There is a lot going on in this video and it might be quite confusing - I am still working on a book that will explain and present everything in a comprehensive and clear way. In the meantime, if you would like study these languages with me, I am now available for private tutoring or a free 30-minute consultation over Zoom. Through these sessions, I hope to get a better sense of what questions people have and to answer them in future videos or the book. The application form is here: forms.gle/FRKYa6WjiY8BYPbk7 As always, thank you for your time and kind interest :)
It took you so long because you didn't know about the concept of similar sounds. Ancient Sanskrit Grammaticians knew it since the beginning. They wrote about 5 places of origin: कंठ (throat), तालु (palate), मूर्धा (roof), दन्त (teeth) and ओष्ठ (lips). Sanskrit consonants were classified into these place with the left ones classified on the basis of other nature, making it easy to study Grammar. That's why more studies should be conducted on Sanskrit!
The similarities between Japanese/Korean/Chinese are interesting, but how would you actually apply this to learning the languages? To gain fluency in Japanese you need to know over 2,000 kanji and, in Chinese, thousands more. Of the characters which are shared between them, there's all sorts of variations such as false friends and traditional vs. modern writings. I'd like to learn multiple East Asian languages, but it seems like this is maybe a false hope, similar to trying to learn English/German/Dutch all at once because of their similarities. If anything I'd be more worried about confusion than it being helpful.
This should be an university class, this is amazing. I consider myself at a low intermediate level of Japanese, but I also want to learn mandarin and korean. This is amazing.
The reason why I like 感動 too is because I actually guessed its pronunciation in Japanese based on what I know in the first place (Mandarin). I grew up learning Mandarin so yeah.
Hm, I feel like you only think that because of the illusion of pinyin and roomaji lol. 始 doesn't even really have a vowel in Mandarin. It ends in a rhotic retroflex lol, which is nothing like an い sound.
I am Korean, and as someone studying both Chinese and Japanese, I've vaguely noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Your video has systematically organized these rules in a way I could never have imagined. The amount of research and effort that must have gone into this is incredible. This video will be helpful to anyone interested in the languages of these three countries.
I love your use of hangeul as the starting point for consonant analysis. It highlights the middle chinese thinking behind the syllable. There are many patterns in the vowels from K to J and M. Also, have you looked at old Korean 한자 dictionaries called 옥편. They show the historical sound change and explain Mandarin in 한글.
It’s obvious to anyone who’s studied multiple CJK languages that the relationship is there yet people angrily deny it to me all the time. Nevertheless systematizing it like this is great
I haven't met a single person who denies 漢字 phonological relation between the three languages. All three languages got it from a common source, classical Chinese, so there really is no other way about it. What I often see denied, and rightfully so, is the linguistic relationship between these languages that some people try to force, often for political reasons. Although recent reconstructive studies on old korean have been promising regarding some degree of vocabulary sharing with old Japanese.
@@chicoti3 OK. Well that has not been my experience and I'm not claiming the other thing so maybe you can find someone who actually believes that if you want to argue about it.
@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 That's what related means when talking about languages. Borrowed vocabulary does not equate to a relationship. You hear it denied so often because it isn't true.
@@katawaya8101 So you're so desperate for an argument you're going to insist I actually meant something I didn't just so you can refute it? No, their large bodies of Chinese-derived vocabulary are related and transform in completely predictable ways between themselves. That's the entire premise of the video you're commenting on.
Even as an Indian who understand basic spoken japanese, I always play this fun game of relating those Japanese sounding words while watching Korean/Chinese media with subs
I have figured out and implemented a lot of these patterns almost subconsciously as I have studied these languages. it’s why i ALWAYS recommend people who express learning ANY of these languages to learn a little bit of ALL of them. they are so deeply interconnected that it’s almost irresponsible to “just” learn one.
Great video! As a native Mandarin speaker learning Japanese, I have always wondered if there were some kind of pattern to how the ancient Japanese people took the Middle Chinese readings and tweaked the pronunciation to fit within the phonotactics of Japanese. I have also kind of developed a hunch for it, but seeing the rules all laid out is great!
This system of CJK Code is similarly what im doing during learning much of Southeast and South Asia languange (apart Vietnam) because sharing Sanskrit or Pali base loanword. Ex: Naraka (Sanskrit) Narok นรก (Thai) Thai tend to chop final consonant and second vowel become o Neraka (Malay) Malay tend to change a into e schwa Neråkå ꦤꦫꦏ (Javanese) Javanese change a into o and first vowel a into e schwa
Great insights that I can relate to! Something to add for the character 易 that appears at 30:18. 易 has two sounds with a different meaning for each as far as I know. Hanja dictionaries call it “쉬울 이 or 바꿀 역.” It sounds “이” when it means “easy, easily” and “역” when it means “to exchange.” I believe Japanese follows the same semantic distinction with the “イ” and “エキ” sounds.
