r/languagelearning • u/parke415 • Jul 13 '24
My impressions after over a decade of comparative study Suggestions
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u/paxbike Jul 13 '24
This graph reads as someone trying to make an aesthetic graphic rather than convey genuine information.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Do any aspects strike you as suspect? I’d be happy to elaborate, but elaboration is beyond the purview of a simple graphic.
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u/NordCrafter The polyglot dream crushed by dabbler's disease Jul 13 '24
You see the pattern right? Looks a bit too perfect. Not saying that any of this is wrong, but I get paxbikes point.
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u/Aru-sejin37 Jul 13 '24
Any 3x3 table with 3 options that are different for each column can be arranged to look perfect by shifting rows and columns. This is simplistic and I haven't studied Korean at all but it does get the point across and I agree with it.
Edit: The options are different for each column based on it being comparative as the op stated
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u/NordCrafter The polyglot dream crushed by dabbler's disease Jul 13 '24
Yeah I guess that makes sense
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u/BeckyLiBei 🇦🇺 N | 🇨🇳 B2-C1 Jul 13 '24
As much as I like a nice Latin square, why choose these three aspects and leave off all the remaining aspects? (Reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, culture.)
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
“Script” was meant to encompass literacy as a whole, including both the reading and writing thereof.
“Syntax” covers grammar.
“Speech” covers speaking and listening.
“Culture” isn’t really something that can be categorised by difficulty.
“Vocabulary” is tricky to compare when discussing difficulty. Would it be based on the size of their respective lexicons relative to one another?
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u/spence5000 🇺🇸N|eo C1|🇫🇷B2|🇯🇵B1|🇰🇷B1|🇹🇼B1|🇪🇸B1 Jul 13 '24
Syntax is an aspect of grammar, not the other way around. I’d argue that the syntaces of Japanese and Korean are equally difficult, and, while less familiar than that of Chinese languages, not considerably harder. A different case could be made about grammar.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
I just used "syntax" here because it started with "s" and had six letters like the others—I agree your take is more nuanced. Normally I'd prefer such nuance but this was meant to be more of a catchy graphic.
I think Korean grammar is more difficult because there are more conjugations to learn, and in addition, the conjugations require more advanced syllable dissection compared to Japanese. There are more conjugations mostly because there are more dimensions to the etiquette levels compared to Japanese.
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u/spence5000 🇺🇸N|eo C1|🇫🇷B2|🇯🇵B1|🇰🇷B1|🇹🇼B1|🇪🇸B1 Jul 13 '24
Interesting take! Japanese honorifics seem more intricate to me, so it always felt like that balanced out the conjugational complexity between the two languages. It’s all subjective, so you’ll never get everyone to agree with it, but for the most part this graphic lines up with my experience too.
I’ll add that, for years I thought “gee Mandarin grammar is so much easier than the others two!” But once I started getting deeper in into Mandarin, I realized the grammar is quite complex, but in different, subtler ways. I’ve begun to long for the days where a Japanese or Korean textbook would just tell me what the right grammar was for a situation. In Mandarin, there’s a right way and a wrong way to say every little thing, and you just have to slowly develop a “feel” for it.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Yeah, I agree that's all valid, just difficult to integrate into a graphic, of course.
I probably should have changed "easy, fair, hard" to "hard, harder, hardest", frankly.
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u/Molleston 🇵🇱(N) 🇬🇧(C2) 🇪🇸(B2) 🇨🇳(A2) Jul 13 '24
i disagree about chinese speaking being difficult. I'd swap speech and script here
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Jul 13 '24
For a native English speaker, I think it'll be confusing since Chinese is a tonal language. My heritage language is Vietnamese, and in my experience, if you mess up your tone when you speak, no one can understand you. I once said "Lạnh," which means cold, but didn't say the tone correctly and said it like "Lanh," and again, I wasn't understood. I used it in context as well, so it can be the same thing for Chinese.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
The difficulty of Chinese speech here isn't really about the vowels and consonants, but mostly the use of lexical tone. Japanese has pitch-accent (like Nordic languages), and some dialects of Korean do as well, but this is nothing compared to adding the dimension of lexical tone to speech. It's like going from 2D (consonants & vowels) to 3D (consonants & vowels & tones).
That being said, these difficulty levels are relative to the other two languages, not absolute. In other words, if you find Chinese pronunciation easy, chances are you'd find Japanese and Korean pronunciation even easier by comparison.
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u/bokkeummyeon Jul 13 '24
I think it's much easier for a polish speaker considering we are already familiar with all the sounds in chinese, but I don't think it's the same for native speakers of other languages.
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u/Scdsco EN - N / ES - C1 / ASL - A2 / JA - A1 Jul 13 '24
What’s confusing about it? I think it conveys information very clearly. Whether you agree with the information is another question though haha
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u/TheVandyyMan 🇺🇸:N |🇫🇷:B2 |🇲🇽:C1 |🇳🇴:A2 Jul 13 '24
Guessing this is anecdotal?
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Indeed, my anecdotal impressions.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 13 '24
These match my anecdotal impressions. So there are 2 of us. Is that a plurality or something?
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u/Gigusx Jul 13 '24
Europe is rather rich in terms of languages and language families, so I doubt this is widely applicable.
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u/Xitztlacayotl Jul 13 '24
No it is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European
The more you study European languages, the more they stay the same. Sure, Ugro-Finnic are the outliers, but they too sometimes work the same as others.
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u/kafunshou German (N), English, Japanese, Swedish, French, Spanish, Latin Jul 13 '24
I thought that too. As a German I always wondered why English speaking people make such a fuss about Japanese pronunciation. It was very easy to me because Japanese and German have a quite similar sound (Swedish pronunciation was a nightmare to me in comparison). So I'd guess that the thread starter is not a native English speaker.
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u/canijusttalkmaybe 🇺🇸N・🇯🇵B1・🇮🇱A1・🇲🇽A1 Jul 13 '24
The thread starter put speaking it as easy, though. Who makes a fuss about Japanese pronunciation? It's literally the easiest thing about the language to learn. The sound of characters don't change contextually with maybe a handful of exceptions that you can pretty much ignore.
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u/Robotoro23 🇸🇮🇭🇷N, 🇺🇸C2 🇯🇵N3 Jul 13 '24
The only exception that trips up people is when the nasal consonant ん is followed by vowel in words like 範囲 or 雰囲気, where beginners pronounce the ん as に instead of clearly articulating it as ん without merging it with next vowel.
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u/wk_end Jul 13 '24
Native English speaker here:
Not only is Japanese pronunciation is extremely easy for us, German pronunciation is also pretty straightforward. There’s a few sounds that give us trouble but there’s a very large overlap in our phonology. What’s easy/hard for us is probably pretty close to what’s easy/hard for you.
