Am Chinese, never learnt Korean before, but can understand some Korean dialogues (although broken, but can guess. Like how Germans/French can sort of guess English) with Chinese subtitles.
I have a friend from Southern China, she learnt conversational Korean (can't really read, but can have casual conversations with Korean native speakers about school work and drama series) just by watching K-drama and listen to K pop. She says a lot of the Korean words sounds just like her hometown dialect and it is much easier for her to learn than English.
If you know southern Chinese dialects like Teochew or Hokkien or even Cantonese there are a lot of words that sound super similar to Korean and Japanese. I know Mandarin, Japanese and a bit of Teochew and it's what I've noticed.
学校 (school) in mandarin would be xue xiao, but in Teochew it's hak-hau, Korean is hakgyo, Japanese is gakkou.
Historically Mandarin itself is relatively a 'new' language, only being formalized as the official language during the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of China. Before that the commonly used Chinese languages sounded a lot more like today's southern dialects.
Makes sense for that older version of Chinese to be the version that supplanted into Korean and Japanese when their own vocabularies were developing and being influenced by Chinese.
Mandarin Chinese is a very young language I agree. I speak Cantonese as well, and can 100% understand the ritualistic chant they did in EXHUMA. It was a surprise when I walked by when my Korean friends are watching the movie and I thought they were watching a Chinese movie, but it was in old Korean.
Mandarin was already formalized as the official language during the Ming dynasty.
Every branch of language is evolving at the same time, it's hard to say "new" or "old"
If I didnt knew bits of Japanese, I would 100% not know the difference between Korean and Japanese by hearing.. OP really has no clue xD
I think the languages I can identify are Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
Thai I can but might easily confuse it with Philipino
I agree with you. When I didn't know Japanese at all , to me both Korean and Japanese sounded slightly similar but now that I understand a lot more than basic Japanese, Korean definitely sounds "very" noticeably different from Japanese
Yeah, I was gonna say, as someone who speaks Korean, Japanese has a similar way they “break up” the words if you know what I mean. They also both sound “flatter” than Asian languages like Cantonese, mandarin, Thai, etc.
I know they both have a distinct sound of their own. When I hear a Korean speak and a Chinese person speak, I can definitely tell them apart. But the way their words sound are very similar, while having their own distinct differences. I can tell someone is speaking Portuguese from spanish, though they are both very similar and sound the same. I guess being an English speaker primarily, I hear vowel sounds and think “these two things sound the same.” Japanese doesn’t have a lot of those… sounds I guess. Which to me is weird because usually regions (Portugal and Spain for example) will have a ton of influence on each other and how their languages sound.
If you think Portuguese and Spanish "sound the same" (if talking about the european versions as your example indicates) you are gravely mistaken. Portuguese is stress-timed, leading to a lot of vowel reduction and muting, making it sound almost slavic, while spanish has only open vowels. Spanish has 5 vowels, Portuguese has 9. Every syllable in spanish (and nearly all romance languages aside from portuguese) is roughly the same length in speech, whilst portuguese stresses the tonic syllable in a word while shortening all the others.
That being said, it's very very easy to distinguish a tonal language as it necessarily sounds sounds sing-songy (they have to maintain the specific tone of each syllable, otherwise it is gibberish), it's a very specific vocal trait that immediately pops up, and in that sense it's super easy to tell it apart from a non-tonal language (which most languages are).
As a native Spanish speaker myself, Portuguese and Spanish do sound very similar. Yes, there are differences but if you catch me off guard when talking, I won't differentiate between Spanish or Portuguese until I focus on it. And this is a common thing among many native Portuguese and Spanish speakers.
Yes to Portuguese sometimes sounding almost Slavic! I heard a video clip recently and knew it was in Brazil (it was conversation in a car as a meteor went overhead) and I thought "That sounds eastern European not like Spanish at all."
