
This helps! I’ve realised while learning Korean than there are many similarities in sentence structure or word construction in Chinese. Japanese is maybe harder due to the writing system but maybe easier to learn the sounds of the characters for English speakers as it isn’t a tonal language? Just thinking out loud, but I’ll see when I get to Japanese whether my theory actually holds up 😂
在中国有一种说法，中国朝鲜族学日语基本和玩一样😂
你是中國朝鮮族嗎？
As a South Korean who can speak Japanese language and have learned the basics of Chinese language, I can definitely say this video is more than precise. Looking forward to your next video!
+) A slight modification would be, however, the three major East Asian languages are the hardest language mainly for the navtive English speakers! As the linguistic distance between languages significantly influences the level of difficulty when you learn the other.
About the difficulty, you're correct. And as a native Hungarian i can say that Korean and Japanese are easy in the logic of their grammar (but japanese also easy in pronunciation) for us.
So yeah, language difficulty is very much depends on what language the person already familiar with.
people who don't study japanese always talk about how kanji is the hardest part, and it is pretty difficult, but you just need to do the same thing for hundreds of times, which is finding the kanji, learning the reading and meaning, it's a lineal process and it's quantifiable, you can know how many kanji you know, and how many of them are in the jouyou kanji list, but when it comes to listening and grammar it is much harder, and I'd argue those two aspects are harder than kanji, as someone who has been learning japanese for 2 years
The grammar rules themselves are really simple, just need to listen a lot and repeat a bunch yourself to really drill them into your brain permanently.
Kanji really was the easiest part 😂 just reading novels and checking the readings on google translate with my phone quick and going on with the story right away.
Awesome presentation, but I think it's wrong to make a parallel between Chinese Korean and Japanese and Romance languages, since Romance languages are one family and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are unrelated at their origin, Chinese vocabulary influence and writing system being the only thing in common. I would later say that the equivalent of Romance languages in East Asia is the Chinese language family.For example, Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Spanish.
Hello! That's a great point and you are absolutely right! I only touched on it briefly in the video when I mentioned that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean differ in their grammars and I could have been more clear about this point. Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good way to learn grammar using the comparative method like in the Romance languages. However, I do think that learning the characters is the biggest issue in learning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean just as grammar is the biggest difficulty in learning the Romance languages, and so the comparative method is similarly effective here.
@@808CJK Even between these 3 East Asian languages, the level of difficulty is different. Chinese has easy grammar but hard writing system.Korean has much harder grammar, but learning Hanja is optional and Hangul alphabet is very easy.In Japanese, both the writing system and grammar are very difficult.I learned Chinese for more than 7 years and now when I read something in Japanese I can guess their meaning based on the Kanjis, even if I don't know how to pronunce them in Japanese.So the comparative method works, at least for writing.
True, I would rather study 3 sinitic languages than study it with Japanese and Korean, it would get a bit confusing because they not that similar at all, except Japanese is similar to Chinese in writing (usage of Hanzi), and Korean similar to Japanese in grammar
Because of the historical influence China had on Japan and Korea, and vice versa, it is reasonable that there is similar vocabulary between the three languages despite being from three separate language groups. I think you are being unnecessarily pedantic considering this is a video meant to help language learners rather than to discuss linguistics.
@@TaiChiKnees As a Korean heritage speaker and Japanese learner, I personally think it's important to identify the relationship between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese as being different from the relationship between Romance languages *especially* considering historical influence... I appreciate the original commenter pointing it out, as a lot of non-Asians, particularly non-East Asian people, are unaware that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese come from different language families in the first place and often compare the relationship to Romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, despite it being entirely different. I would even argue that ignoring the difference helps perpetuates the negative stereotypes that all Asians are the same. I don't think that the original comment takes away from a language learner's experience, rather I would think that someone who was uninterested in thinking about linguistics would simply brush over the comment and someone who was interested would be glad to read the comment, just like I was.
I love how you pronounced kanji, hanzi and hanja correctly! Nice video, thank you.
I’m studying Korean but doing Mandarin on Duolingo for fun while my son bugs me to Learn Japanese since he’s moving there. My main trouble in Korean is recalling vocabulary and have already noticed that similarities in some of the few terms I know in Mandarin or Japanese helps a LOT to remember Korean. And I only really need to recognize Chinese characters, not draw them. So any new pathway to reinforce a term in my brain will help. I look forward to your videos!
I think 'write' is a more appropriate word than draw. It's more commonly used to say "writing chinese characters" :))
@@lucwolfe3068 that's what i wanted to say too ;)
You should look up Remembering the Kanji by Heisig. Learning kanji through this method has helped me learn vocabulary faster since the words are built from kanji, and each kanji is associated with a keyword. So when I hear a new word I might be able to guess its meaning due to having formed these associations. When I see a new word I'm also able to guess its reading. I think this method would work well for learning Korean vocabulary. For example, 大 means big and is read as "dai“ and 学 means school and is read as "gaku." If I encountered the word 大学 for the first time I would be able to guess that it is read as "daigaku" and means college.