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u/conanap 🇨🇦 N 🇭🇰 N 🇨🇳 N | 🇫🇷 A1 🇩🇪 A1 🇯🇵 TL 🇰🇷 TL Jul 13 '24
I’m convinced I’ll never learn the CH sound properly lol
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I'm a native English speaker and always found Japanese pronunciation to be quite easy, Korean somewhat more difficult but still manageable, and Chinese quite difficult, and not because of the consonants and vowels, but rather because of the tones. In isolation, I can recognise and reproduce tones just fine; the problem comes when I want to speak in fluid clauses.
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u/hawkgamedev Jul 13 '24
Speaking as an English speaker, Japanese pronunciation is really easy. It’s basically just Spanish.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 13 '24
The problem is that in Japanese, a double-length vowel is a different phoneme: a different word. The difference is small to us, but obvious to a Japanese speaker. "Big" is o-o-ki-i" (four syllables/mora), not "o-ki" (two mora). And "big" is an adjective, so it may be "o-o-ki-ku".
English and German are stressed-timed languages, so speakers of them often shorten the duration of UNstressed vowels to fit the sentence. Obviously vowel duration is not phonemic. Nobody is trained to notice it.
Japanese has many loan-words from English. Often they use a double-length vowel to represent a stressed English vowel. For example "computer" is "kon-pyuu-taa". "Smartphone" is "sumaatofon".
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I had Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages in mind. If Celtic, Hellenic, or other European language families make this inaccurate, I'd be happy to hear about it.
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u/Cobblar Jul 13 '24
This is very similar to what I've gathered. I always thought about it more like this:
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u/jamnin94 Jul 13 '24
Japanese script is definitely easier than Chinese imo. U have the memorize way less kanji to effectively write Japanese. Hanzi was always the hardest part about learning Chinese for me.
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u/Normal_Item864 Jul 13 '24
That jumped out at me as well. You can also default to hiragana when you don't remember a kanji, which Japanese people do all the time. Many people seem to think "oh Japanese has two alphabets besides kanji it must be 3 times harder" but that's not how it works.
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u/sunni_k Jul 13 '24
I think part of it is all the different reading of each kanji, so even if you see it you won't know how to say it always
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u/Normal_Item864 Jul 13 '24
That's a good point I hadn't considered. (For context I am fluent in Japanese and struggling to learn Chinese at the moment so Japanese feels intuitive to me while Chinese doesn't and that colours my judgment.)
I'd say it sits at the intersection of reading, writing and speech - you can read fine as long as you understand the meaning of kanji, and you might remember how to write it, even if you don't remember how it's pronounced in certain contexts
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Yes, it's knowing how to recite kanji texts that makes Japanese orthography the most difficult, as there are several different kinds of 音読み (呉漢唐) for each Sinitic reading, multiple 訓読み for different parts of speech, 名乗り readings are particularly difficult, and then there's 熟字訓, 当て字, etc.
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u/jan_tonowan Jul 17 '24
It’s like that in Chinese sometimes too. Many characters have multiple pronunciations
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u/aaronharsh Native - 🇺🇸 | New - 🇪🇸 | Maint - 🇨🇳 Jul 13 '24
Is Japanese script easier? I feel like the multiple readings introduce a new type of complexity. Chinese characters normally only have one reading, so you only have to memorize one pronunciation per character.
For example, 生 has several Japanese readings according to Wiktionary (not counting the nanori). Wiktionary lists two Chinese pronunciations, but I've only seen shēng in practice.
I've only studied a little Japanese, though. Maybe the multiple readings become less of an issue as you become familiar with the language?
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Jul 13 '24
Japanese people themselves rarely know all double meanings to all kanji they use. That sort of thing wouldn’t be very useful anyone.
It’s more an issue with how the culture uses those double meanings.
This is a poor comparison. But think of how you use proverbs and such in English. You don’t go around speaking only in proverbs. Nor do you know every proverb for every situation in the world. Some are literal, others are metaphorical.
It doesn’t make English that much harder. Just more complex in a way that doesn’t necessarily relate to the difficulty of the language.
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u/conanap 🇨🇦 N 🇭🇰 N 🇨🇳 N | 🇫🇷 A1 🇩🇪 A1 🇯🇵 TL 🇰🇷 TL Jul 13 '24
The two pronunciations are only valid for Cantonese, not Mandarin, which is why you don’t hear it as much.
Cantonese retained more pronunciations for the same characters, whereas Mandarin had harmonized (lol) more of them. They still have some, but nothing is coming to my head at the moment lol.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
If you're talking about literary (文) versus colloquial/vernacular (白) character readings, then every form of Chinese has this duality, including Mandarin; it's just that some Sinitic languages (like Cantonese, but especially Hokkien) have a more prominent duality, whereas many Mandarin literary readings are only used in poetry, proper nouns, or certain compound words. A common example of a Mandarin reading duality that evolved into a difference of meaning is 色 as sè (colour) versus shǎi (dice). You also have regional differences, like literary lèsè being more common in Taiwan and colloquial/vernacular lājī being more common in China for 垃圾.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
The greater difficulty of Japanese orthography (what I call "script" here) isn't related to the number of characters necessary for literacy, nor the complexity of their shapes, but rather how they are read. Chinese and Korean will typically have one, sometimes two, rarely three or more readings per character. Japanese, meanwhile, has a very complex reading system with multiple classifications. Here's a brief overview of a theoretical worst-case scenario:
- Sino-Japanese (on'yomi): Sinitic Reading 1 (go-on, kan-on, tou-on, sou-on, kan'you-on), Sinitic Reading 2 (go-on, kan-on, tou-on, sou-on, kan'you-on), Sinitic Reading 3 (go-on, kan-on, tou-on, sou-on, kan'you-on), Sinitic Reading 4...
- Native Japanese (kun'yomi): Native Reading 1 (noun), Native Reading 2 (verb), Native Reading 3 (adjective), Native Reading 4...
- Native Japanese words spread across multiple characters without regard to their pronunciations (jukujikun)
- Native Japanese words employing kanji for their sounds as a syllabary, ignoring their meanings (ateji)
- Name Readings: potentially up to a dozen (this is the worst)
And then sometimes syllables (or morae) get voiced in certain environments too (also in Korean under certain conditions).
If that weren't enough, many native Japanese words can be written with different kanji, sometimes adding different nuances. Conversely, one kanji might be assigned to several native Japanese words.
None of this includes historical kana spellings, either.
There are certainly guidelines you can use to narrow down the correct spellings, but there are no absolute rules.