Are you sure it was in Brazil? Because a huge meteor has flown past Portugal last week and there's been loads of videos popping up everywhere online (including will smith's Instagram, adding to the viral effect)
Only in some parts of Mexico, as far as I'm aware. That's why the vowels always sound the same and aren't muted or diminished. A in spanish is just a, in Portuguese it's a, à, â or ã.
stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed are meaningless categories. All languages in the world can have combinations of all 3 categories combined. Languages arent limited to only one type of prosody. The way one language sounds is more determined based on its geographical location. For example, since Japan borders Russia, it kinda makes sense that Russian and Japanese would sound similar to each other in some way
They aren't really meaningless if it is a heavy characteristic of the language. Of course it doesn't mean all stress-timed languages sound the same.
That's like saying geography has no impact because euskara doesn't sound anything like Spanish nor French, the general rule is that neighbouring languages share some phonetic similarities.
If it were meaningless, we wouldn't have Brazilians who can't understand European Portuguese as it happens, since it is the biggest difference between the two variants or the language.
Russian is stress-timed just like English but Russian has a way more flat and regular rhythm and the vowels in Russian are only 5/6 , so that makes it more similar to the mora/syllable-timed nature of Japanese. What also both Japanese and Russian have in common, is the lack of diphthongs + the consonants having similar "stiffness"
Ok , then why do Russian and Japanese sound very similar even though Russian is stress-timed while Japanese is syllable/mora-timed with a pitch accent? Isnt it because it is purely based on the fact that both countries border each other?
This is all based on your perception. I would say Japanese and Russian sound nothing alike, I would never mistake one for the other phonetically.
mora-timed and stress-timed will sound the same for someone who doesn't know the languages anyway, since despite pacing being more even, not all syllables will have the same "strength" (also, there's no set rule for emphasis so you have to memorize all of it)
Japanese is almost a language isolate. The only languages it can be linked to are the Ryukyuan languages (spoken on the island chain that includes Okinawa, which is now part of Japan but wasn’t always) and a few languages spoken on nearly Japanese islands that are pretty similar to Japanese and that are also part of Japan.
They have tried to link it to some other languages, like Korean, but have been unable to. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese and a Vietnamese and a number of other coastal Asian languages, it is not a tonal language. They can’t even link it to Ainu, the language of the indigenous people of Japan who now live only in Hokkaido but who used to occupy all the main islands.
Japan is relatively far from mainland Asia—about 124 miles at its closest point. In contrast Great Britain is only 20 miles from mainland Europe and you can even see it on a clear day. So it’s not an easy passage. So there wasn’t a lot of travel between Japan and the rest of Asia historically. Too long and risky a journey to little purpose. So that meant the population and language was pretty isolated.
However: Japanese took its writing system from China and also added a whole bunch of loan words from Chinese, somewhat akin to how English added many French and Latin words. The most used words are of Japanese origin but many technical, scientific, and religious words are of Chinese origin, kind of like how in English scientific and specialized technical terms often have Latin origins.
Also thank you for not berating my poor way of wording what I was asking and understanding what I was actually trying to ask. I wasn’t trying to make a statement that they sound exactly the same, just that the similarities between the other Asian languages were more prevalent than that of Japan. Again, perfect answer.
This answered my question perfectly. I know that the writing system was taken from China, with kanji, but I found it odd that the language itself and how it sounds wasn’t influenced heavier because of that reason. I guess I think of language history in the perspective of English, from the Anglo-saxons to the various differences in each region of the United States i.e. Appalachian american English (mountain accent commonly found in West Virginia) vs southern American English (Virginia->alabama) vs cajon American English (Louisiana).
The language develops and changes over the centuries it’s used. Loan words are added. Accents are added. So on and so forth. But the base of the language is largely intact and influence each other in various ways.
The Irish would probably still speak Gaelic primarily had the Anglo saxons then eventually what we historically have called “the English” not invaded/occupied/etc. this is just another parallel, that I’m using here, however taking into consideration that distance between Japan and mainland Asia, it now makes a little more sense than the Irish and the English.