This has always been at the back of my head all this time, and I'm glad someone had finally made a video about it. I'm not a native speaker of any of the three languages so this helps so much !! Everything is explained so well and comprehensively, Thank you so much !!
thanks for your hard work! I can't imagine how laborious it was to join all that info in such a clear way. BTW, if you want some info on the vowels of the readings, there is a very famous youtuber called Stuart Jay Raj, he is both a linguist and a polyglot, and also fascinated by anything related to the Chinese language. Maybe he has some ideas to add to your system, since he learned some old and middle chinese as well. Also, when are you going to continue reading all the chinese characters？
Thank you for the suggestion! I will definitely check out Stuart Jay Raj's videos as I do more research on vowels :) I'm graduating from college in a few weeks so I'll probably continue with reading the Chinese characters after that! Just so I have time to finish up with school and to study more characters. I'm glad you enjoyed that stream haha. Was pretty worried that it was a bad idea.
yep, I was waiting for someone to mention Stu, otherwise I would have - he's got a great video on the sound shift from the languages. I'm also sure you've seen the newer CN, JP, KR videos from the polyglot youtubers
0:13 deeply "related" can be a bit misleading, because those three languages are different language families and don't share any lineages. Deeply influenced might be a better way to say it. Edit: I realized it's also mentioned later in the video
Long ago, I started learning Japanese. More recently, but still years ago, I began to learn Korean. The existence of a "matrix" with which one could shift words of Sinitic origin from Korean to Japanese and vice versa is something I figured out, but I didn't have the systemic organization and skills to map everything out. Thanks to this video, I could drastically speed up vocabulary acquisition.
I took one semester of mandarin in the mid 1980s. it was entertaining but the only thing I now recall is the name the teacher gave me. Chen Bai Lin. that is it, the sum total of what I learned. I really hope this attempt is more fruitful. I am greatly impressed by the thought and organization you have put into these videos! Thank You.
amazing video. as a learner of kr/jp and heritage speaker of chinese I've always been thinking about this and it's great to see it all laid out systematically like this. I've been supporting on patreon since I first found this channel and this video alone made me really glad I did! you're doing great work, keep it up 👍👍
" I've been supporting on patreon since I first found this channel and this video alone made me really glad I did! you're doing great work, keep it up 👍👍" literally 그 말이 내 말이야
It's nice having it laid out in a comparison table like this. I feel like I was doing this subconsciously with Cantonese, Japanese, and Vietnamese already, but I guess with the power of this table I can now go from Japanese to Korean and more Mandarin.
Regarding the vowel system you mentioned, if you know classical Japanese spelling (歴史的仮名遣い) and the rules applied to change it in the meiji era to accommodate vowel changes, it's also possible to predict mandarin vowels to a relatively high degree of accuracy. For instance 相(ショウ) was originally シヤウ which sounds very similar to xiang when you pronounce it in Japanese. Same for 上→シヤウ→shang, here are a few more examples: 棒→バウ→bang 鋼→カウ→kang 九→キウ→jiu 劉→リウ→liu 高→カウ→gao 好→カウ→hao 鏡→ケイ→jing 停→テイ→ting I just started learning Mandarin so there's probably a lot more I'm yet to notice, but here are some trends I've realized: aウ→ang/ao ヤウ→iang eウ→iao eイ→ing So final ウ(after a) and イ(after e) tend to consistently be Japanese equivalents of ng and final o. Just one thing to be careful is that Japanese has various onyomi readings for each kanji and the one we need to use when "converting" to mandarin is 漢音 (most of the time). If the kanji has 唐音 use that instead. When converting to Hakka, for instance, 呉音 would be more appropriate. As an example, 漢音 of 病 is ヘイ, which using the pattern I demonstrated above we correctly get the mandarin equivalent "bing". If we use the 呉音 ビヤウ however, using the same technique, we get the Hakka "phiang".
Awesome video! I learned Mandarin but I'm not planning to learn the other 2 languages any soon, but I'm still passionated about linguistics and particularly fascinated by the sinosphere so this is also very helpful to me.However, I think the video should have been diving a little more into the different types of Japanese on-yomi readings such as 漢音，吳音, 唐音 etc and how this system work for each of them, or you can do another video about it.
I did the same research as yours and had similar outcome back in my college period. It would be lovely if we can discuss over this. For the vowel part, I think Korean is more predictable. This is because Japanese only has 5 vowels and there are more vowels in Middle Chinese. Originally, there were 8 vowels in middle Japanese, they somehow merged to the current 5 vowels.
vietnamese is also really intesting as ưe has significantly more starting consonants than japanese and korean so i think we preserved a lot of the original sounds as a vietnamese learning korean and japanese i've also found a lot of similarities between them and sino-vietnamese words i hope u make a video about it
Incredible video! I wish you had some examples to pratice my skills on at the end. Like, if the Chinese pronunciation is this, what might the Japanese pronunciation be? If the Korean pronunciation is this, what might the Chinese pronunciation be? etc!
Chinese generally also had a dual-reading system 文读 (literary) and 白读 (vernacular reading). The latter is the local way of reading a character and the former is the attempt to imitate official speech at the time. Standard mandarin is a conglomeration of both readings in the north and thats why there are characters that weren’t supposed to have multi-sounds now having multi sounds because it absorbed literary reading into the system, which itself is an imitation of southern court speech in Nanjing in the south.