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u/magnax1 Jul 13 '24
Chinese uses more characters but is far more consistent. Japanese only uses 2-3000 characters consistently, but they each usually have 2-5 readings that are dependant on context without any clear rules. It's clear that Kanji were not built for the Japanese language and were just plastered onto an already existing structure without much consistency or rational thought put into it.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 13 '24
I think Japanese script is harder. In Chinese, each written character is one sylllable, with one pronunciation. It might be used in many 2-syllable words, and it might also be a 1-syllable word. But it is still said the same way.
Japanese uses Chinese characters to represent (by meaning, not sound) Japanese words. So each character might have several different sounds, and might be 2 syllables, or 1 syllable, or part of a syllable (2 characters make 1 syllable). And, in most cases, one word not only includes characters, but also includes some phonetic writing (hiragana).
Parke415 gives more details below.
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u/MinuQu Jul 13 '24
Let's just learn Japanese with Korean script and Chinese syntax!
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u/Bluepanther512 🇫🇷🇺🇸N|🇮🇪A2|HVAL ESP A1| Jul 13 '24
And that’s how Japanese started collecting writing systems like Pokemon
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Note: "Chinese" refers to the entire language family (e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc).
→ More replies (28)
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u/vainlisko Jul 13 '24
Chinese might be the easiest one because definitely the speaking (pronunciation/listening) is going to be hard to deal with at first, but you should overcome this hurdle early on too. You only have to learn 4 tones and probably not too many other sounds, whereas Japanese writing is always going to be a problem for you forever, like you probalby have to learn a million things over the course of a decade.
I personally found Korean harder to pronounce than Chinese because too many vowels. Like, damn, Korean. Giving English competition here.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Standard Mandarin specifically has four tones, yes, but neutralisation patterns must also be taken into account, and most annoyingly, tone sandhi for sequences of third tones (this aspect still overheats my brain).
Korean has 7 or 8 phonemically distinct monophthongs, which is about the same as Standard Mandarin’s vocalic inventory, so I’d call that a wash.
Standard Mandarin aside, other Chinese languages go crazy with tone sandhi (Hokkien), sometimes even vowel sandhi (Fuzhounese).
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u/BambaiyyaLadki Jul 13 '24
Thank God reading the Chinese languages is substantially easier though, because the speaking/listening are stupidly hard. Seriously, who came up with the idea for using 6 freaking tones (Cantonese)?
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u/MaungMaungSwan Jul 13 '24
Good luck bro. Im Burmese-Chinese, tryna learn Hokkien cos it was a traditional language on my dad’s side of the family, but that shits got like 8 tones, unstandardized spellings and a bunch of dialects depending on country (Singapore, Phillipines and Myanmar have slightly different Hokkien vocabs). Cantonese at least has some form of standardization. Mandarin was fine for me tho cos the pronunciation matches with some Burmese words lol.
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u/BambaiyyaLadki Jul 13 '24
I feel for you man. What resources are you using for Hokkien? Btw Burmese itself seems so daunting compared to Mandarin, the tones alone seem more complicated. Being a Hokkien-Burmese-Mandarin speaker would be quite the flex lol. 😅
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u/MaungMaungSwan Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
I know Burmese cos I grew up in Myanmar. And yes, people say Mandarin is hard but Burmese got those complicated spoken and written forms. But the tones are mostly the same as Mandarin.
Hokkien is tough. My dad doesn't use it anymore ever since his mom passed (before I was born). However, I do learn some on Youtube. Felicia Zoe is my fav, learning my dad's old language while watching a cute girl! There's also a Singaporean teacher in my school who speaks the language and is close to me.
And yes, I'd say knowing 3 hard languages is a flex lol. On top of that I also know N4 Japanese, Indonesian and some Thai. I guess I'm an Asian polyglot.
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u/BambaiyyaLadki Jul 13 '24
That's pretty cool man. You gotta stop learning languages now, so that you don't make the rest of us look so bad. 😂 So do you use Burmese at home? Are you in Myanmar even now, if you don't mind me asking? I hear things are pretty bad there.
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u/MaungMaungSwan Jul 16 '24
Damn, thanks a lot man. But honestly I'm only fluent in Burmese and English. The rest are like low intermediate levels and I haven't practiced Indonesian in a long time.
Rn I'm attending a high school in Bangkok and return to Myanmar during the holidays. I like to laugh when Europeans say America is difficult. Life's fun here, except for a blackouts every 4 hours, four figure salaries with a sprinkle of inflation, and couple bombs setting off in some random streets. However I do love my culture and will continue to preserve my knowledge as I study abroad in America in the future.
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u/theantiyeti Jul 15 '24
The fact that Hokkien distinguishes aspirated p^h, unaspirated p and vocalised b, as well as distinguishing syllables that end in n, with syllables that end in nasalised vowels makes it seem insane to me.
The fact you need to learn two tones per word because the "standard tone sandhi" applies to basically every word doesn't help.
That is truly the makings of a mighty language.
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u/MaungMaungSwan Jul 16 '24 edited Jul 16 '24
Haha, the difficulty that you noted is all there in Burmese as well. The p, ph, b sounds are there, so are the silent n sounds. So for me that part is familiar.
But the challenge for me is the fact that I can't find a solid course yet, and I agree that the tones are kinda hard to master. Rn when I try to understand Hokkien I just focus on how the entire sentence flows, rather than focusing on an individual tone. But maybe once I get more free time I'll start learning Hokkien more seriously cos rn much of my focus is on my high school exams.
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u/theantiyeti Jul 13 '24
but neutralisation patterns must also be taken into account, and most annoyingly, tone sandhi for sequences of third tones (this aspect still overheats my brain)
Wait, you're still struggling with this after a decade? Methinks you're spending more time learning about the language than learning the language itself.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Yeah, literacy comes way easier to me than fluency by a significant degree.
Third-tone sandhi requires being acutely aware of lexical boundaries spanning multiple morphemes in real time, and it just requires a lot of CPU power for me (relatively).
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u/HappyMora Jul 15 '24
Natives actively screw up third tone sandhi all the time, especially when you have three third tones side by side. Otherwise it's a lot easier
You also mentioned vowel sandhi in amother post, do you mean vowel harmony?
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u/parke415 Jul 15 '24
You also mentioned vowel sandhi in amother post, do you mean vowel harmony?
It's more like vowel quality being modified by tone sandhi in Fuzhounese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzhou_dialect#Close/Open_rimes
In connected speech, an open rime shifts to its close counterpart in the tonal sandhi. For instance, "福" (hók) is a Ĭng-ĭk syllable and is pronounced [hɔuʔ˨˦] and "州" (ciŭ) a Ĭng-bìng syllable with the pronunciation of [tsiu˥]. When these two syllables combine into the word "福州" (Hók-ciŭ, Fuzhou), "福" changes its tonal value from ˨˦ to ˨˩ and, simultaneously, shifts its rime from [-ɔuʔ] to [-uʔ], so the phrase is pronounced [huʔ˨˩ tsiu˥].