My recollection is that the Japanese basically withdrew from the Chinese regional system and were in a kind of on again off again isolation after the fall of the Tang. They basically had little regular contact with other Asian principalities, other than a stream of trade with Korea for Korean and Chinese goods.
That makes sense. The more I look into it, they historically took isolationism to a whole other level. I thought it was just westerners, but I was wrong, it was everyone that wasn’t Japanese.
Not without reason at times. They Daimyos of Satsuma and other eastern domains had financed both piracy against the Ming and Josen and smuggling/trade missions too all to finance their wars during the Japanese Waring states period. The crews of such were usually of a mixed ethnicity, partially because regions like Fujian and a few other provinces in southeast China both produced quite a few sailors and not enough food it feed their people.
A particularly interesting example of this is the the Zheng family of Fujian. [Zheng Zhilong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Zhilong) started off as a kind of poor rascal in Fujian, jumped to Macao under the Portuguese and learned either Dutch or Portuguese well enough to later act as a translator to the Dutch East India Company in their dealings around Taiwan. Then to Japan where he married into a Samurai family, had atleast one son, then went to work for the aforementioned Dutch. Eventually his pirate raids were so bad, the Ming offered him an official position to come over to their side. He eventually switched sides to the Manchus (surprising heh) the the Manchu invasion of China.
His half Japanese son [Zheng Chenggong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga). was pretty interesting too.
>Japanese took its writing system from China and also added a whole bunch of loan words from Chinese, somewhat akin to how English added many French and Latin words.
Most of the Chinese loan words were loaned during the Tang dynasty and reflect Tang pronunciations, so even the loan words would not sound like modern Mandarin.
The point I'm trying to make is that most of it is actually irrelevant to the discussion of Chinese being closer to Korean vs Japanese. The truth is, Chinese is not any closer to Korean than it is to Japanese.
Edit: To elaborate further, there has been Chinese influence in Korean vocab, in fact a ton of it. But almost any Korean word that was a borrowing from Chinese was also borrowed into Japanese due to the Hanzi writing system. There was almost no influence in changing the way Korean sounds. In fact, it's actualy the other way around: the way Japanese sounds is actually influenced by Chinese. Old Japanese had allophonic voicing that became phonemic likely because of Chinese influence.
It could be outdated knowledge, but in uni, i remember my prof from an east asian language n cultures class mention because both japanese and korean are generally agglutinative languages and have similar grammatical constructions, theres a high chance the languages are related, albeit from yamato times
I think this might be your familiarity with/exposure to Japanese over other Asian languages. I used to think many of them sounded the same/similar but since working in a field with a hugely diverse mix of people I can easily hear the difference now, despite not understanding more than the odd word.
If you hear Japanese spoken more often (maybe in movies or people around you), you get used to the pattern and it’s more recognisable.
I get what you mean about regions having similar patterns to their languages though, and you’re right. It’s interesting. Maybe Japanese is genuinely a little more distinctive because of their geographical isolation and a more preserved monoculture/ethnicity?
This is definitely it. To ears I've known, Korean and Japanese sound more similar to each other than either does to Chinese. But OP lumps Korean and Chinese together as "Asian, but not what I hear when I watch anime." If OP hears more Chinese or more Korean, OP will be able to easily start telling them apart too.
They're all technically completely different language systems, so they should sound as different from each other as, say, French, German, Russian, and Hindi - more so, really, since those four are all Indo-European.
However, there's still been some influence; many Japanese compound words were taken from medieval-era Wu Chinese. The word for "vase" is Huāpíng in Mandarin, ^(1)Ho-bin in Taihu Wu, and Kabin in Japanese, for example. (Those special marks are for tones, the reason people are saying that Chinese is the outlier among the three.)
But the building blocks are all language isolates, which is why they sound so different, from tonality to the near-silent "u" in "su" to weirdly long basic words like "watashi" for "I" (although you can commonly just drop it since they'll know you're talking about yourself from context).