You should try some backup apps or books as well because it’s said that duolingo doesn’t translate correctly unfortunately
@@KrabbyPattySecretForumla Not just doesn't translate correctly, but you can't use doulingo exclusively if you actually want to learn a language.
When starting to learn Korean, I already had some basic knowledge of Japanese and don't get me started on how confusing it was. The grammar is similar in some ways so switching a Korean word for a Japanese didn't seem like much of a problem to my brain haha
I started to focus on Korean and only after reaching a higher intermediate level I began to learn Japanese again, from scratch and guess what.
The process was way more pleasant because I had something to compare it to (Korean) and I did not get confused with vocabulary, since Korean is already so engraved in my brain.
Never tried learning Chinese but I don't think learning it at the same time as the other two languages would be a good idea.
Tbh even with the romance languages, I know French quite well and when learning Spanish it seemed quite confusing sometimes. It is true you can understand some of the other romance languages but learning all of them at once just results in a jumble of words from multiple languages that don't go together.
That's just my opinion as an average language enthusiast and learner.. ^^;
I had the same expierence, learned Spanish, and when tried picking up french I would lose my spanish.
Learning all 3 is fine, I do it too. However you have to keep in mind that unlike the Romance languages which belong to the same language family, Japanese, Korean and Chinese belong to different language families namely the Japonic, Koreanic and Sino-tibetan language families respectively. The Chinese characters are shared but Japanese uses Kanji different (Kunyomi/onyomi, some kanji only exist in Japan) than Chinese Hanzi and Korean Hangul is different too. It can end up causing more confusion if you don't keep that in mind.
@@danbo967 Also for the meanings it not always will work if you accidentally mix the chinese and japanese versions up. Especially with kanji compounds.
And in lots of cases you can't really get a pass with changing up a single character either because they might have very different design in both languages.
For Chinese speakers who are currently studying Korean, check out《韩文单字语源图鉴》!! It points out the differences and similarities between these two languages, which helps to memorize the meaning of words
i started with japanese and picked up korean a little later. and the grammar is SO similar it's basically the same (on the beginner's level at least). i make crazy combination sentences way too often because of this... but on a side note even earlier i also tried learning chinese but stopped after a while because i couldn't keep up with the vocabulary... but because i memorised all the strokes and keys and the order in which they're written kanji is a piece of cake for me!
New videos coming out in May. Also, we have a team now!
_____
Hi everyone, thank you for all your support. I am overwhelmed by all the traction that this channel has gotten and very thankful for all of your interest and support.
Over the past month, I have been building up a team and refining the video production process. We have taken your feedback and will be moving away from the shorts format. Instead, we will produce normal, longer videos, which means I don’t have to speed-read through the script like an overcaffeinated Eminem. This also means we can go deeper into aspects of the languages and the cultures that were previously cut for time.
For May, you can expect one new character video per week. We plan to gradually increase our capacity in the future so that we eventually release three videos per week.
I would like to thank the team, without whom none of this would be possible. I cannot appreciate them enough for all the time and hard work that they are putting in!
If you are interested in supporting the team for their time and hard work, please also consider supporting us on Patreon (www.patreon.com/808cjk). We are working on some exciting perks, but they will take some time to complete as we are still focusing on video production. In the meantime, you can rest assured that *all* Patreon proceeds will be distributed among the team for their incredible work. You will also get shout-outs in our future videos.
Finally, here is a shout-out to all our team members! They are:
AJ
Alex
Amberly
AshElly
Ha My
Jacqueline
Nate
Theo
Zhi Rui
Awsome!
Thank you so much for your channel. I just became a regular visitor :-).
Heyo
What resources are you talking about at 5:10? I speak Korean fluently and have previously failed trying to pickup both Japanese and Chinese
awesome
I basically learned J and C from scratch at the same time, from absolute beginner to year 3 in university. I really enjoyed it.
don t ever say C when you re talking about chinese, i thought you were talking about the C programming language and assumed that J stands for Java
@@luxraider5384 why would you assume he was talking about computer programming, under a video about spoken human languages? Context is important. And who would refer to Java as “J”? Why not assume JavaScript?
@@luxraider5384bro same 😭
When other people ask if it is possible to learn bunch of languages at the same time, I answer them: _guys, did you learn (or do you learn) physics, chemistry, biology, math at school? Did you succeed? If you remember at least something, then of course it's possible to learn languages that way too!_
This mentality won't help you become fluent though. If you're native language is English and you learn French and Spanish at the same time that might work well, become they are at least related. Chinese and Japanese are completely unrelated though and are very grammatically different from English. In order to start understanding anime in Japanese, I've had to devote a lot of my free time to listening to audio and some reading, since knowing kanji has helped me learn vocabulary faster. I don't think devoting time to multiple languages at once is a good idea. You will get burnt out fast.
@@crimsonghost4107 Honestly, from experience, I think learning 2-3 languages that are not related to each other at all is easier for me and keeps me from burning out (because I can just change which one I study each study session and it will surely be completely different). Learning very similar languages confuses me since they have similar grammar and vocabulary rules, but they are slightly different and I can accidentally mix them up.