This is really interesting ... Instead of just learning Mandarin I wanna be able to learn all 3 languages , China is obviously really influential and will play an important role in the future of manufacturing and technology but Korea and Japan have more soft power in the arts and culture and a lot of specialized industries where they're important , so it's definitely interesting to learn all three , that part of the world is super developed and very interesting for us westerners as it's the closest you can get to a different planet when you compare it to north America or Europe. Everything is so different and unique from our POV even if there are some problems in those countries they're not perfect by any means ( as people who idolize east Asia tend to imply ) , there's no such thing as a perfect country or region but still it remains really interesting , exotic and exciting to visit those places and to speak the languages in order to create relationships or do business , so it's definitely an amazing approach you're crafting here , You're doing god's work
Tip: consonants before /i/ or /j/ have the tendency to change to sibilants / alveolo-palatal sounds due to palatalization. Compare Mandarin 地球 (dìqiú) with Japanese 地球 (ちきゅう, chikyuu), where the palatalization occurred on different syllables in the two languages.
Cantonese and a lot other southern dialects preserve the non nasal consonants. Also, the er added at the end as final consonant only happens in Beijing dialect and surrounding northern dialects which was an influence from mongols and Manchurians when they ruled China since song dynasty. People in the south generally don’t do it at all.
Depending on the when the Chinese words were borrowed, Cantonese could be a lot closer than Mandarin. The word 時間 in Cantonese is "Si-Gan" which is a lot closer to Japanese and Korean than "Shijian"
Uh not cantonese at all wtf you talking about, they sound extremely different cantonese sounds more like vietnamese or thai, Japanese sounds almost exactly like middle chinese if you said the syllables longer and stetched the indentation’s
@@NeostormXLMAXOP mentioned both Cantonese and Hokkien. And both dialects are from the Southern branch of the Sino-Tibetic language family; therefore there will be some similarities. Also Japanese retains the Sui-T'ang dynasty way of speaking Chinese so a lot of Kanji on'myouji (Chinese readings) will sound like Cantonese and Hokkien as those were the lingua franca of the empire at the time. Mandarin only came to existence approximately 1,000 years ago.
@@NeostormXLMAX I say some, not all of it. I'm Hong Konger btw, and I can hear words in Japanese that sounds closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. also, Cantonese is much more closer to Middle Chinese than mandarin.
@@NeostormXLMAX i speak canto and learning korean atm. When he gave the "time" example, korean was "sigan" and mandarin was "shijian" which is similar. However, the canto pronounciation is exactly the same being "sigan". Whilst learning korean, I've noticed many other words that are have exactly the same pronounciation and meaning. Therefore, canto is much closer to korean in pronouciation than mandarin.
For fu, it's part of the syllable group for bu or rather bu is viewed as voiced variation of fu in Japanese, so I would argue it is still predictable, especially if you know about either Japanese or have done language comparision with Germanic languages, where f, b, v are all interrelated.
I know that there are way more Mandarin than Cantonese speakers and it isn't easy to find good learning resources for Cantonese but it would be great if you used Cantonese instead of Mandarin to showcase similarities between languages. As a Canto learner who've learned a bit of Korean and Vietnamese before, I find those languages super useful when it comes to guessing the meaning of some words and I'd guess it works both ways.
just one question - are the 808 characters in order of most used on your website? thank you very much for this video - I internalized pretty much nothing as a casual viewer but even so I see the formulation of a very clear system for understanding these three languages and I will certainly be back here!
This video is very useful so far. I'm not sure if anyone's pointed it out yet, but I think there's a small error I noticed with the IPA symbols. The phones you're using to represent the 'r' sounds for CJK are a bit off. /ɹ/ represents the rhotic 'r' in English. So it isn't the sound in Japanese. That would be more like the /ɾ/ (if we're not being too narrow). Korean should probably be /ɽ/ since it's retroflex, but that could also be a tap /ɾ/ too I guess.
oh great video learning this three languages is hard but in otherwise is fun since i love to travel china japan and korea💗 thabk you for sharing this video😘 kasahamnida,xiexie, arigato gozaimasu
This makes me want to play with an Anki deck that has the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese sound reading (not meaning reading) for the most common characters. Hopefully with audio too.
So fascinating and interesting how three countries with so much deep-rooted hate, bloodshed and hostility between them both currently and historically could have such deep-rooted commonalities in language, culture and values. There's so much to explore there in terms of the contrast between these neighbors and the history/geopolitics of Western areas, maybe maybe it has something to do with the fundamental differences between Abrahamic religions and Asian religions (Buddism/Confucianism/Shinto etc)
Are there any evidence of what you claim at 1:50? Because I've studied a lot Korean and Japanese, history and literature and my experience suggests the contrary. Most old literature were written in pure Chinese. For instance Sejong the great emperor created the Korean characters as we known today from Chinese to reduce inalphabetism in Korea. This is what you explain in the introduction but what I mean is that countries have been creating their own language to claim independance and from there their languages have evolved in their own path, creating new words and idioms. It's particularly more obvious in Japanese language where the shape of some original Chinese characters have changed in some kanjis but the meaning remain the same, and some yojijukugo are also used in ancient Chinese literature.
Korean is as related to Chinese as English is to Latin. I love this video, but let's be sure to highlight that despite heavy historical contact, these languages are not related to each other. Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and countless other languages have been influenced to the point where a significant portion of their lexicon is derived from Chinese. Grammatically they're separate language families.
Good video for beginners! Minor thing but, at 0:24, the count for shared words seems to be an error. I speak all three languages in varying degrees, and I think there are thousands of shared words. Just think about this. There are 808 shared characters, and most words are made by combining the characters. It does not add up. (for example, 杀--杀人-杀人犯). When I study these languages, for so many words, I just need to double-check the pronunciation, and the meanings are exactly the same.