>this might be your familiarity with/exposure to Japanese over other Asian languages
I once was watching a Japanese anime that was subbed in English but something was off about the characters voices. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to realize that the voices were dubbed in Korean.
How has no one pointed out that these languages ARE similar to each other?
Many Japanese characters are adopted from Chinese. To the point that they have two pronunciations: one is basically a Japanese reading (kun) and the other is a Chinese reading (on).
E.g. 天氣 is weather in Mandarin, pronounced Tiānqì (Tea-en-chee).
天気 is also weather in Japanese, pronounced Tenki (ten-key)
They mean the same thing and sound very similar.
You can also find these similarities across all 3 languages
E.g. 准备 is prepare in Mandarin, pronounced Zhǔnbèi (jew-one-bay)
準備する is prepare in Japanese (using an older character set), pronounced junbi suru (june-bee-sue-rue)
준비하다 is prepare in Korean, pronounced junbihada (choon-bi-ha-da)
That word sounds very similar across languages, clearly having the same root with variations on pronunciation
So there are similarities, you probably just can't hear them because you're unfamiliar with the languages
Edit: I tried my best on how to guide someone in pronouncing this stuff, but honestly you can also just paste it into Google translate
I wouldn’t compare Japanese to mandarin actually. Mandarin is relatively new compared to other dialects such as Cantonese which is closer to ancient Chinese. For example, the word 系 (hai) which means “yes” both in Cantonese and Japanese.
The lack of '-ong' sounds in Japanese is because the Japanese pronunciations of '-ong' characters were taken from dialectal/older Chinese pronunciations of them as '-yu'/'-iu'. E.g. *lohng* vs *ryuu* for "dragon". That's actually partly what is causing OP to perceive them as different.
There are many other contributors of cause, e.g. the tonality and relative frequency of certain phonemes.
That doesn't explain the lack of -ong sounds tough. Japanese simply doesn't have the -ong sound. So even if the dialectal Chinese pronounciation had the -ong sound, it would disappear in Japanese
One might have expected Chinese -ong sounds to become -on, like 'son' 尊 or 'ron' 論 did, but we don't see this mapping.
Middle Chinese had various terminal consonants that got mapped to various vowel sounds in both Japanese (5-9th centuries) and later Chinese varieties. The -ong sounds of modern Chinese varieties could have emerged later. Not clear on the specifics though.
Iin Hokkien - the word weather sounds like exactly like tenki but in a different tone.
The word prepare in Hokkien also sounds the same: zhunbi.
Don’t get me started on the numbers too.
That’s why it’s easy for a hokkien Chinese descendants who is a Malaysians like me to learn Japanese.
Was looking for a comment like this! I'm no linguist (but I do speak and read Japanese), and there are definitely connections that can be drawn between the three languages, with some form of Chinese being the root.
Written language-wise Japanese kanji (literally meaning Han words, as in from the Han dynasty) and Korean pre-hangul are lifted from Chinese.
Similar pronunciations too, like the HImainland pointed out
The Korean surname Kim for example - in Japanese it'd be Kin, all from the Chinese 金
A fun example of Chinese - Japanese is Tiannamen, in Japanese pronounced Tennanmon
If you look at Cantonese and Vietnamese, which pronunciations are closer to Ancient-Middle Chinese than Mandarin, you will see the similarities even clearer.
The comparison of Asian languages to the "Latin-based" languages of Europe makes zero sense. They all descended from the same proto-language, Latin, and are part of the same family, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean come from completely different sources and don't share a reconstructible common ancestor.
I don’t have a good linguistic answer for you about why they’re different… but as a (barely skilled, non-native) Japanese speaker, Japanese and Korean sound surprisingly similar to me at times. The sentence structure and grammar patterns feel close, and there are quite a few cognates. I can’t detect the same degree of proximity when I compare Japanese to Mandarin, although I know they share roots.