That mix-up doesn’t happen when learning 2 very different languages (like Mandarin Chinese and German, lets say), and helps keep things fresh and distinct.
Except the way you learn in school is incredibly inefficient. it'll take you a year or more to learn the stuff you could learn in less than a week if you focus on one, plus people tend to forget most of it after a couple months.
Not a very convincing argument tbh.
My experience with learning languages taught me I do better when learning more than one language at once anyway, and I also noticed similarities between Thai and Chinese as well. I will also be able to remember "20" in Thai and Korean bc they're pronounced nearly the same! Learning multiple similar languages at once also kinda does a sort of extra repetition with the words you're learning that will also help you remember them. I love this!
this is such an interesting video! im fluent in cantonese, mandarin and english and im currently learning japanese. sometimes when im watching anime/japanese shows/kdramas, i notice how i could actually understand select terms that have pronunciations similar to chinese and i thought it was just a conspiracy theory i had in my head due to the sheer amount of shows i would watch ?? on a completely unrelated note, my first japanese word i learnt from listening to my japanese-speaking aunt talk was actually denwa (telephone) because it had a similar pronunciation to telephone in cantonese (dinwaa) or mandarin (dianhua). so then 5 year old me was like nah this gotta be a joke and i thought i was a language genius bc of that LMAO
I’ve been comparing the languages as I’ve been learning Korean this past year!!! I didn’t even know I could use this method and it seems very promising!!! I was planning on learning Japanese after Korean, but I have a (what I think to be) solid framework of Korean - my speaking ability is limited but I can write and comprehend more than I can speak. Sentence structure is the biggest challenge, I think. That and the fact that Korean and Chinese are tonal languages while Japanese isn’t tonal (just like English isn’t tonal). And, of course, the writing systems. I’ve been wondering about Hanja since I heard and read about it while watching period K-Dramas and it would be great to learn more about it here! LOVE THIS CHANNEL!
I started trying to learn Chinese on my own after several years of taking Japanese classes. I found that each language aids the learning of the other, especially with recognizing the meaning of characters. To see a video that explains this phenomena is very exciting!
First language: Vietnamese
Second language: English
Attempted to learn: 1) Korean in middle school but stopped after learning the writing system and having trouble with the sentence order
2) Mandarin in high school but stopped after having trouble with tones in pinyin being completely different from Vietnamese tone accents
I guess it’s time to relearn those two and add Japanese into the mix since I’m visiting Japan at the end of the year. 🤷🏻♀️ Might as well since I have little bits of everything from four years of high school French and one year of college German and ASL. Being interested in languages makes this challenge sound really fun so I’m looking forward to learning these 808 words!
Im learning Korean, I want to learn Chinese and Japanese but I was holding off in fear of confusing myself but I think I might try learning them all together
I think they're far too different to mix up vocabulary.
I'm learning Korean and Japanese at the same time, I really want to learn Chinese but I'm also scared I might confuse myself
@Citrus idk, tbh I don't really care if they are similar or not, because at the end I dont want to write kanji or Chinese or hangeul, writing is not and reading is not my aim, all I want to know is how to speak and understand that language, because I wanna understand the dramas and series
@Citrus easy to you, to me there are alot of new sounds since im not a native English speaker, so pronunciation is so difficult, Japanese to me is easier, there's only one character that makes an unfamiliar sound, other than that we have it in my language
@Citrus also you said you have a Korean background, that's why it's easy to you, I don't have a Korean background, my native language is Arabic
As someone who wasnt very fluent in English, I can say that Comprehensible Input works. Being an indian who studied in an english-medium school, i had a basic grasp of English, but wasnt exactly the most fluent in it. it was during covid times that my English got more proficient, so lets say that before covid, my skills were a ten, but after covid, they became a straight 1000. i used to watch English movies all day long, and words that i didnt know started making sense if you look at the context that they are used in. this technique really does work. it was subtitles for me that really helped. now, as a basic korean learner, i have started to watch a lot of k-dramas, and i mean a lot. and obviously yes i listen to kpop (not bts or blackpink tho) and i can say that i am making progress, slowly but surely. the problem is me using English subtitles. if i switch it to korean, then i could be pretty proficient in it. but what you really need, its a basic understanding on vocabulary of any language you want to learn. without vocabulary, you cannot do anything and believe me when i say this. so dont switch to subtitles on the language youre learning immediately, learn how to read it and some common vocabulary.
I was taking a Japanese class, and my classmate was from Hong Kong and it was just easier for her to learn Japanese by writing in Chinese.
This content is gold!! I'm a native portuguese speaker & fluent in english, studying japanese. This helped me a lot!!
As a Chinese learner, I believe Chinese has an easy grammar structure that English speakers can pick up quickly-the characters, unfortunately, tend to overwhelm most. I would say Japanese and Korean are more similar in grammar and writing overall since they have set scripts (unlike Chinese), their sentence structures are similar (SOV) and they use particles which are also used in Chinese, but less frequently and not in the same ways.
