As we are aware
of top Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. They are not only
known as top influencing languages across Asia, but also they are leading
worldwide in their technological innovation and advancement.
As China, Japan
and Korean continues to record their robust economic growth, and thus there is
a huge demand of Japanese, Korean, Chinese interpreters
and translators. According to a survey, there are
more than 50,000 people in China learning Japanese these days and 40 million
people are studying Chinese language worldwide and similarly also
learning Korean but not in huge percentage than Chinese and Japanese.
Here we would
find the similarity and difference among these three languages. As we know these
languages are considered as top Asian languages worldwide. If we talk about
Chinese then obviously Chinese is considered as the world difficult languages
in writing, reading and speaking
As far as we
know that Chinese, Korean and Japanese are very similar in some respects. There
will be some resemblance in vocabulary, since both Japanese and Korean borrowed
heavily from Chinese at various times in the past.
Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean are three unrelated languages that do not share any common
origin nor belong each other, as far as it’s been confirmed. They are mutually
unintelligible. However, Japanese and Korean are the closest to each other.
This is because the two share several pretty unique similarities not found in
other languages. Chinese, on the other hand, is a completely different language
from Japanese and Korean, but it has highly influenced them, particularly in
vocabulary and writing.
looking typologically, Chinese would probably be the odd-man
out. Korean and Japanese have fairly simple pitch-accent systems
(basically almost the simplest tone system possible), while Mandarin and many of
the closely-related Chinese languages have contour tone systems (that is, not
just relative pitch between syllables, but also pitch contours — like a little
melody within the syllable). Also, most morphemes in Chinese are a single
syllable, whereas in Japanese and Korean they can be longer. Chinese also has
very little morphology, perhaps only allowing compounding, while Japanese and
Korean both have an array of inflectional and derivational suffixes.
Grammer:
Japanese and Korean share a very similar and unique grammatical structure that
is totally different from Chinese. As a result, Korean and Japanese sentences
are translatable word for word and the words used in the languages’ sentence
are placed in the same order, but not so with Chinese. Chinese sentences goes
by subject, verb, object while Japanese and Korean sentences both go by
subject, object, verb. Both Japanese and Korean also uses topic markers and
object markers that doesn’t exist in Chinese. The way to show inflection is the
same in both Japanese and Korean, both being agglutinative languages. Chinese
is not a agglutinative language and don’t use inflection at all.
Writing System: Modern Chinese and Japanese are closer to
each other in this category. Both uses Chinese characters in its writing
system. While Chinese uses only Chinese Characters, Japanese uses Chinese
characters along with hiragana and katakana. Interestingly, hiragana and
katakana were both Japanese invented, but were developed from Chinese
Characters. Korean is written with its own unique alphabet called hangul,
completely different from the Japanese and Chinese writing. Korean used Chinese
characters like Japanese all the way until the later parts of the 20th century,
so the older Korean language was similar with Japanese and Chinese. Now days,
Korean just use hangul.
Vocabulary: The three languages have common vocabulary.
Japanese and Korean borrowed a lot of words from Chinese. About 60% of vocab in
both languages are Chinese loanwords, but the amount used in everyday speech
may be much less. The vocabulary borrowed were changed to match Japanese and
Korean phonology. The vocabulary borrowed were from middle Chinese and not
modern Chinese and since then, so the pronunciation of the vocab can be
different today. Also, Japanese and Korean have native words that
linguists say might be related.
Many people get
confused by the fact that Japanese is partially written using Chinese
characters (kanji in Japanese). It should be noted that what
writing system a language uses doesn’t have any bearing on whether a language
is related to another. Hundreds upon hundreds of languages use the Latin
alphabet, but not all of those languages are related to Latin. You can
also note that a literate Chinese speaker would not be able to read Japanese
very easily — many of the characters have changed their meaning in Japanese,
and the syntax and morphology of Japanese are still totally different from
Chinese.
INCCS is the
only translation agency focusing on Chinese translation services requirements
of clients with diverse linguistic backgrounds. We undertake translation from
any language into Chinese and vice versa! Some language pairs we specialize in
other than English – Mandarin & Mandarin – English include, Chinese toJapanese Translation, Japanese to Chinese Translation, Korean toChinese Translation, Chinese to Korean Translation, French to
Chinese, Chinese to French, German to Chinese, Chinese to German, Japanese to
Chinese, Chinese to Japanese, Russian to Chinese, Chinese to Russian, Koran to
Chinese, Chinese to Korean, Italian to Chinese, Chinese to Italian, Turkic to
Chinese, Chinese to Turkic, Portuguese to Chinese, Chinese to Portuguese,
Spanish to Chinese, and Chinese to Spanish, Hindi to Chinese, and Chinese to
Hindi. To know all our language pairs,