Ya'll really speaking these 3 languages in addition to English, huh? Edit: I'm learning Japanese, but I'm jealous of hangul. It really seems like a beautiful system, and seems like it'd fix my issues with kanji. I suppose you could just write in hiragana/katakana in theory, maybe with spaces or other ways to detect word boundaries, but I guess it's just really not done.
That would be perfect as a computer algorithm, but I no human could apply these principles and be able to "convert" words from one language to another on the fly, let alone talk. To say nothing of the way each of these languages "phrase" their thoughts (i.e. their grammar). Lots of overlapping between Japanese and Korean structures, to be sure, but not so much between those languages and Chinese. Interesting as a subject of study, remarkable actually, but anybody who has studied any two of those three languages already knows there is a lot of overlapping between words used by all three because of the Chinese origin of much of their vocabularies.
This is good information, but the slides need major formatting changes so that the viewer understands every step you make. There are so many symbols floating around, and it’s hard for me to make sense of them without more colors, labels, Gestalt principles.
Here's a question about Chinese and Japanese. Shanghai is Shanhai in Japanese / しゃんはい. However, 深海 is shinkai (shēnhǎi in Chinese). They use the same Chinese character and I am wondering where "kai" comes from and it's not "shinhai" in the second one. Where did that "k" come from? I have discussed this before and have one plausible answer, but I am curious first what you guys think.
A lot of things lost in Mandarin like initial [ng], final [k] and the entering tones are preserved in Cantonese, I'd love to see how that compares in this analysis.
You're not gonna mention Vietnamese too? Greatly influenced by Chinese I mean they even invented a simplified down alphabet using Chinese characters (forgot the specific name but it's an alphabet) and created their own set of Chinese characters (Chu Nom). Some words also sound really similar to these.
There is a lot going on in this video and it might be quite confusing - I am still working on a book that will explain and present everything in a comprehensive and clear way. In the meantime, if you would like study these languages with me, I am now available for private tutoring or a free 30-minute consultation over Zoom. Through these sessions, I hope to get a better sense of what questions people have and to answer them in future videos or the book. The application form is here: forms.gle/FRKYa6WjiY8BYPbk7
As always, thank you for your time and kind interest :)
It took you so long because you didn't know about the concept of similar sounds.
Ancient Sanskrit Grammaticians knew it since the beginning. They wrote about 5 places of origin: कंठ (throat), तालु (palate), मूर्धा (roof), दन्त (teeth) and ओष्ठ (lips). Sanskrit consonants were classified into these place with the left ones classified on the basis of other nature, making it easy to study Grammar.
That's why more studies should be conducted on Sanskrit!
The similarities between Japanese/Korean/Chinese are interesting, but how would you actually apply this to learning the languages? To gain fluency in Japanese you need to know over 2,000 kanji and, in Chinese, thousands more. Of the characters which are shared between them, there's all sorts of variations such as false friends and traditional vs. modern writings. I'd like to learn multiple East Asian languages, but it seems like this is maybe a false hope, similar to trying to learn English/German/Dutch all at once because of their similarities. If anything I'd be more worried about confusion than it being helpful.
If you need help with chinese "hokkien" dialect, I can help you
@@nintendospecial9721what does Sanskrit have to do with Chinese, Japanese and Korean?
@@nintendospecial9721 where did you learn about this - is this a standard practice to learn from for sanskrit?
i am looking to learn sanskrit
Wow, I almost feel like I don't deserve this video
Haha glad you like it!
😊 I do deserve this video
❤️
exactly! so much effort applied it this vid.
you don’t if you didn’t notice this tbh.
This should be an university class, this is amazing. I consider myself at a low intermediate level of Japanese, but I also want to learn mandarin and korean. This is amazing.
My favourite example of words between Chinese (specifically Mandarin) and Japanese is 開始. They’re almost identical. Another one is 感動, too.
The reason why I like 感動 too is because I actually guessed its pronunciation in Japanese based on what I know in the first place (Mandarin). I grew up learning Mandarin so yeah.
its not so simple.勉强 has two different meaning.
@@WmannThe tones in Chinese dialects prevents a 100% accurate translation 😅
Well I’m not saying ALL are the same, I’m just saying that knowing Mandarin in the first place really helps
Hm, I feel like you only think that because of the illusion of pinyin and roomaji lol. 始 doesn't even really have a vowel in Mandarin. It ends in a rhotic retroflex lol, which is nothing like an い sound.
Me not knowing any of these languages:
oh yes, of course, very interesting 🧐 🤔
Lol same 😂😂
I feel you bro😂
I am Korean, and as someone studying both Chinese and Japanese, I've vaguely noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Your video has systematically organized these rules in a way I could never have imagined. The amount of research and effort that must have gone into this is incredible. This video will be helpful to anyone interested in the languages of these three countries.
And you'll find it both Japanese and Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters are actually more similar to Cantonese.
As a Chinese, I improved my Chinese after listening to your tutorial.
I love your use of hangeul as the starting point for consonant analysis. It highlights the middle chinese thinking behind the syllable.
There are many patterns in the vowels from K to J and M.
Also, have you looked at old Korean 한자 dictionaries called 옥편. They show the historical sound change and explain Mandarin in 한글.
Oh thank you so much for the recommendation-this is the first time I've heard of them. I'll definitely look into this!