Amazing!! Thank you so much for making this! I am a native Cantonese/Mandarin speaker trying to learn Korean from hanja but there are not a lot of existing resources for learning from this route. Your channel and the pdfs you linked are game changing for me.
Very interesting! I'm studying Japanese at Uni, but I've come across a lot of Chinese in various online spaces, and knowing Kanji definitely helps understanding the gist of what's going on, but having the appropriate pronunciation would obviously be even better! It's always super interesting to me when I can make out similarities in certain words like 練習, 天国, or 大王...
I found this video and this was really gaming changing for me, I'm a Brazilian who learned English and Spanish by my own, and since I like anime and kpop, I'm also studying Korean and Japanese, but I also like a lot the Chinese language, and I've noticed that a few things that I know in Korean helped me in Japanese, and also things that I've learned in Japanese helped me in Korean, but I though that was something from my head, it's good to know that is not hahahaha thank you for the content!
Now this is what I call proper TH-cam algorithm suggestion! This is the kind of content I would like to see on my feed. Congrats on starting your channel 👏
I can attest to this video as Vietnamese since I discovered this comparitive method through pure intuition that 1:1 conversions for reading and listening of words are true for many words between Vietnamese and Japanese
Great video! I'm currently learning Vietnamese and Japanese after learning Chinese, and I think this will be a really helpful method to incorporate into my learning. Thanks for sharing this!
Reminds me this story from a friend. When his family moved to Canada from Japan when he was kid, his Japanese dad and a Chinese neighbor were having trouble communicate as they were both not fluent in English, in the end the dads some how figured out to use written Chinese characters to communicate.
I think comparing Chinese/Japanese/korean to Romance language is a bit too extreme.
The comparaison would be good for Mandarin/Cantonese/Vietnamese
But Korean/Japanese have their native language root, which is distinct from Chinese, but due to Chinese influence, they assimilated a lot of words and characters into their initially different language. The fact that Korean/Japanese have a different sentence structure than Chinese make it more obvious. For example in Korean there is a distinction between sino-korean words, and native-korean words.
So, I would say that the comparation could be Italian vs German, Many german words come from Latin, they use mostly the same alphabet but one is Germanic and the other is Latin and for german speakers, it's not too difficult to distinguish which words are germanic and which words are latin.
Non l’allemand ca resemble pas au latin c’est plutot l’espagnol
Oui c'est précsément ce que je dis. L'allemend a quelque mots de latin mais ce n'est pas une langue latine.
De la même manière, le Coréen a des mots de chinois (les mots sino-coréens) mais l'origine de la langue n'est pas le chinois.
In Chinese view, Korean and Vietnamese are much more Sinolized than Japanese.
I can speak Japanese and I know they can use native Japanese with a few Chinese-root vocabularies in daily life, but as I know in Korean or Vietnamese, they can't yet.
Such that, for K and V speakers, learning Chinese might be much more easier than J. ( and as I know almost all native level Chinese learner from country out of China are from these 2 countries )
@@nyleeu2632 I agree for vietnamese, which is close to cantonese, they even have tones (although different from mandarin) and the language structure is very similar.
But I disagree about korean being 'closer' to chinese than japanese.
They both have the same percentage of chinese loan words (한자어/漢語) in their language and they are both very different from chinese in the sense that they are agglutinative SOV languages (chinese isn't like that at all). Meaning that Koreans and Japanese do construct their sentences and words in a VERY different way than Chinese.
Regarding writing, I would say that Japanese is closer, as they still use 漢字 to the point where Japanese and Chinese can actually communicate together through writing. Which is not possible for Koreans. the usage of 한자 is very limited and only a very limited list of "important" 한자 are taught at school.
@@amadexi What you say is expression "Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese are diffierent languages", And I totally argee that, but grammar like SOV or SVO don't that improtant.
I'm guessing you're Korean, as far as I know Jeju used to have a large Mongolian population living on the island during the Mongol Empire, and there is still a huge difference between the Jeju dialect and standard Korean today, but I think whoever it is acknowledges that they are closer to Korean than Mongolian.
The fact that modern Korean has almost abandoned Chinese writing does not change the fact that it is actually closer to Chinese than Japanese, and modern Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, but it is clearly closer to Chinese than to French. Strictly speaking they are even closer to ancient Chinese than to today's Mandarin, as the Chinese language itself is gradually changing itself through the culturally central effect of the capital.
I learned portuguese in ~6 months because i already speak spanish. I basically just learned some extra vocab words and some different pronunciations.
This is an idea I've had for a while. I would keep a notebook, and each time i learn a new Chinese character, i would find the Japanese equivalent and note pronunciation, difference in writing and definition. I never got to it because i just don't know where to start.
You don't need to know where to start, just do it, that's the only way.
I’ve been learning Japanese for about a year now, and I always wondered if getting to know more Kanji would make it easier to learn Chinese as well - since the characters were originally adapted from Chinese.
This answers my question and makes me want to learn the other languages as well. Super excited to dive into these videos! Thank you ☺️
The difference is understanding the languages as relationship modeling rulesets, rather than data sets. Shared language family means shared data with similar modeling rules. Relying on the shared data reduces one of the greatest bottlenecks (downloading data to your brain).