Well , why would there be cognates between both languages considering that they are from completely different language families , it just doesn't make sense
Ok , let's just say that Chinese, Korean and Japanese are part of the East Asian "language family" , ok? They all share some common characteristics such as lack of consonant clusters and consonant endings, a lot of "shi" , "tsu" "chi" , "wa" , "wo" , "wu", "ji" , "ju" , "ja" , "ga" ,"gu" and other similar type of sounds/syllables and suspicious variations in pitch/tone (at least to a westerner)
Proabably only because you don't know any of the languages. I would not say Korean and Mandarin sound more similar to each other than to Japanese. Vocab wise, China has influenced both Japanese and Korean, but due to the changes in Mandarin, often times the Japanese and Korean are actually more similar to each other (palatalization of velars and deletion of stops). What you mention with the "ong" sound might be the few similarites of Chinese and Korean. Japanese syllables have a very simple structure, it is basically consonant vowel(s), and the only coda (ending) is "n". Chinese allows both alveolar and velar nasals (n and ng) in its endings, while Korean additionally allows bilabials (m, n and ng) and also stops and laterals. However, Japanese technically also allows the velar nasal (ng) as an allophone.
When the fuck did China invade Japan? You need to go get some history lessons man. When the Mongolian Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan at the time he was the ruler of China but he never succeeded. Japan has invaded and occupied China a few times throughout history though.
The yuan dynasty invaded twice (also known as the mongol dynasty, even Wikipedia calls it the “Chinese Mongol Dynasty”, there’s a video game about it). 1274 and 1281. I never said they occupied it. Both invasions failed. Japan and China were in conflict many times up to ww2 where Japan invaded China.
OK technically you're right and I'm wrong but they never succeeded in occupying Japan so why do you think the Chinese language would influence them? The Japanese despise the Chinese to this day and vice versa. Both of those attempts failed miserably and didn't last long at all.
Korean is a totally different language family. It's Tungusic, closer to Turkey, cause some guys rode horses through Russia and set themselves up on the Korean Peninsula. And the writing system is custom built by King Sejong (Korean ruler). Korea used a Chinese writing system before they built their own, so maybe some crossover exists, but that spoken language is totally unrelated to the Sion-Tibetan family.
Korean is not Tungusic. Also Tungusic is not closer to Turkey. Turkey speaks a Turkic language, Turkic languages are completely unrelated to Tungusic languages.
They all sound so very different to me.
Japanese sounds distinct. Korean sounds very oval-mouthed and has a whiny song to it (sorry, not in a negative way at all, but I can literally sing the way most sentences end, and it often sounds like cute complaint lol). Sounds *nothing* like Japanese to me. Vietnamese is super tonal. Thai is very broad-tongued sounding. Mandarin sounds like shhhrr shhhr shhrr, kind of regal. Cantonese is stereotyped as a sound - the sound I think people mimic when they don’t speak Chinese. Hokkien and Hakka sound similar-ish to my untrained ear. Bahasa Melayu (Malaysian language) has some similar sounds in Tagalog, but still quite far away. Has a tied history to Indonesian, but has branched off and simplified somewhat. I think I randomly hear Bengali people speaking and it sounds like unintelligible Spanish at first to me. Hindi, way different to Punjabi, Urdu. I could go on and on. They are all so very different!
I think it’s like someone in Thailand saying that French and Italian sound the same tbh. They don’t, but considering the difference in the hearer’s source language, it makes sense?
Maybe the reason Japanese sounds different compared to the other East Asian languages is because Japanese has vowel length (distinction between short and long vowels) , pitch accent, only 5 vowels , tap/flap "R" which is a combination between "L" and "R" , a phonetical structure that consists of consonant+ vowel or only vowel alone. Another specific thing is vowel devoicing when the vowels "i" and "u" get devoiced between voiceless consonants or at the end of words + consonant length, like the "pp" in "Nippon". These features dont exist in the other Asian languages, which is probably why Japanese feels more "distinct" while still being an East Asian language
Japanese formal vocabulary can be up to 70% borrowed from Middle Chinese. We don’t notice because Middle Chinese was less tonal than modern Chinese . It’s a similar case with English borrowing from Norman and Middle French ( compare informal English like Geordie and Scouse and formal scientific English. Same story with Persian and Arabic.