It’s obvious to anyone who’s studied multiple CJK languages that the relationship is there yet people angrily deny it to me all the time. Nevertheless systematizing it like this is great
I haven't met a single person who denies 漢字 phonological relation between the three languages. All three languages got it from a common source, classical Chinese, so there really is no other way about it. What I often see denied, and rightfully so, is the linguistic relationship between these languages that some people try to force, often for political reasons. Although recent reconstructive studies on old korean have been promising regarding some degree of vocabulary sharing with old Japanese.
@@chicoti3 OK. Well that has not been my experience and I'm not claiming the other thing so maybe you can find someone who actually believes that if you want to argue about it.
@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 That's what related means when talking about languages. Borrowed vocabulary does not equate to a relationship. You hear it denied so often because it isn't true.
@@katawaya8101 So you're so desperate for an argument you're going to insist I actually meant something I didn't just so you can refute it? No, their large bodies of Chinese-derived vocabulary are related and transform in completely predictable ways between themselves. That's the entire premise of the video you're commenting on.
Even as an Indian who understand basic spoken japanese, I always play this fun game of relating those Japanese sounding words while watching Korean/Chinese media with subs
Please come back!!!!
As a Korean, I REALLY love your work!
Thanks!
I have figured out and implemented a lot of these patterns almost subconsciously as I have studied these languages. it’s why i ALWAYS recommend people who express learning ANY of these languages to learn a little bit of ALL of them. they are so deeply interconnected that it’s almost irresponsible to “just” learn one.
this channel is fucking awesome. just have to say.
Great video! As a native Mandarin speaker learning Japanese, I have always wondered if there were some kind of pattern to how the ancient Japanese people took the Middle Chinese readings and tweaked the pronunciation to fit within the phonotactics of Japanese. I have also kind of developed a hunch for it, but seeing the rules all laid out is great!
This system of CJK Code is similarly what im doing during learning much of Southeast and South Asia languange (apart Vietnam) because sharing Sanskrit or Pali base loanword.
Ex:
Naraka (Sanskrit)
Narok นรก (Thai) Thai tend to chop final consonant and second vowel become o
Neraka (Malay) Malay tend to change a into e schwa
Neråkå ꦤꦫꦏ (Javanese) Javanese change a into o and first vowel a into e schwa
Great insights that I can relate to! Something to add for the character 易 that appears at 30:18. 易 has two sounds with a different meaning for each as far as I know. Hanja dictionaries call it “쉬울 이 or 바꿀 역.” It sounds “이” when it means “easy, easily” and “역” when it means “to exchange.” I believe Japanese follows the same semantic distinction with the “イ” and “エキ” sounds.
簡易 is (kan i) and 貿易 is (bou eki) so yes there is a distinction
Cantonese 易Yi(easy) and 易Yik(change)
This has always been at the back of my head all this time, and I'm glad someone had finally made a video about it. I'm not a native speaker of any of the three languages so this helps so much !! Everything is explained so well and comprehensively, Thank you so much !!
牙 means molars or back teeth, and 齒 means incisors or front teeth, hence the Chinese names for velar and dental (sibilant) sounds.
So underrated lesson for CJK leaners...
thanks for your hard work! I can't imagine how laborious it was to join all that info in such a clear way. BTW, if you want some info on the vowels of the readings, there is a very famous youtuber called Stuart Jay Raj, he is both a linguist and a polyglot, and also fascinated by anything related to the Chinese language. Maybe he has some ideas to add to your system, since he learned some old and middle chinese as well. Also, when are you going to continue reading all the chinese characters？
Thank you for the suggestion! I will definitely check out Stuart Jay Raj's videos as I do more research on vowels :)
I'm graduating from college in a few weeks so I'll probably continue with reading the Chinese characters after that! Just so I have time to finish up with school and to study more characters. I'm glad you enjoyed that stream haha. Was pretty worried that it was a bad idea.
yep, I was waiting for someone to mention Stu, otherwise I would have - he's got a great video on the sound shift from the languages. I'm also sure you've seen the newer CN, JP, KR videos from the polyglot youtubers
0:13 deeply "related" can be a bit misleading, because those three languages are different language families and don't share any lineages. Deeply influenced might be a better way to say it. Edit: I realized it's also mentioned later in the video
Long ago, I started learning Japanese. More recently, but still years ago, I began to learn Korean. The existence of a "matrix" with which one could shift words of Sinitic origin from Korean to Japanese and vice versa is something I figured out, but I didn't have the systemic organization and skills to map everything out. Thanks to this video, I could drastically speed up vocabulary acquisition.
I took one semester of mandarin in the mid 1980s. it was entertaining but the only thing I now recall is the name the teacher gave me. Chen Bai Lin. that is it, the sum total of what I learned. I really hope this attempt is more fruitful. I am greatly impressed by the thought and organization you have put into these videos! Thank You.
amazing video. as a learner of kr/jp and heritage speaker of chinese I've always been thinking about this and it's great to see it all laid out systematically like this. I've been supporting on patreon since I first found this channel and this video alone made me really glad I did! you're doing great work, keep it up 👍👍
" I've been supporting on patreon since I first found this channel and this video alone made me really glad I did! you're doing great work, keep it up 👍👍"
literally 그 말이 내 말이야
this is something i v been looking for more than 20 years! thank u very much. so should all chinese, japanese and korean people.