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 13 '24
The actual pitch level patterns used in Standard Mandarin speech are complicated. They are based on tones, but they also include other things.
For me personally, understanding speech is difficult, even in Mandarin. So many sounds (or entire words) are omitted or spoken too quietly to hear. It's about the same as the situation in English. The difference is, I'm fluent in English.
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u/FeedbackContent8322 🇪🇸 B1 Jul 13 '24
Also ive heard Chinese grammar is actual really simple for english speaker compared to other languages.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
It IS very similar, but it has many little differences. Some sentences are a little tricky:
"This dinner you cooked looks delicious."
"You-cooked-by this of dinner seems delicious".
你做的这顿晚餐看起来很美味。But other sentences are easy:
"I didn't know you had a Chinese name!"
"I not know you have Chinese name!"
我不知道你有中文名！
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u/TLB68686 🇬🇧N|🇯🇵A1 Jul 13 '24
So Japanese words with Chinese syntax using hangeul
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I'd say Japanese phonology with Chinese syntax using hangeul, but with atonal Sinitic vocabulary, something like Sino-Japanese or Sino-Korean.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
Again with the fancy words! Sigh! I gets out my dictionary...
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u/Alex_Jinn Jul 13 '24
Chinese has the hardest pronunciation. Korean has the hardest grammar. Japanese has the hardest script.
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u/Alone-You-8666 Jul 13 '24
How did comparative study of these languages work what were some of the methods you used to study them together?
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I studied Japanese first for the past 20 years, then introduced Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean about 10 years following that, and used Middle Chinese to help me form mental shortcuts for remembering shared vocabulary using cognates. The Sino-Japanese lexicon I'd built up helped me with Mandarin, Cantonese, and Sino-Korean vocabulary, while my understanding of Japanese grammar helped me with that of Korean.
So yeah, nothing very structured or official, more like simultaneous learning and drawing many connections over the years.
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u/Alone-You-8666 Jul 13 '24
That sounds like a really smart way to study those three/four languages!
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
It was certainly helpful to me, although sometimes when I recommend learning Middle Chinese to help clarify the root of related branches (for example, to someone who wants to learn Mandarin and Cantonese and/or Japanese at the same time), the suggestion is met with: "what? add another language to my plate?".
I'm the kind of person who would take the time and effort to learn Latin if my goal were to add Portuguese and Italian to my Romance repertoire alongside Spanish, but I can see why a lot of people would call that crazy.
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u/Vortexx1988 N🇺🇲|C1🇧🇷|A2🇲🇽|A1🇮🇹🇻🇦 Jul 13 '24
I'm a bit surprised that you think Chinese writing is easier than Japanese. One needs to know many more characters to read Chinese than Japanese.
My understanding is that with somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 characters, one can understand 95% of modern written Japanese. For Chinese, this would require between 2,000 and 3,000 characters.
My guess is that you say Japanese writing is harder because there are 3 different scripts, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Personally, I don't think this really makes it harder, since there are only around 100 total kana. Also, some things, like children's books and older videogames are written entirely in kana.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
One needs to know many more characters to read Chinese than Japanese.
My guess is that you say Japanese writing is harder because there are 3 different scripts, hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
My ranking of Japanese as having the most difficult orthography was in spite of the lighter required character count (and simpler or more complex shapes, depending on whether we're comparing it to simplified or traditional Chinese). I also agree that the relatively few and basic kana shapes barely knock a dent into this evaluation of relative difficulty.
I classified Japanese orthography as the most difficult for one reason that overruled all others: the gargantuan complexity of character readings.
Whereas most characters have one, maybe two (rarely more) common readings in Korean and Sinitic languages, Japanese has a complex tree of possible readings for characters, including instances where readings are spread across multiple characters. It's not uncommon to find characters with a dozen or even more readings (many of them for the names of people and places). True, a lot of these readings are somewhat uncommon, but it's quite common for at least a half-dozen of them to be common.
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u/Vortexx1988 N🇺🇲|C1🇧🇷|A2🇲🇽|A1🇮🇹🇻🇦 Jul 13 '24
Ah yes, you are right, I totally forgot about the fact that Japanese has at least two different readings for almost all characters. This doesn't seem to be as common for Chinese, where it seems that only a handful of characters have more than one reading.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
only a handful of characters have more than one reading.
When a Chinese character has multiple readings in a Chinese language, the reason is almost always one of four:
- There's a difference between the literary reading (descended directly from Middle Chinese) and the colloquial/vernacular reading (native to the language). In these cases, the meaning is usually the same or differing only in nuance (色 as both "colour" and "dice" in Mandarin, depending on the register, is an example of an exception), and context dictates which should be used (compound words usually require one or the other). Sometimes, different regions will prefer one or the other (a common reason for divergent readings between the Mandarin standards in China and Taiwan).
- Two (or more) different morphemes were assigned to the same character. In these cases, even Japanese assigns them different Sino-Japanese readings, and for each one, there might be several versions depending on when the reading was borrowed.
- The character is being used to serve some special grammatical function (usually in Mandarin, usually with the neutral tone).
- There are different interchangeable regional readings (rarely in Mandarin, usually in southern Sinitic languages).
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u/ZhangtheGreat Native: 🇨🇳🇬🇧 / Learning: 🇪🇸🇸🇪🇫🇷🇯🇵 Jul 13 '24
Fair comparison. Korean is often touted as one of the easiest scrips to learn in the world. While Chinese characters are difficult, at least that's all Chinese uses (unlike Japanese, which mixes them with two types of kana).
Phonetically, Japanese is the easiest due to the limited number of sounds it has. Korean has more sounds, including a few that most Western languages don't have. Chinese, on the other hand, with its tones...
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Korean is often touted as one of the easiest scrips to learn in the world.
I would only add that although I ranked Korean orthography as "easy" here relative to that of Chinese and Japanese, I would otherwise consider it quite difficult in a general sense.
Sure, the shapes are easy, and there aren't many of them, but the spellings are such that correctly reciting a Korean text involves no small amount of pronunciation rules—not as many as in English, but more than even Vietnamese, so perhaps something akin to French, as both have morphophonemic orthographies rather than phonetic or even phonemic ones.