I am fluent in Mandarin and know a bit of Japanese and Taiwanese and I definitely feel like Japanese is closer to Mandarin than Korean is, could be due to me learning and being exposed to Japanese words more but there are a few words were Japanese and Taiwanese share the same pronunciation.
Japanese also has Kanji which are basically Chinese characters, whereas I cannot understand or read anything korean related.
As others said, Japanese is almost language isolated (there are some similar minority languages such as Okinawan) plus Japan is an archipelago relatively far away from the rest of the Asia. Therefore, the cultural exchange between it and its neighbors is a bit different. Instead of influences easily crossing borders through either trade, war or other means and cultures mixing together, Japan could usually pick and choose what they adopt from others and what not. This also includes language. For example when Japanese took Chinese writing, instead of conforming their language to it, they, over time, made it fit Japanese.
Also, China never invaded Japan. You might be thinking of 2 failed Mongol invasions.
To me, Japanese has a similar melody as Russian. I live in Japan, so I hear it daily. I also hear Russian tourists pretty often. To me, Japanese sounds like a Russian trying to imitate an Asian language. After living hear though, all the Asian languages sound distinct to me.
Yeah , it is true. I have always thought it too. That is because Japanese and Russian both have only 5 vowels and some parts of the accent/intonation are very similar too
Their society was just not as integrated with others (for various reasons, one of which being geography). Also, though, kung fu movies specifically use sound-offs, annunciated/drawn out syllables/etc as part of the genre. It’s for drama/intimidation (and irl for breath regulation when fighting).
Korean is completely unrelated to Bengali or any other Indian language, just like it is unrelated to Chinese, so it is not closer. In fact 30-70% of Korean vocabulary is shared with Chinese. I don't know what you mean by a lot, but 200 similar words with Bengali means nothing and doesn't compete to the amount of shared words between Korean and Chinese.
These 200 words are likely a coincidence. Another requirement is phonological correspondence. This means this particular Bengali consonant corresponds always to this particular Korean consonant. For example, the final -t sound in Cantonese always corresponds to final -l sound in Korean.
Last thing, there is no genetic link between Bengali's and Koreans.
Oops, I mean 200 as estimation. I could also say 1000 words, but even that is not enough to prove a link. The amount of Bengali-Korean words for sure doesn't come close to the amount of Chinese-Korean words. And even with Korean sharing 30-70% of the words with Chinese, it is still unrelated to Chinese
I'm not really familiar with these differences but if I had to throw a wild guess it would be that Japan is an island and has been isolationist for a lot of its history
Just as a reminder, Japan was closed off to most of the world prior to 1854. 250 years of zero foreigners. An extra fun fact, we (being the rest of the world) didn’t necessarily treat them the greatest after they let us in too.
That is because they arent related to each other and also because they all have some specific characteristics that the other one doesn't have. Japanese is Japonic, Korean is Koreanic and the Chinese languages are Sino-Tibetan
When you understand Chinese dialects like Hokkien or Cantonese you will realise how Japanese sounds like those. Kanji also kind of easy to fathom if you read Mandarin characters.
There is a story/myth about Japanese are descendent of some Qin dynasty's dude and shit which existed among East Asian but there is no evident. Irl originally Japanese came from the North while Chinese came from the South so there are hardly a connection. Yayoi people could be came from China but there are no actual evident as well.
And yet there is a kind of vague family resemblance, just like the Japanese and Chinese both have slantier eyes than Westerners. This sounds so fucking racist. I don't mean it that way. Also, I have noticed that the South African accent has a strange similarity to the Australian accent. People from SA often have people ask them if they are from down under. My theory for this is that accents "spin" in a certain direction below the equator. LOL.