This is a fascinating project, really looking forward to the series.
English speaker here, i lucky already have a good feel with Japanese so I have started to lightly dip my toes into Chinese and Korean. Its very interesting too see the characters change
I’m a Chinese native speaker and I self learned Korean by myself with the help of my Chinese knowledge. Now, I’m trying to learn Japanese and I’m having troubles with writing form for it which are Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Even though its a different set of writing form compared to Chinese and Korean, I still have some help with the help of my Chinese knowledge as I can understand the meaning of some Japanese Kanji which have similar meanings to Chinese words. GOODLUCK to those learning this 3 language at the same time
I studied Japanese all four years of college, then ended up moving to China after graduating. Unfortunely my Japanese has deteriorated into nothing, I still occasionally remember a new Mandarin word easily because of it's phonetic similarity to Japanese. Thinking about the Sino-Japanese vocab and how most of the modern science words are related either in pronunciation or hanzi/kanji, I'm excited to see a channel like this grow and teach me. Gah I'm so excited!
I’ve been interested in Japanese for a long time but felt it would be too difficult to learn, so I would just learn Korean and maybe learn Japanese later, but with this channel I can change my interest in Japanese into interest in Korean through their shared aspects. I’ve also been wanting to learn the history of Kanji and how it split from Chinese while preserving the Chinese characters in most of its nouns.
3:30 That’s because they aren’t like the Romance languages at all. They don’t share a common writing system except perhaps Kanji. They are from three different separate language families, there don’t descend from one mother tongue.
omg i've been convinced of this for months and i was so happy to have confirmation when I saw the title of your video! I've been trying to learn Japanese for years (but self-teaching is very slow because i don't have a schedule for that haha), I started learning Korean on my own as well (but the tried and true method of listening to music and series is on my side this time) and I've been learning Mandarin since September through school. All that to say that not only did I note all the similarities and influences between these languages, but I realised that for example, knowing a few things about hanzì through Japanese has helped a lot in my Chinese classes. This is the only video i've seen from you so far but I am definitely going to keep up. Thank you so much for this initiative and I hope it thrives!
props to this guy for taking the time out of his week to research all of this so we don't have to....respect
Wow, this is really helpful! I used to study Chinese on my own, but I promised a friend of mine that I would learn Korean too. Thank you for sharing
The scope of this channel is incredible. I have very little money because i am going through rehabilitation after my brain cancer, but if I had any, I would spend it on you. I look forward to using this amazing ressource to learn the three languages. Thank you so much for putting all this work in!
I just happened to stumble across your channel, and I'm super excited!! I've been studying Korean, Japanese, and Chinese for a few years in my spare time (so progress has been slow, unfortunately) - but this is one of the things that fascinates me! I love learning about the history and the overlaps of these languages. I can't wait to watch more of your videos. Thank you for creating a resource to meet this need in the language community. I also appreciate the way you organize and clearly articulate your thoughts and the information. It makes the subject easy to follow and understand.
very interesting! excited to see what you post next!
Very interesting and helpful project for everyone who is willing to learn these languages, learning 漢字 may not be the very first step for beginners but they definitely are very useful tools on the way to being a fluent speaker.
Currently learning Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Esperanto, Polish and Korean at the same time. This video really helped out a lot! Looking forward to more videos.
I was born speaking English and French, aunt taught in Japan and taught me Japanese, other aunt who traveled extensively taught me some Spanish, I thought Italian sounded cool so I started learning that and started realizing the similarities and that is how I became obsessed with learning new languages even just a little bit and now my brain is so jumbled with different languages that I know to varying extents that I can no longer properly speak any of them 🤣🤣🤣
This is probably the most logical videos I've ever watched about methods for learning languages.
As a native french, I found spanish a lot easier to learn and understand comparing to english. When I started to learn spanish in middle school, I was able to have conversations about a lot of topics in less than 6 months while it took me years for english. And people around didn't understand why I struggled in english and why I thought spanish was easier since english is known for being a simple language comparing to romanian languages (for example only one way to use verbs for each pronoun vs 6 different ways for each verbs). But the answer is simple : it's because it looks like french and I learnt it just by comparing it to french.
I wanted to learn some japanese, chinese and corean for years but i never tried cause I thought I was too ambitious. After watching your video, I hit the suscribe button and I think I will start my learning journey with your videos.
Thank you for that :)
Romanian sitting here like: 👁👄👁
Anyone who used that face is unlovable
Mda, stau și ma uit la video-ul asta de parcă deja is nativ japonez, korean și chinez. Dar ploblema e ca ne este lene sa invătam alte limbi!
I'm native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, and can read and write traditional Chinese - I had no idea that trilateral dictionary exists, this will actually make life so much easier. Also gonna follow along the rest of the videos :) Really wished they'd made a traditional Chinese version of that dictionary, though, as some simplified Chinese characters still makes me scratch my head.
I looked for such comparative materials and couldn't find. Mostly I had to check wiktionary, that works great, but you have to look up one by one. Finally you are doing the job that was missing. Subscribed.