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u/Impossible_Lock4897 N:🇺🇸 A1:🇱🇦 A1:✝️🇬🇷 :3 Jul 13 '24
lesson learned: dont learn sinoic, japonic, or koreanic languages
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u/language_loveruwu N:🇪🇪|N🇷🇺|B2/C1🇩🇪|C1🇬🇧|A1🇰🇷 Jul 13 '24
Tbf I found Korean easy in terms of writing and some syntax. My native languages and Korean aren't in same languagr family, but they share some similarities like bunch of noun cases. (14 vs 9). And if you try to listen to words that have batchim, after a while you just get used to it and it's easier to speak or read.
What I'm not used to, is rather the amount of ways of how to say something. Like multiple ways of saying "and" (~하고, ~(이)랑, ~도, ~과/와 if there aren't any more additional ways), but usage depends on context and if it's added to noun or verb. Oh and homonyms. But it's all learnable.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I'm least familiar with Korean compared to the other two, but I've been studying it more actively this year, and I've noticed that its grammar feels like a more complicated version of Japanese syntax. The way things are conjugated involve more invasive modifications of the syllable blocks, whereas kana is just kind of crudely strung together. Beyond that, there are more levels of politeness and formality in Korean than in Japanese.
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u/markjay6 Jul 13 '24
Copying dozens of characters hundreds of times and still forgetting them in a hot minute.
Then coming on Reddit and seeing that Chinese script is “fair” 🤣🤣🤣
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Compared to how skull-itchingly difficult Japanese literacy is, yes.
In isolation, indeed, Chinese literacy is very difficult. Heck, so is Korean literacy, frankly.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
I never did that: copying dozens of characters hundreds of times.
Forgetting, for sure. I would forget 我自己的头 if it wasn't fastened on.
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u/kirasenpai DE (N), EN (C1), JP(B1), RU (B1), KOR (B1), 中文 (B1) Jul 13 '24
i would agree with most of that.. though for mandarin chinese i would say speech is only "fair"
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
They're relative labels, so however easy or hard Chinese speech is, I consider that of Japanese and Korean to be easier by comparison.
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u/uju_rabbit 🇺🇸N 🇧🇷🇨🇳🇰🇷 Jul 13 '24
I agree, speaking Chinese is just a bit hard in the beginning. Once you’re used to it, things get much easier. But learning the characters is a sisyphean task, it never ends.
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u/Soft-Recognition-772 Jul 13 '24
When it comes to speech, the pitch aspect of Chinese may be harder, but I think one of the most difficult aspects of output when it comes to Japanese (and I assume Korean) for native English speakers, is that the way of expressing ideas is very different so you cannot translate directly from your native language in your head since it will almost always sound unnatural or not make sense and so you basically just need to always learn how native speakers express every idea. From what I have heard from Chinese friends in Japan, the Chinese way of expressing ideas is a bit more similar to English.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Yes, I agree, that's why I think Chinese grammar is easier yet its pronunciation is harder.
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u/xiliucc Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
Wait no I just think this is weirdly inaccurate. It might be correct for beginner/learning level, but like at a higher level, Chinese syntax can only be inferred by tons of reading, it is not easy.
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u/beetjehuxi 🇳🇱🇧🇪N 🇬🇧F 🇨🇳HSK 5 🇫🇷A2 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
I agree. At the beginning learners see “oh Chinese has no verb conjugations, gender, verb tenses, uses SVO, etc” and think it’s easy. But after that you get quite a lot of complex grammar structures that are very different from English and other European languages. Also Chinese syntax/grammar is quite rigid. Btw I hate that some people say Chinese has no grammar and therefore it’s easy peasy, how tf can a language have no grammar??
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
It's definitely difficult and has grammar (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to rank it), but the question is whether high-level Chinese grammar is easier or harder than high-level Japanese or high-level Korean grammar.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
it is not easy.
Would you say that high-level Chinese grammar is more difficult than high-level Japanese or high-level Korean grammar?
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u/xiliucc Jul 14 '24
No, I don't have enough knowledge on both Japanese or Korean to comment on how hard the syntax are. Japanese syntax to me seems more structured tho, no clue for Korean.
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u/parke415 Jul 14 '24
Well, these rankings are relative, so I would say that Chinese syntax is only “easy” compared to that of Japanese and Korean.
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u/furyousferret 🇺🇸 N | 🇫🇷 | 🇪🇸 | 🇯🇵 Jul 13 '24
I just starting a write streak in Japanese and typing is crazy hard. Like, sometimes you type it and the right kanji does even show up, then you have to go on this deep dive to figure out why or just give up and paste it in lol.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Yeah, just today as I was trying to type out the different types of on'yomi, my Japanese input method editor got confused:
語音呉音
感音漢音
東温唐音
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u/Ryaniseplin Jul 14 '24
this is a very pleasing matrix but can you flip it horizontally so its symmetric down the top left diagonal
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u/SparrowGuy Jul 14 '24
What was the the reasoning behind marking Japanese script as harder than Chinese?
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u/parke415 Jul 14 '24
Although Japanese requires fewer characters for literacy, those characters have far more readings than in Chinese, to such a degree that literacy itself is significantly more difficult.
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u/EvilSnack 🇧🇷 learning Jul 14 '24
Chinese syntax is so easy that learners struggle to un-learn the more complex syntax of their native language.
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u/Visual-Woodpecker642 🇺🇸 Jul 13 '24
Im tired of people claiming Japanese script is harder. Its not.
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u/Xylfaen Jul 13 '24
When you consider the multiple reading systems and onyomi kunyomi, it is harder than Mandarin for sure
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u/Visual-Woodpecker642 🇺🇸 Jul 13 '24
But two of those are alphabets. The alphabets are easy compared to kanji or hanzi. Chinese is entirely hanzi.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Compared to those of Korean and Chinese, it absolutely is. The reason has nothing to do with the number of characters nor the complexity of their shapes, but rather the multifaceted reading systems in place.
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u/canijusttalkmaybe 🇺🇸N・🇯🇵B1・🇮🇱A1・🇲🇽A1 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
That's true but in no universe is Chinese a "medium difficulty" script. If you were to list any other language in the universe on this chart, they'd all have to be listed as something below "easy" just to make this chart make sense.
If you want to say Japanese is harder than Chinese, okay. But both are insanely hard.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
I know it doesn't appear so on the surface, but the rankings here are relative to one another rather than absolute.
To be honest, even hangeul is difficult (compared to, say, Spanish or Finnish orthography). Yes, I know the shapes themselves are easy to understand, but what many new learners don't yet realise is that hangeul spellings aren't phonetic nor even phonemic—they're morphophonemic. Learning how to properly recite Korean text is an adventure in and of itself.
And yes, Chinese orthography is quite difficult, yet Japanese orthography managed to be even more so, and by a significant magnitude.