I can watch lessons like these all day
As a person who's studied all 3, Cantonese sounds closer to both Korean and Japanese than Mandarin does.
Shijian doesn't sounds similar to Japanese jikan. 0. Cantonese sounds more similar😂
Cantonese sounds similar to Vietnamese.
Cantonese sounds nothing like Japanese or Korean. Cantonese sounds like vietnamese or mandarin.
It's nice having it laid out in a comparison table like this. I feel like I was doing this subconsciously with Cantonese, Japanese, and Vietnamese already, but I guess with the power of this table I can now go from Japanese to Korean and more Mandarin.
@@3miuretro821 That's because Mandarin palatalized k followed by front vowels to become j and the other languages did not.
These videos are so well done. Excellent work
Why this is so underrated? The work he put in this is amazing ❤
Regarding the vowel system you mentioned, if you know classical Japanese spelling (歴史的仮名遣い) and the rules applied to change it in the meiji era to accommodate vowel changes, it's also possible to predict mandarin vowels to a relatively high degree of accuracy. For instance 相(ショウ) was originally シヤウ which sounds very similar to xiang when you pronounce it in Japanese. Same for 上→シヤウ→shang, here are a few more examples:
棒→バウ→bang 鋼→カウ→kang
九→キウ→jiu 劉→リウ→liu
高→カウ→gao 好→カウ→hao
鏡→ケイ→jing 停→テイ→ting
I just started learning Mandarin so there's probably a lot more I'm yet to notice, but here are some trends I've realized:
aウ→ang/ao
ヤウ→iang
eウ→iao
eイ→ing
So final ウ(after a) and イ(after e) tend to consistently be Japanese equivalents of ng and final o.
Just one thing to be careful is that Japanese has various onyomi readings for each kanji and the one we need to use when "converting" to mandarin is 漢音 (most of the time). If the kanji has 唐音 use that instead. When converting to Hakka, for instance, 呉音 would be more appropriate. As an example, 漢音 of 病 is ヘイ, which using the pattern I demonstrated above we correctly get the mandarin equivalent "bing". If we use the 呉音 ビヤウ however, using the same technique, we get the Hakka "phiang".
This really helps, being born in HK and knowing Mandarin and some Canto, it has helped with learning Japanese
終於有人整理出我一直想做的音韻對應了 好感動
这真的很有意思啊！！！学了一点日语韩语和广东话，我真的能几乎无误地推理出一个字在另一门语言中的发音！😂
但作為講粵語的還是有點失望w 因為感覺粵語保留的ptk能夠對應得更好吧
@@oishibaking 比如“法”这类是吗？其实讲真的，ptk对应最好的可能是韩语。
@@martingin6937
學 （hok, hak, gaku, xue)
粵語、日語、韓語，只有粵語韓語完整保存了ptk
粵語就是直接從中古漢語照搬完整的ptk，根本就無需「對應」，這才是我失望的原因，因為粵語我認為更有參考價值。不過可能普通話比較常用吧（順帶一提很多粵吹就是用粵語完整ptk的發音踩低普通話）
韓國的話也是ptk不過t變成r了，日文吧ptk變成っ(納豆)、つ(発)、く/き(敵)，日文的p韻尾是消失了的。
@@oishibaking 粤语的花，有些字的ptk会发证变化，比如“法”从p变成了t。日语的话也没有消失到完全没有痕迹。日语里面很多固有词和汉字读音都经历了经历了末尾ふ（读作ぷ）→う的变化。比如蝶々（ちょうちょう）、十（じゅう）。
This video is awsome! I can't stop rewatching it.👍🏻
Awesome video! I learned Mandarin but I'm not planning to learn the other 2 languages any soon, but I'm still passionated about linguistics and particularly fascinated by the sinosphere so this is also very helpful to me.However, I think the video should have been diving a little more into the different types of Japanese on-yomi readings such as 漢音，吳音, 唐音 etc and how this system work for each of them, or you can do another video about it.
That's a great suggestion! I've been interested to look into the different types of onyomi for a while now, so maybe I will do a video about it!
Will there be any more uploads? I just came across this channel. It’s soo useful!
I did the same research as yours and had similar outcome back in my college period. It would be lovely if we can discuss over this.
For the vowel part, I think Korean is more predictable. This is because Japanese only has 5 vowels and there are more vowels in Middle Chinese. Originally, there were 8 vowels in middle Japanese, they somehow merged to the current 5 vowels.
Yes, it would be lovely to chat! Please feel free to email me at 808cjk@gmail.com :)
vietnamese is also really intesting as ưe has significantly more starting consonants than japanese and korean so i think we preserved a lot of the original sounds
as a vietnamese learning korean and japanese i've also found a lot of similarities between them and sino-vietnamese words
i hope u make a video about it
Incredible video! I wish you had some examples to pratice my skills on at the end. Like, if the Chinese pronunciation is this, what might the Japanese pronunciation be? If the Korean pronunciation is this, what might the Chinese pronunciation be? etc!