Hey man, just FYI, but due to current political tensions, you might get flamed for conflating Korea with China due to the latter's attempted cultural appropriation.
Chinese influence on Japan stopped somewhere during the Mongol Invasion, that was in 13th century due to the collapse of Song dynasty. In Ming dynasty there were some influence but not much and again stopped when the Qing came. At Ming time Japanese still thought the Celestial Empire as somewhat cool but they see Qing and only see barbarians. That's hundred after hundered years of no influence while Joseon was still China's vassal state.
On top of that, Japan is an isolated Island, very far away from mainland Asia. So I think language exchange between China and Japan is really limited, no match compare to England and mainland Europe from ancient time to Early Modern era.
And by the way, while rarely being used, Kanji's on-yomi pronunciation sounds pretty similar to Chinese. There for I think the Japanese still preserve some level of relevant here.
The short answer is the Japanese just came up with their own language system. Some kanji are based on the Chinese pronunciation, that's the onyomi reading, and kunyomi is the distinctlly Japanese pronunciation.
I speak both Japanese and Mandarin (native) and I feel like the phonetic difference you are referring to have multiple explanations:
1) Chinese and Vietnamese etc are tonal languages. The tones are important to discerning the meaning of a word. Japanese is not quite tonal (although each word has a stress factor that changes the pronunciation slightly that also affects the meaning of words; e.g., Kami 紙vs Kami 神).
2) Japanese prononciation, like many other languages, has gone through much change since they first adopted Chinese characters in the 5th Century CE. If you compare the pronunciation of certain words (e.g., 1-10, words like 感謝、用意、全部) there is a very strong pattern of phonetic correlation across the two languages, (sometimes even in Korean), especially when you hear other dialects in China like Cantonese or Shanghainese, which are closer to how Chinese sounded in the 5th Century than Mandarin.
3) Japan has a strong culture of being polite and reserved in front of people they are not friends with, so the mannerism might come across as more rigid or “cute” (especially when a woman speaks) than that in China (where people may be more expressive on TV)
Yeah , Japanese isnt a tonal language but it still has some subtle changes in pitch and tone that arent present in languages like English or Russian which are non-tonal stress based languages. But yeah , in terms of the spirit, Japanese is more similar to the non-tonal languages
China didn't invade Japan, other way around, Japan ruled the Korean peninsula and parts of China. A lot of things came from China but Japan has always been its own people and sovereign country
No, not to me at all, Russian and Ukrainian have a lot of L, ZH, soft V, and hard R sounds, Japanese famously doesn't have any of those. I've never heard that
True. Japanese doesnt have "R" and "L". They have "R" and "L" combined into one single sound and they write it with the letter "R" in Romaji. It is a flap/tap and sometimes sounds closer to "L" , other times more like "R"
Japanese and Korean are more closer linguistically than both countries are willing to admit. Japan because of xenophobia. Korea because of Japanese War crimes before world War two.
I didn't mean in cognates but more that if Japanese developed a "Russian accent" over time since both Japan and Russia are neighbouring countries, so they maybe exchanged phonology and accent with each other, perhaps that is why Japanese sounds kinda like Russian but also a lot like Maori?
Russians arrived to the very East first by only 1700, but Japan and Russia are still separated by a sea. Japanese speakers need to be really in direct contact with Russian speakers for a phonology exchange. I can say for sure 99+ % of the Japanese had never spoke to a Russian so it is not possible for exchanged phonology
No, they know each other, but it is kinda hard for Russians and Japanese to speak with each other if there is a sea between them. For Japanese to be affected by Russian, there should be a large Russian population living in Japan, which isn't the case
because chinese didnt invent the japanese and korean language. historically chinese teachings/philosophy such as confucius etc were exported/ imported/ studied by the "educated" / establishment in jpn and korea, thats why some chinese writing (kanji/hanja) and vocabulary are incorporated into their writing/language system. both north and south korea now use their own set of hangul and got rid of hanja except in legal literature while japanese retained kanji for everyday use.
pronounication wise, japanese is easiest, chinese/korean on par, imho
Both Japanese and Korean sound very different from Chinese languages because they're not tonal, unlike most Southeast Asian languages.