As a native speaker of two romance langages, that's true. I can understand every other romance langages speaker if they speak clearly, slow and with a simple vocabulary. That work really good because I've even learn English like this (That's not a romance langage, but It's really similar and has some origins in French that is a romance langage). As you can see I'm not the best in English, I sure that I've made at least one or two mistake and my sentences may sound not natural, but I can express myself !
This is true! English is my L2 and sometimes its grammar helps me understand my L1 (Spanish) better. Never thought of applying this method to these languages, I was planning to first become as fluent as possible in Mandarin and then take up Korean but this might be better! Thank you
You absolutely are a pioneer in this field in the east Asian language, I have known some stuff like learning western language like this, but I didn't get it in the Eastern one.
As a native Japanese, I notice a lot of similarities between Chinese when I study it. Splendid video I will implement this to my studying.
Dude, you might just be the most useful language learning youtuber outhere, really hope you gain more attention lately, amazing dude
To the author of this video: Romanian is also a Romance language. Romanian, the language of the Romans...
Tysm for this channel. I'm brazilian(portuguese native) and I'm a begginer student of Chinese and Korean.
Eager to see more of your videos 감사합니다 Obrigada!
Quite interesting fact about the Romace languages. I'm Brazilian, and we call them Latin languages (or languages from Latin countries), but I didn't know it was how they were called in english ^^
"Língua romance" é bom português e bem comum. O português antigo era chamado de "romance".
@@will7922 Comum? Posso perguntar de onde você é? Pois onde moro nunca vi esse termo, e quando nos referimos ao português antigo utilizamos o termo arcaico para isso
Em português também dizemos "linguas românicas" (por que elas vieram do Latin que era falado em Roma). O "romance" em "romance languages" também vem de "Roma"
There’s absolutely an interest in knowing more and more characters. More power to you
This sounds really fun! I hope you can add Vietnamese and Cantonese into the mix when you make the videos!
Yeh, I second this. Vietnamese and Cantonese
L1 English speaker, ethnically Chinese, so I've been speaking Mandarin (casually) my whole life. Also, I grew up in a mostly korean neighborhood and have been studying Japanese.
From what I can tell the overlap in C/J is in characters (kanji), pronunciation and grammar (K/J) and learning all 3 kind of simultaneously is amazing!
Lots of overlap-- like how Hangul and the Japanese scripts use a phonetic system whereas Chinese doesnt... but lots of other stuff is very culturally interesting to see the comparison!
Wow, this is so cool. Thanks for putting this idea into action. Ever since I've gotten into kpop I've been connecting Korean and the Chinese I learn at school and also talking about kanji with my brother who learns Japanese and making connections like these are really really helpful and interesting to me, but it's so hard to find definitive or just any answers at all with these things so thank you so much and I will definitely be watching your videos going forward. ✊🏼
It's a cool idea but I noticed that some of the Japanese characters in the book are simply words that came from the Chinese spelling but are used to spell out native Japanese words. For example, 出来 would be「しゅつ・らい」or「しゅったい」if it was a loan-word like 출래 in Korean. But it is simply used to spell a native Japanese word (でき）so I don't think that counts. You're looking at these languages from a very literary perspective. In my opinion, it only counts if it uses both the spelling and the sino-pronunciation (音読み), not just the spelling.
I studied for HSK 6 from a book in korean, the best book I've found yet. Its a pity how these materials are not widely available in other languages.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED, THANKS, I'LL KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON YOUR CONTENT
I think analytical study involving multiple languages of the same group and explaining their origins is the best way to learn them, I've been learning English since a very young age and know some latin from my native language's scientific terms and other latinisms. This allows me to read and understand a large portion of the French, Italian and Spanish texts I encounter and it can be super handy in some cases
all we need is patience and time
This channel is a godsend, your work is absolutely amazing.
I think this sounds very interesting and promising! the main issue I've noticed, is how you are delivering it. I am personally not a fan of the youtube short, i rarely check those, i hate how youtube is using it ( wish it at least would only show you the current channel you are looking at instead of random stuff after the video you clicked on). There's probably people that don't mind it, honestly. But the views speak for themselves, a lot of views on this, and yet little to no views on the instructive content.
I noticed there's small compilation you've made that compile some already viewed content, but the thumbnail makes it confusing, and the title grows too long for it to all show up to be readable (for instance, putting your channel's name in the title isn't necessary, since people can scroll down to see it is you, or you can put a transparent watermark on the video itself), in the end the video feed section of your channel looks cluttered with no clean and easy way to notice what is new and what is a re-upload but compiled.
Thumbnail are very important and people will see the thumbnail and even click the video before even reading the actual title. To put all the chance in your bag, you should work on making good thumbnails picture for each video uploaded ( if you go with regular video instead of shorts). it doesn't need to be over the top, but clean simple and straight to the point can go a long way.