Chinese generally also had a dual-reading system 文读 (literary) and 白读 (vernacular reading). The latter is the local way of reading a character and the former is the attempt to imitate official speech at the time. Standard mandarin is a conglomeration of both readings in the north and thats why there are characters that weren’t supposed to have multi-sounds now having multi sounds because it absorbed literary reading into the system, which itself is an imitation of southern court speech in Nanjing in the south.
come back please
This is really interesting ... Instead of just learning Mandarin I wanna be able to learn all 3 languages , China is obviously really influential and will play an important role in the future of manufacturing and technology but Korea and Japan have more soft power in the arts and culture and a lot of specialized industries where they're important , so it's definitely interesting to learn all three , that part of the world is super developed and very interesting for us westerners as it's the closest you can get to a different planet when you compare it to north America or Europe. Everything is so different and unique from our POV even if there are some problems in those countries they're not perfect by any means ( as people who idolize east Asia tend to imply ) , there's no such thing as a perfect country or region but still it remains really interesting , exotic and exciting to visit those places and to speak the languages in order to create relationships or do business , so it's definitely an amazing approach you're crafting here , You're doing god's work
Continue the course with common grammar, semantics, phonetics, slangs, etimology, common poems and musics, between the 3 idioms,mini films
That's me learning Japanese as a Korean - just remembering the japanese pronunciation of the vocab that I already know in most cases
My brain is growing up after I saw this video
This is amazing. Thanks for all the hard work!
Tip: consonants before /i/ or /j/ have the tendency to change to sibilants / alveolo-palatal sounds due to palatalization. Compare Mandarin 地球 (dìqiú) with Japanese 地球 (ちきゅう, chikyuu), where the palatalization occurred on different syllables in the two languages.
thank you so much!! ur videos are soo helpful
Man! You're absolutely brilliant.
Amazing work and enormous amount of useful information! Please, accept my deepest appreciation!
This also applies to Vietnamese btw
What are the changes of consonants though?
@@lupus5338 what do you mean?
@@conho4898 like the word time, jikan, shikan... how would it change in vietnamese?
@@lupus5338 時間 is thời gian.
@@conho4898 hm, I can see the shift of sounds.
Cantonese and a lot other southern dialects preserve the non nasal consonants. Also, the er added at the end as final consonant only happens in Beijing dialect and surrounding northern dialects which was an influence from mongols and Manchurians when they ruled China since song dynasty. People in the south generally don’t do it at all.
This is pure BS by the way if you are actually educated in Chinese linguistics
@@FK-se4hqwhich part of
Amazing! Keep up the good work :)
I need to clear my brain out of everything first, then come and watch this video. That way, I'll understand more of what im seeing.
Depending on the when the Chinese words were borrowed, Cantonese could be a lot closer than Mandarin. The word 時間 in Cantonese is "Si-Gan" which is a lot closer to Japanese and Korean than "Shijian"
The information in this video is powerful
Amazing! I think I want to put this up as a poster! :D
Some Japanese and Korean pronunciations are closer to Cantonese and Hokkien, than to Mandarin.
Uh not cantonese at all wtf you talking about, they sound extremely different cantonese sounds more like vietnamese or thai,
Japanese sounds almost exactly like middle chinese if you said the syllables longer and stetched the indentation’s
@@NeostormXLMAXOP mentioned both Cantonese and Hokkien. And both dialects are from the Southern branch of the Sino-Tibetic language family; therefore there will be some similarities.
Also Japanese retains the Sui-T'ang dynasty way of speaking Chinese so a lot of Kanji on'myouji (Chinese readings) will sound like Cantonese and Hokkien as those were the lingua franca of the empire at the time.
Mandarin only came to existence approximately 1,000 years ago.
@@NeostormXLMAX I say some, not all of it. I'm Hong Konger btw, and I can hear words in Japanese that sounds closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. also, Cantonese is much more closer to Middle Chinese than mandarin.
@@NeostormXLMAX also, Vietnamese also inherit some pronunciation from Middle Chinese, but theirs is a lot further away.
@@NeostormXLMAX i speak canto and learning korean atm. When he gave the "time" example, korean was "sigan" and mandarin was "shijian" which is similar. However, the canto pronounciation is exactly the same being "sigan". Whilst learning korean, I've noticed many other words that are have exactly the same pronounciation and meaning. Therefore, canto is much closer to korean in pronouciation than mandarin.
Great video!
For fu, it's part of the syllable group for bu or rather bu is viewed as voiced variation of fu in Japanese, so I would argue it is still predictable, especially if you know about either Japanese or have done language comparision with Germanic languages, where f, b, v are all interrelated.
I know that there are way more Mandarin than Cantonese speakers and it isn't easy to find good learning resources for Cantonese but it would be great if you used Cantonese instead of Mandarin to showcase similarities between languages.
As a Canto learner who've learned a bit of Korean and Vietnamese before, I find those languages super useful when it comes to guessing the meaning of some words and I'd guess it works both ways.
Thanks 👍
just one question - are the 808 characters in order of most used on your website?
thank you very much for this video - I internalized pretty much nothing as a casual viewer but even so I see the formulation of a very clear system for understanding these three languages and I will certainly be back here!
