For English Speaker, Korean or Japanese? [ Question Thread ]

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LWFlouisa
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For English Speaker, Korean or Japanese? [ Question Thread ]

Post by LWFlouisa »

I've been trying to learn Japanese at the moment, after having some issues learning a romance language. But I'm considering the idea of switching to Korean temporarily, as it's looking like my career might switch in that direction.

Language Difficulty
With Japanese, Hiragana and Katakana aren't insurmountable, provided I can find a good language app. But I'm fairly consistently mind boggled how much Kanji you have to learn.

Am I correct that the South Korean dialect doesn't have the same issue? It seems like Hangul has 38 characters as a whole.

Language Ambiguities
The other one is: I know South Korean is more complex than Japanese in terms of levels politeness. Are there similar ambiguities in the South Korean dialect of Korean, similar to situations I've had in Japanese?:

A friend asks me if I know any words that end in the Japanese symbol for N, and I mention all I can think of is Chan. But even though I mean that as just a word I found, it interpreted as my calling him Chan, which isn't something I generally do.

In short: How easy is it to establish the distinction between calling someone a rank lower than they are, and simply saying you found a word, and aren't necessarily calling them that.

How much does context help in situations like these?
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LinguistCat
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Re: For English Speaker, Korean or Japanese? [ Question Thread ]

Post by LinguistCat »

LWFlouisa wrote: 09 Dec 2022 17:47 A friend asks me if I know any words that end in the Japanese symbol for N, and I mention all I can think of is Chan. But even though I mean that as just a word I found, it interpreted as my calling him Chan, which isn't something I generally do.

In short: How easy is it to establish the distinction between calling someone a rank lower than they are, and simply saying you found a word, and aren't necessarily calling them that.

How much does context help in situations like these?
As someone who speaks a little Japanese but am not fluent yet, your example confuses me because I can't think of a way the exchange could go where that would be a possible interpretation. Not to say there isn't a way. Again, not fluent. But it feels like you might have misunderstood something about the language already. The only way of using chan to call someone that is to append it to their name, Ex Marumaru-chan. You don't just call someone "chan" as the same way of using miss or mister in English. So I'd say this isn't even a matter of context, but how the word itself is used.

I think context would be needed more for words that are said basically the same but have the same meaning, but that's true for every language with homophones. There are just more homophones in Japanese than in most other languages.

Unfortunately, I can't help with how Korean compares.
LWFlouisa
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Re: For English Speaker, Korean or Japanese? [ Question Thread ]

Post by LWFlouisa »

LinguistCat wrote: 09 Dec 2022 21:27
LWFlouisa wrote: 09 Dec 2022 17:47 A friend asks me if I know any words that end in the Japanese symbol for N, and I mention all I can think of is Chan. But even though I mean that as just a word I found, it interpreted as my calling him Chan, which isn't something I generally do.

In short: How easy is it to establish the distinction between calling someone a rank lower than they are, and simply saying you found a word, and aren't necessarily calling them that.

How much does context help in situations like these?
As someone who speaks a little Japanese but am not fluent yet, your example confuses me because I can't think of a way the exchange could go where that would be a possible interpretation. Not to say there isn't a way. Again, not fluent. But it feels like you might have misunderstood something about the language already. The only way of using chan to call someone that is to append it to their name, Ex Marumaru-chan. You don't just call someone "chan" as the same way of using miss or mister in English. So I'd say this isn't even a matter of context, but how the word itself is used.

I think context would be needed more for words that are said basically the same but have the same meaning, but that's true for every language with homophones. There are just more homophones in Japanese than in most other languages.

Unfortunately, I can't help with how Korean compares.
That actually helps considerably. Thank you.
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DesEsseintes
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Re: For English Speaker, Korean or Japanese? [ Question Thread ]

Post by DesEsseintes »

I’ve studied both languages and personally find Korean harder due to nuances in pronunciation that to me are more challenging than anything in Japanese.

The grammars of the two languages are quite comparable. I don’t think the politeness registers and honorifics in Korean are any more complex than in Japanese. In fact, I think Japanese might be the trickier one in this respect.

Kanji was not a problem for me since I know Chinese, but you can learn Korean without bothering with Hanja so that helps.
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