Another thing would be to avoid putting information at the bottom of the screen, as a non-english speaker, i often have subtitles on for instructive videos to make sur i understand correctly, if subtitle are available, and the information becomes hidden with the subtitle as a consequence of this.
for the compilation video, i feel like having all 3 video side to side fills the void the shorts makes, but it doesn't translate well since it is an information video. I think if the subject of the conversation changed, it shouldn't have the previous one still lingering. As a symbolic, having one presented at a time, and moving to the next (can also have the youtube cut in the timeline, so people can easily navigate in it between subjects) , represent taking your time, and its like cooking the main dish first and moving on afterward to the dessert, instead of doing the whole meal at same time, in a way. Don't want the main dish and the dessert in the oven at same time, taking the flavor of the other dish together. Can put a conclusion at the end to revise what was in the video too, it can also make the video closure more natural that way, up to what you feel like. If you already are aware of the next video's subject, you can also say it at the end of the video, that way people can look forward for next video, though this require certainty of your choice, else it can deceiving for viewers.
I hope you will read this and find it useful in any way,
Good luck!
Hi there, thank you so much! This is extremely extremely useful and I will definitely take this into account for future videos 😀. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts!
there has to be a medal for this kind of charity work. thank you for your efforts
I'm living in Vietnam and learning Vietnamese a little bit each day, self-studying, not formally. Recently, I started studying Korean too and I'm noticing so many similar words between the languages. I understand that each of these languages exist in their own tree, but there are naturally many transferred words between the cultures and languages.
The learning curve into Vietnamese is rather steep but, as the only SE-Asian language that uses a Latinate script as its official written form, it could be a useful stepping-stone for people who have zero experience with other such languages. The Vietnamese language is extremely diverse, absorbing multiple ethnicities' languages from throughout the region, including previously very-isolated mountain dwellers, and some Khmer language influences. The documentation of the language is also lacking, for example, there seems to be no formally-produced dictionary of the central-Vietnam vocabulary, with "official" Vietnamese focussing solely on the Hanoian form. Thus, using Vietnamese to ladder into these other SEA languages may not be so helpful but, if used in a strictly academic sense with pre-defined lists of comparable words and their morphological differences, it could be a useful key. It should be noted that Vietnamese is indeed its own language family, but it does contain a large number of Sino (Chinese)-origin words, many of which are in common daily use and often are used as the more formal form of a word, much like French-based English is the foundation of things like contracts and other legal speak. The Sino-Viet words are the ones most likely to be comparable to CKJ.
Learning how the IPA works and exploring with controlling all aspects of the mouth has also been massively helpful for me. Armed with that, I was able to learn Vietnamese pronunciation in just a few weeks (although, living here, I'm always working on improving it), and I learnt Hangeul in a few hours and Korean pronunciation in a few days. Not to suggest that I'm perfect at it or even good, but the IPA base enabled my brain to make sense of it extremely quickly. In combination with my Vietnamese foundation, I now have a mental map of pronunciations of multiple languages, and am starting to recognise common pronunciation shift patterns between Vietnamese and Korean. Doubtless, learning Chinese pronunciation will fill the transition between these shifts because any shared vocabulary likely originated in one of the Chinese languages.
As Mr. 808CJK mentioned, the comparative resources for CJK are not written in English, which is what led me to write this comment. Learning Vietnamese gives me the simple transition into SEA language concepts via the Latinate script (basically the Roman alphabet plus modifications: a â ă e ê o ô ơ u ư đ & tones on the vowels a á à ả ã ạ), and then learning Hangeul is simple because it is actually just a 2D alphabet. Once inside the SEA linguistic constructs (different to one another but seemingly relatively similar when compared to PIE languages) via Vietnamese and Korean, I imagine that mapping the vocabulary pronunciations to kanji and hanzi will be much simpler than coming directly from a Romance language. Additionally, for myself at least, reading block symbols is mentally complex and my eye movements (saccades, the way that eyes move rapidly between points, Google it for more info) are not yet trained for such reading. Transitioning from Vietnamese pronunciation and vocab into Korean pronunciation with Hangeul seems like it would be a good method to graduate my saccades and block-symbol processing unit, in preparation for grasping logograms (kanji, hanzi).
This looks like a long path into it. It suits me because I'm living in Vietnam and I'm busy with other things, so, a slow but steady approach is fine for now. If you're interested in tapping into SEA languages immediately and you have no experience with CJK writing scripts, Vietnamese is immediately readable and thus rememberable, even if you can't pronounce it yet.
For example:
park : công viên : 공원 [gong-won]
student : học sinh : 학생 [hag-saeng]
animal : động vật : 동물 [dong-mul]
singer : ca sỹ : 가수 [ga-su]
chemistry : hóa học : 화학 [hwa-hag]
room : phòng : 방 [bang]
bread : bánh mỳ : 빵 [ppang] (from French "pan") (mỳ means wheat)
Of course, Hangeul has RR (Revised Romanisation), which is certainly helpful, although I found it interfering with my Hangeul reading development. Additionally, many of the letter combinations wreak havoc with English digraph recognition, which took me a jolly-long time to disconnect from! Regardless, RR certainly helps to get into SEA languages via Korean :)
eo is /ʌ/ (my brain wants to say eyoh)
ae is /ɛ/ (my brain wants ehh)
e is /e/ (my brain wants ee)
eu is /ɯ/ (my brain wants ew)
i feel so good that i found your channel!! cant wait to start my learning journey!!!