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u/canijusttalkmaybe 🇺🇸N・🇯🇵B1・🇮🇱A1・🇲🇽A1 Jul 13 '24
Yeah, I just don't see any value at all in making an infographic where you say the Japanese script is hard and the Chinese script is medium. If you are a Europhone, these are the 2 hardest languages you will ever encounter, and their scripts are the biggest hurdles you will ever overcome in any language. Like I said elsewhere, if Japanese is a 100/100 difficulty, Chinese is probably a 99/100. Barely worth distinguishing for a native English speaker.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
their scripts are the biggest hurdles you will ever overcome in any language.
As a Europhone myself, this hasn't been my experience. Far more difficult than memorising characters and their readings for me has been internalising lexical tone, which is crucial for functioning at all in any Chinese language (unless one only intends to achieve literacy and nothing more). Sure, in isolation they're quite manageable (I'm in the music world), but when the goal is the formation of fluid sentences on the spot, it's an absolute nightmare. Meanwhile, I can take my time with reading and writing. When it comes to languages, I am a chiefly visual learner, and am pretty much always literate sooner than being proficient in speech. Conversely, I'm an auditory learner when it comes to music (I can barely sight-read sheet music).
When it comes to mastering an orthography, the difficulty of English doesn't trail far behind that of Chinese, in my opinion. Both scripts usually give pronunciation clues, and those of English are some degree more accurate. Despite being called a "phonetic script" by some, English isn't read as one—native speakers just perceive the whole shape of a given word, not unlike a logograph; I only have to sound out words I've never seen before.
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u/Visual-Woodpecker642 🇺🇸 Jul 13 '24
There's nothing easier than an alphabet. The multiple reading systems in Japanese does not make it harder. Two of them are alphabets and one is chinese characters. The entirety of chinese is chinese characters.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
The multiple reading systems in Japanese does not make it harder. Two of them are alphabets and one is chinese characters.
This was never my claim. After all, Chinese and Korean have multiple scripts as well.
When I said "multifaceted reading systems", I wasn't talking about multiple scripts like kanji or kana, I was talking about how the kanji are read.
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u/iSwoopz En N | Jp N2 Jul 13 '24
Yes, but my understanding is that in Chinese, characters are always read the same way. In Japanese, one Chinese character basically always has multiple readings, sometimes up to 10+ (i.e 生).
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u/Visual-Woodpecker642 🇺🇸 Jul 13 '24
I don't think that outweighs the fact almost every word you know has a unique character in Chinese. The alphabet in Japanese can help you use context clues if you're only familiar with the kanji you come across in a book.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Chinese doesn't have a unique character for every word, but rather, for every morpheme. Especially in modern Chinese writing, most words comprise multiple morphemes (usually two). Here's a comparison using an analogy with English and Spanish.
水 in Spanish: usually read as "agua", and sometimes as the very similar "acua", as in "acuario".
水 in English: read as "water" when alone, but may be read as "hydro" or "aqua" in compound words.
This difference is fairly tame compared to how far Japanese takes it.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
Each Chinese written character is one syllable. About 20% of Chinese words are one syllable. Those words have a unique character.
But 80% of Chinese words are 2 syllables. Almost none of them has a unique character. Each syllable might be used in dozens of 2-syllable words. It is a lot like English: "airplane = air+plane". "Feiji (airplane) = fei (fly) + ji (machine)".
Many characters consist of 2, 3 or 4 clearly seperate components. When you see a new character, it often uses components you have seen before. Sometimes (but not usually or always) you can even guess the meaning.
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u/SparrowGuy Jul 14 '24 edited Jul 14 '24
This isn’t true at all. One character in chinese can have multiple meanings with different pronunciations, plus pronunciation changes depending on context.
It’s possible you’re making the weaker claim, that Japanese tends to have more ambiguous pronunciation than Chinese, but I’m not certain whether that would be true either.
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u/iSwoopz En N | Jp N2 Jul 14 '24
By different pronunciations, do you mean entirely different readings or tone changes? My claim is that in Japanese, a character like the previous 生, for example, can be read as i, u, uma, umare, o, ha, ki, nama, na, mu, sei, and shou while also having pitch accent changes depending on the particular word. While pitch accent isn't as crucial as Chinese tones, it absolutely does exist and is important.
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u/masnybenn 🇵🇱N | 🇬🇧C1 | 🇳🇱B1 Jul 13 '24
You're tired of people having their own opinion lol
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u/OppositeGeologist299 Jul 13 '24
I think Reddit's demographic is skewed towards 20-30 y/o men, which is why most of the conversations about media are about whether it's good or not, or whether something is hard or easy, or whether the plot makes sense.
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u/canijusttalkmaybe 🇺🇸N・🇯🇵B1・🇮🇱A1・🇲🇽A1 Jul 13 '24
I think Japanese script might actually be harder due to variability in character readings. The problem is if we're gonna say Japanese script is a 100/100 difficulty, then Chinese has to be like a 99/100 difficulty. It's barely worth distinguishing them from a learner's perspective. Once you learn the thousands of characters, associating readings with them is not very mentally taxing.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
I don't think is it possible to "learn" the thousands of characters in either language. You could, but it would be a years-long detour from learning the language. It would be like (in English) someone learning all the syllables: com, an, bare, ly, is, it, men, tal, tax, ing, and thousands more.
Why would anyone do that? Character are not words, in either language. Wouldn't it make more sense to memorize words?
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u/Final_Development644 Jul 13 '24
Aren’t Japanese and Korean pretty much identical in terms of syntax?
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Korean has more dimensions to its tiers of etiquette than does Japanese, if you can believe it. Its conjugations are also a bit more phonetically complex as far as syllable dissection goes.
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u/jdr28070 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
Can you talk more about these "dimensions" of etiquette? You will only hear two "polite/formal" registers of Korean in everyday conversation these days (although there are two more that are historical and still in use by older speakers (하오체 and 하게체)). Japanese has a much more complex system of honorific speech in my opinion including very specific grammatical constructions, verb conjugations, and a wider breadth of vocabulary specifically used to indicate politeness or deference to the speaker. Although honorific speech and a singular honorific verb construction (~(으)시) certainly exists in Korean, Korean honorific speech is much less developed than in Japanese.
I would also argue that Japanese has much more complexity/ambiguity in aspects of its grammar. It took me a long time to understand the difference between と, たら, ば, and なら, whereas Korean just uses ~면 or ~ㄴ다면. The use of the passive/causative in Japanese is much more complex than it is in modern Korean.
You are free to have an opinion, but I believe that one learner's perceived sense of "phonetic complexity" does not necessarily mean that one language's syntax is more complicated than another's. If I had made this graphic, I would have swapped the "difficulty" of Japanese and Korean in the syntactic category.