This video is very useful so far. I'm not sure if anyone's pointed it out yet, but I think there's a small error I noticed with the IPA symbols. The phones you're using to represent the 'r' sounds for CJK are a bit off. /ɹ/ represents the rhotic 'r' in English. So it isn't the sound in Japanese. That would be more like the /ɾ/ (if we're not being too narrow). Korean should probably be /ɽ/ since it's retroflex, but that could also be a tap /ɾ/ too I guess.
oh great video learning this three languages is hard but in otherwise is fun since i love to travel china japan and korea💗 thabk you for sharing this video😘 kasahamnida,xiexie, arigato gozaimasu
Conclusion: learn one and say that u can speak both of them
Amazing thank u for the video
This makes me want to play with an Anki deck that has the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese sound reading (not meaning reading) for the most common characters. Hopefully with audio too.
just discovered your site. This is AMAZING! im struggling with the 3 of them.... 👌👍🙏⚘
underrated video❤❤
you may find the pronunciation of southern chinese ( eg cantonese) are more sound like koeran and Japanese
Hokkien is more like them
Hokien literary reading is coincidentally similar to Kan’on, but there is no causality other than both being Chinese systems.
2:57 I didn't know this rule even though I'm a native speaker of Japanese
Up down up down left right left right B A Start
Fun fact is: when u understand this video, which means u already know the forth language
So fascinating and interesting how three countries with so much deep-rooted hate, bloodshed and hostility between them both currently and historically could have such deep-rooted commonalities in language, culture and values. There's so much to explore there in terms of the contrast between these neighbors and the history/geopolitics of Western areas, maybe maybe it has something to do with the fundamental differences between Abrahamic religions and Asian religions (Buddism/Confucianism/Shinto etc)
Are there any evidence of what you claim at 1:50? Because I've studied a lot Korean and Japanese, history and literature and my experience suggests the contrary. Most old literature were written in pure Chinese. For instance Sejong the great emperor created the Korean characters as we known today from Chinese to reduce inalphabetism in Korea. This is what you explain in the introduction but what I mean is that countries have been creating their own language to claim independance and from there their languages have evolved in their own path, creating new words and idioms. It's particularly more obvious in Japanese language where the shape of some original Chinese characters have changed in some kanjis but the meaning remain the same, and some yojijukugo are also used in ancient Chinese literature.
Oooh! I need this.
Korean is as related to Chinese as English is to Latin. I love this video, but let's be sure to highlight that despite heavy historical contact, these languages are not related to each other. Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and countless other languages have been influenced to the point where a significant portion of their lexicon is derived from Chinese. Grammatically they're separate language families.
1:58 the reading for 気 in Japanese is "ki".
Ironically modern mandarin is the worst at preserving the sounds of middle chinese 😂
Good video for beginners! Minor thing but, at 0:24, the count for shared words seems to be an error. I speak all three languages in varying degrees, and I think there are thousands of shared words.
Just think about this. There are 808 shared characters, and most words are made by combining the characters. It does not add up. (for example, 杀--杀人-杀人犯). When I study these languages, for so many words, I just need to double-check the pronunciation, and the meanings are exactly the same.
历害！😊👍
Ya'll really speaking these 3 languages in addition to English, huh?
Edit: I'm learning Japanese, but I'm jealous of hangul. It really seems like a beautiful system, and seems like it'd fix my issues with kanji. I suppose you could just write in hiragana/katakana in theory, maybe with spaces or other ways to detect word boundaries, but I guess it's just really not done.
So helpful!! Thank you
If using Cantonese, Japanese, Korean comparisons. Should be way more in common
That would be perfect as a computer algorithm, but I no human could apply these principles and be able to "convert" words from one language to another on the fly, let alone talk. To say nothing of the way each of these languages "phrase" their thoughts (i.e. their grammar). Lots of overlapping between Japanese and Korean structures, to be sure, but not so much between those languages and Chinese. Interesting as a subject of study, remarkable actually, but anybody who has studied any two of those three languages already knows there is a lot of overlapping between words used by all three because of the Chinese origin of much of their vocabularies.
Phantastic linguistic research! Now I am interested in kantonese.
This is good information, but the slides need major formatting changes so that the viewer understands every step you make.
There are so many symbols floating around, and it’s hard for me to make sense of them without more colors, labels, Gestalt principles.
Please include Vietnamese as well. It's CJKV
Thanks I'm typing this comment so I can watch this.
I am actively using japanese and korean funny enough i had learned basic mandarin before them😂
Dude I think I love you
Here's a question about Chinese and Japanese. Shanghai is Shanhai in Japanese / しゃんはい. However, 深海 is shinkai (shēnhǎi in Chinese). They use the same Chinese character and I am wondering where "kai" comes from and it's not "shinhai" in the second one. Where did that "k" come from? I have discussed this before and have one plausible answer, but I am curious first what you guys think.
I'm one of the few people who knows that gen alpha is gonna be absolutely insane at progressing our society. They grew up with computers
A lot of things lost in Mandarin like initial [ng], final [k] and the entering tones are preserved in Cantonese, I'd love to see how that compares in this analysis.
I'm Cambodian and wanna study the triple language cuz I love all of them county ❤
1:52 the Korean word 기운 that you put as a native Korean word which was not derieved from Chinese character is actually the opposite
i only understood like half of that but it seems cool
Hi there, love your work.
I'm thinking of joining your patreon. Are you still maintaining and operating it?
Hello! Unfortunately, I am not actively adding content to it right now but I do hope to start again in the next few months
Thanks for letting me know. When you become active again, I'll likely join@@808CJK
You're not gonna mention Vietnamese too? Greatly influenced by Chinese I mean they even invented a simplified down alphabet using Chinese characters (forgot the specific name but it's an alphabet) and created their own set of Chinese characters (Chu Nom). Some words also sound really similar to these.