I love this! Please keep posting!
Thus was so nice to find! I've been going back and forth between Korean and Japanese for various reasons so I was kind of doing this already but having videos that explain them without me having to look up all these things is amazing. Thank you!
I really want to learn Cantonese . I’m learning mandarin at the moment but I’ve heard the tones for Cantonese and just wooooow🤯🤯
my first langeage is Cantonese >:DD, I also can speak English and Mandarine but I wish to learn Japanese
I learned Japanese in high school. I started learning Korean more recently and immediately noticed some similar words etc.
Wow, my story exactly.
I'm Native Chinese. I speak Chinese as my main language and learned English as my second language. It was till 2017 when I started learning Korean. At first it was hard but as soon I got the hang of it I started trying out on Japanese, which I started just last year. I thought Japanese would be hard but it really isn't for me. At first it's because Japanese tend to have a similar grammar structure like Korean so I got the hang of the grammar structure pretty quick, also it was pretty easy for me to figure out what some sentence might mean just by looking at the kanji and kind of connecting it to Chinese character and it actually made it easier for me to learn and memorize those words the Japanese way. Also after knowing Chinese and Korean I noticed there was a lot of words that sound the same too in all three of the language so that was also pretty easy, including some Japanese word that sound like the same in English. I guess knowing Chinese english and Korean really helped me a lot on learning Japanese to be honest and I think that would apply to other languages. The more language you learn, the more easier it is to learn other languages that is quite similar to the language you already know.
My Dad used to learn a bit of Japanese, and he would joke around saying that it couldn't decide to plagiarize who, so they copied both English and Chinese XD Nowadays I just grab some Japanese things, look at some familiar words and try and guess what the hell is that
I've been learning Japanese for years, and I picked up Mandarin last year. I want to start Korean too. So this is great! I'll have a look into it
all of these languages are totally separate. the only similarity might be syntax, and even then that’s a coincidence. even though they’re all east asian and very close together, each are definitely separate. the three similarity is the use of Han, called Hanji or Hanchi in Korean, and Kanji in Japanese. Definitely a good idea to learn these separately. Best of luck.
Hanja in korean, not Hanchi..
@@thefalconflame its hanja or hancha. could be either. must’ve been a typo.
I am currently learning Japanese and Chinese at the same time… I am quite fluent in Chinese already but I was afraid of diving into Japanese while being in the midst of learning Chinese …. This video has added to my confidence. Thank you . I am interested in your research as well.
I learned that learning these languages together my brain grows bigger and I can retain the information better do to the information confusion. Information overload. Or Cerebral CYBER COMPLEX
Are you are using simplified Chinese Characters - what's used in Mainland China? You could throw Traditional script in too, then you could comprehend most script in Taiwan too :)
Im trying to learn both Mandarin and Japanese because I don't know where I want to live😅
I’ve been learning Chinese for a few months and listen to jpop+consume a lot of Japanese media so the idea that that can all automatically become comprehensible input for me is really cool! And something I hand thought about befote
Korean was one of the easiest language ive learned so far. Japanese however is indeed very hard
Are you Chinese?
I’m learning Korean but Batchim is killing me
I'm really glad I came across this! I want to Learn Chinese, Korean and Japanese for a while now, and while my Korean is in the intermediate level just from my exposure through media, the others haven't really moved forward. This gave me an insight.
Yes! I found this guy finally he adopts east asian languages in one!! I subscribed!!!!
Urdu, arabic and farsi are a trio too!..
Besides English, I know Bangla, Hindi and urdu.. so is it possible for me to learn Arabic and Farsi easily?? I'm a Bangali btw🐰
@@orangee9487 if you know atleast how to read and write urdu then, you can learn those 2 languages a bit easily... Arabic and farsi words in urdu are used at bit advanced level...(farsi words are tho more common than arabic!)
While if you know urdu from hindi that might not help!
Whatsoever! You can still learn them from scratch!...
@@blbubble2106 thanks for your suggestion! Wall I can read and write Arabic but my vocabulary is literally zero!! On the other hand I can speak Urdu fluently (know the grammar too) but can't read them😅 totally weird, right??😂😂
@@orangee9487 this trio has different alphabets like in urdu there are more than in other twos....
So start learning with urdu it has all!
I am just that: born Korean, lived in China for 6+ years as a teen, and learned English and Japanse on the way.
Korean (mother-tongue), English (Toeic 975), Chinese HSK (new 6/ old 10), JLPT (N1), JPT 875..
Thanks for the Interesting video.
Or I don't do this and use my phone instead.
This
一千我自己学习了日和韩文，现在在大学我学习中文 - 我找真容易。taught myself some japanese and Korean in the past and now doing mandarin - there are so many similarities that sometimes you understand words/phrases without noticing. would love the time to carry on with them until I can speak each of them confidently
such an inspiring video btw :)