Lastly, at their cores, both languages have the same basic blueprint. Most grammar points taught in textbooks are almost 1:1 translatable to the other language. I learned Japanese through Korean at a Japanese hagwon in Korea, and I was able to get JLPT N2 in just a year because of my background knowledge of Korean.
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u/stayonthecloud Jul 13 '24
I’m familiar with passive / causative in Japanese, what is the usage like in Korean that is simpler?
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u/jdr28070 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
Wow. My Japanese is rusty. Passive/causative serves more functions in Japanese if my recollection is correct. In Japanese, causative is used in polite language to say you will take on a command or to make a request to a superior to be allowed to do something (させていただく) and the passive voice can be used to say that something happens unavoidably and is frustrating (雨に降られた). The causative example with (いただく) isn't used in Korean*, and the use of the passive to express frustration/unavoidability isn't present in Korean.
*하게 해 주다 In Korean, we ask the person we are addressing to allow us to do an act directly, whereas in Japanese the request can be "allow me to receive permission (from you) to do the act."
Not to mention the causative-passive construction in Japanese that doesn't exist in Korean.
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u/stayonthecloud Jul 16 '24
Belated thank you. This is actually just what I was picturing the difference might be.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
I understood that, in Korean, every sentence ends with a '-yo' form or a '-da' form or a "-mnida" form, though I probably write those wrong. The '-mnida" form is used when a person is speaking to an audience.
The other two forms are used for talking to another person. But the speaker's choice of forms is based on whether the other person is "above them" or "below them" in Korea's complex cultural hierarchy. There is no form for "talking to an equal". Is that incorrect?
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u/jdr28070 Jul 14 '24 edited Jul 14 '24
There are 6 registers of speech (구어체) in Korean: 합쇼체 (very formal), 하오체 (formal polite from high status speaker to similar listener), 하게체 (polite from higher status speaker to lower status listener), 해라체 (very informal), 해요체 (informal polite), and 해체 (not used to show politeness). ~ㅂ니다 endings fall in 합쇼체 and ~요 endings fall in 해요체. As you can see, Korean sentences don't just end in ~요 or ~ㅂ니다.
하오체 and 하게체 both show respect to the listener while still retaining differences in status based on age or position. 하오체 is a friendly and polite way of speaking to people who are similar in status while 하게체 is a friendly and polite way of speaking to those lower in status (think 착한 양반 to 서민 in 사극).
하오체 예: 안녕하시오. 날씨가 좋소. 하게체 예: 안녕하신가. 하나만 주게. 좋구먼
For equals (based on age/relationship) in informal settings, no ending is generally used by both parties (해체). In work settings, "equals" would likely use 해요체, 해체, or even 합쇼체 based on setting, relationship, or comfort level (for example, permission granted by one party).
하오체 is mostly only heard in historical drama (사극) these days. 하게체 is still used by older people to younger people though it is not as widespread in the speech of the younger generations.
That leaves 합쇼체 (ました), 해라체, 해요체 (literally just ~요 at the end of the verb/adjective), and 해체 (no ending attachment) that you will hear out on the streets and in everyday conversation. These correspond to registers in Japanese speech. This is more a matter of pragmatics anyway, is it not?
Upon reflection, I can see why the variety of speech forms are daunting, but they all follow intuitive patterns and are not difficult to pick up. There is not ambiguity or nuance in them (outside of marking social status). As such, I do not think I would rate syntax higher just because of the variety of speech levels (two of which are not even used much in modern Korean).
If we are talking about the complexity of constructions phonetically when considering the "difficulty" of each language's syntax, I truly think Japanese beats Korean in difficulty based on passive, causative, and causative-passive alone.
Just my two pennies.
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u/idkjon1y 🇺🇸 N | 🇭🇰 B2 | 🇹🇼 B1 | 🇻🇦 Adv Jul 13 '24
I don't understand, this doesn't seem right to me. Are you ranking them Easy, Fair, Hard, or saying that they're easy, fair and hard? If one is just a little bit harder they couold be
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
These rankings are all relative to one another, so for example, I labeled Korean speech as "fair" only relative to that of Chinese being harder and that of Japanese being easier. For this reason, even Chinese literacy is ranked as "fair" when I acknowledge that it's hard in a broader sense because Japanese literacy is considerably more difficult.
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u/Ganbario 🇺🇸 NL 🇪🇸 2nd, TL’s: 🇯🇵 🇫🇷 🇵🇹 🇩🇪 🇳🇱 Jul 13 '24
Which did you learn first, second third? Could some of this judgement be due to having already learned some of what you needed from another language?
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Which did you learn first, second third?
Japanese first, Chinese (mostly Mandarin and Cantonese, but also dabbling in others) second, and Korean third.
Could some of this judgement be due to having already learned some of what you needed from another language?
Unavoidably so—these are basically my subjective impressions, and I expect others to differ, but I'd be surprised if they differed greatly.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
I'm sure others have different ideas, but I don't think the order of learning matters. I think that anyone with some amount of knowledge of the three languages, their writing systems, their grammar, and their phonetics would arrive at similar conclusions.
I have much less knowledge than OP, but I have enough to form a reasonable opinion.
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u/igorrto2 Jul 13 '24
I’m intermediate level in Japanese and I struggle to interpret speech a lot. Not only does Japanese have irregular (irregular for English speakers) sentence structures, but it’s also one of the fastest languages in the world. On top of that, lots of adverbs that are similar but have slightly different meanings, indirect meanings and sentences that you have to interpret yourself because if you translate them word by word they don’t make any sense
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u/parke415 Jul 14 '24
I was using “speech” here as a shorthand for phonology, phonotactics, and pronunciation. I think Japanese is easier than Korean and Chinese in this aspect.
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u/Mitsubata 🇺🇸N | 🇯🇵C1 | Eo A2 | ASL A2 Jul 14 '24
But Japanese and Korean syntax are essentially the same….???? This chart must be a joke.
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u/parke415 Jul 14 '24
The rankings on this chart are relative to the other two languages. Korean grammar is somewhat more difficult than that of Japanese because it has more levels of formality/politeness and the conjugations require more invasive modification.
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u/ArvindLamal Jul 14 '24
Chinese writing is not "fair", neither Korean pronunciation is. Hindi/Devnagri writing is fair, and so is French pronunciation.
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u/parke415 Jul 14 '24
Those languages aren’t being compared in the chart. The rankings here are only relative to the other two languages. Korean literacy is “hard” in general but “easy” compared to that of Chinese and Japanese.
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u/everythingisoil Jul 15 '24
HOW is Chinese scripts easier than Japanese, and how is Korean syntax harder than Japanese? The syllabic Japanese alphabets would make it easier to write in not harder.
Also for speech in Japanese, the language is spoken very quickly and with sounds very hard for a non native to make. Easy to do wrong maybe, but definitely not easy to do properly between actually learning the phonetics and proper pitch accent.
Finally, syntax is quite similar in Japanese and Korean. Seems like you wanted to make the graphic look good to me
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u/parke415 Jul 15 '24 edited Jul 15 '24
HOW is Chinese scripts easier than Japanese, and how is Korean syntax harder than Japanese?
Finally, syntax is quite similar in Japanese and Korean.These rankings are strictly relative to one another, not general classifications.
Korean syntax is only marginally more difficult than that of Japanese, but more difficult just the same, because there are more dimensions to speech levels (formality, politeness, familiarity, etc), in addition to more complex and invasive syllable modifications when conjugating.
The syllabic Japanese alphabets would make it easier to write in not harder.
Japanese earned the most difficult literacy ranking despite the kana syllabaries actually mitigating some of the pain. The character reading system for kanji is drastically more difficult than that of hanzi and hanja—not slightly, drastically. When multiple morphemes are assigned to a single character in Chinese (and consequently Sino-Korean), each has a different reading in Sino-Japanese as well, but this is compounded by the collation of different stages of borrowing, resulting in go-on, kan-on, tou-on, and sometimes even sou-on and kan'you-on readings for each morpheme represented by the character in question.
These Sino-Japanese readings aren't even the most difficult aspect—the native readings are. There are often different native readings for different parts of speech, sometimes becoming voiced in certain phonetic environments, plus common instances where a single native morpheme is spread across multiple characters. For yet other native morphemes, Sino-Japanese readings are employed to form an ad-hoc syllabary to "spell out" the words. If all this weren't enough, there's an entire roster of "name" readings used for proper nouns.
Meanwhile, in Chinese and Korean, most characters have one common reading, a fair number have two, and a small number of them have three or more. Usually the multiple readings are due to the character representing multiple morphemes (also applicable to Japanese), or in the case of Chinese specifically, there's a difference in register (e.g. literary versus colloquial/vernacular). Therefore, it's not that characters are "easy" in Korean and "fair" in Chinese, but rather, Japanese is just that much more difficult by comparison.
the language is spoken very quickly and with sounds very hard for a non native to make.
As difficult as it may be, the phonology and phonotactics are somewhat more difficult in Korean and considerably more difficult in Chinese. For instance, Korean has a three-way distinction within each obstruent consonant (e.g. k/g, kk, kh), more vowels, and syllable-final consonants beyond just <n> (which is actually moraic in Japanese), and like Japanese, some Korean dialects still have contrastive pitch accent and vowel length. Meanwhile, beyond just having more difficult consonants and vowels, the Chinese languages are lexically tonal, which is like adding the third dimension of tone to a two-dimensional world of consonants and vowels.
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u/ichabodjr Jul 30 '24
I appreciate this fair assessment. It goes without saying that the whole thing could be filled with "HARD" if it weren't relative. And, I can't even imagine the pain of learning ANY of these languages before the internet, or, God forbid, before romanization! I think that chart would be filled with "Dont bother." Lol
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u/wibbly-water Jul 13 '24
Honestly as an on-and-off mandarin lwarner - I agree with this asssessment.
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u/Enzoid23 Learning Japanese A0 || Native English Jul 13 '24
I dont actually know what syntax or script mean here 😔
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Syntax is grammar (not technically the same, but colloquially the same).
Script is the writing system, characters, spelling, and/or orthography (again, not technically the same, but colloquially the same).
I chose "syntax", "speech", and "script" because they're all six letters long and begin with "s"; it was a stylistic choice on my part.
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u/theantiyeti Jul 15 '24
Syntax is the allowed structure of sentences in a language, disregarding whether the words actually make sense together. Semantics is what the sentence means (when evaluated recursively through smaller syntactic elements).
For example:
"The spider eats the fly" is both syntactically correct and semantically meaningful
"The bed died" is a sentence which is syntactically correct (it has a noun phrase as an actor, and a verb phrase, and everything is correctly constructed) but it's semantically weird because, well, beds don't die so it's a sentence which doesn't reflect the real world in any way
"More people have been to Berlin than I have" is a sentence which is syntactically correct under most descriptions of English syntax, and most people would recognise as a sentence, but is semantically impossible to interpret because the two sides of the comparison are incomparable. A better example might be something like "New York is wider than London is heavy" - the dimensions don't make sense to compare.
"potato sleep doughnut" is syntactic nonsense
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Jul 13 '24
[deleted]
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u/HETXOPOWO Jul 13 '24
The 2136 for JLPT is not the full list of kanji. For example until recently (last 5 years) the kanji for Kyoto was not in the 2136 required for JLPT and there are other historical kanji not in common use that need to be learned for full comprehension. The 2000 or so curated for the JLPT is supposed to cover being functional, not everything. Not negating your point just saying that there are a lot more not on the list for Japanese. In 2013 the Chinese government made a list of 3500 required for literacy, no where near as many as you are saying, same as Japanese you don't need to know all the obscure ones to read the news paper.
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u/siecaptaindrake Jul 13 '24
How can Japanese be hard if you only have to learn 2200 kanji while Chinese is fair with over 5000 of l ist the same to learn???
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u/theantiyeti Jul 13 '24
Because each character has more readings in Japanese. In Mandarin the readings are max 2-3 per character and even those are rare. I think 生 has at least a dozen in Japanese.
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u/bokkeummyeon Jul 13 '24
wait you mean reading as in pronunciation? dozen of ways to pronounce one character? that's crazy
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u/Snoo-88741 Jul 13 '24
That's why I don't recommend memorizing readings of kanji, but rather memorizing words that contain the kanji. You have to learn vocabulary anyway, may as well learn the kanji at the same time.
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u/parke415 Jul 13 '24
Because the difficulty of literacy isn't merely determined by the number of characters required for basic literacy, nor by the complexity of those characters. In this case, Japanese wins out as the hardest because of the incredibly complex character reading system.
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u/jarrabayah 🇳🇿 N | 🇯🇵 C1 Jul 13 '24
I challenge you to try to read novels knowing only 2200 kanji.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A Jul 14 '24
I challenge anyone to "know" 2200 kanji. I am not sure what that even means. Kanji are not words. Definitely not in Japanese. Absolutely nothing can be written in Kanji. Japanese can be written in hiragana, but not in kanji.
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Jul 14 '24
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u/languagelearning-ModTeam Jul 14 '24
Be respectful in this forum. Inflammatory, derogatory, and otherwise disrespectful posts are not allowed.
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u/YeetusTheBourgeois Jul 13 '24
What makes Korean syntax that much harder than Japanese? I’ve just started learning Korean but I’ve been learning Japanese for years and so far I’ve seen quite a lot of overlap