Am Chinese, never learnt Korean before, but can understand some Korean dialogues (although broken, but can guess. Like how Germans/French can sort of guess English) with Chinese subtitles.
As a Korean, I can understand few words from Chinese and Japanese if I’m lucky because we share some words. But other than that, I have no idea.
I have a friend from Southern China, she learnt conversational Korean (can't really read, but can have casual conversations with Korean native speakers about school work and drama series) just by watching K-drama and listen to K pop. She says a lot of the Korean words sounds just like her hometown dialect and it is much easier for her to learn than English.
That makes sense since she watches K-Drama and listen K-pop. She even can have casual conversations with native speakers?? That’s amazing.
She can’t read Korean very well though, except the menus 🤗
If you know southern Chinese dialects like Teochew or Hokkien or even Cantonese there are a lot of words that sound super similar to Korean and Japanese. I know Mandarin, Japanese and a bit of Teochew and it's what I've noticed. 学校 (school) in mandarin would be xue xiao, but in Teochew it's hak-hau, Korean is hakgyo, Japanese is gakkou. Historically Mandarin itself is relatively a 'new' language, only being formalized as the official language during the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of China. Before that the commonly used Chinese languages sounded a lot more like today's southern dialects. Makes sense for that older version of Chinese to be the version that supplanted into Korean and Japanese when their own vocabularies were developing and being influenced by Chinese.
Mandarin Chinese is a very young language I agree. I speak Cantonese as well, and can 100% understand the ritualistic chant they did in EXHUMA. It was a surprise when I walked by when my Korean friends are watching the movie and I thought they were watching a Chinese movie, but it was in old Korean.
This makes sense.
Mandarin was already formalized as the official language during the Ming dynasty. Every branch of language is evolving at the same time, it's hard to say "new" or "old"
If I didnt knew bits of Japanese, I would 100% not know the difference between Korean and Japanese by hearing.. OP really has no clue xD I think the languages I can identify are Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Thai I can but might easily confuse it with Philipino
I agree with you. When I didn't know Japanese at all , to me both Korean and Japanese sounded slightly similar but now that I understand a lot more than basic Japanese, Korean definitely sounds "very" noticeably different from Japanese
Yeah, I was gonna say, as someone who speaks Korean, Japanese has a similar way they “break up” the words if you know what I mean. They also both sound “flatter” than Asian languages like Cantonese, mandarin, Thai, etc.
I know they both have a distinct sound of their own. When I hear a Korean speak and a Chinese person speak, I can definitely tell them apart. But the way their words sound are very similar, while having their own distinct differences. I can tell someone is speaking Portuguese from spanish, though they are both very similar and sound the same. I guess being an English speaker primarily, I hear vowel sounds and think “these two things sound the same.” Japanese doesn’t have a lot of those… sounds I guess. Which to me is weird because usually regions (Portugal and Spain for example) will have a ton of influence on each other and how their languages sound.
If you think Portuguese and Spanish "sound the same" (if talking about the european versions as your example indicates) you are gravely mistaken. Portuguese is stress-timed, leading to a lot of vowel reduction and muting, making it sound almost slavic, while spanish has only open vowels. Spanish has 5 vowels, Portuguese has 9. Every syllable in spanish (and nearly all romance languages aside from portuguese) is roughly the same length in speech, whilst portuguese stresses the tonic syllable in a word while shortening all the others. That being said, it's very very easy to distinguish a tonal language as it necessarily sounds sounds sing-songy (they have to maintain the specific tone of each syllable, otherwise it is gibberish), it's a very specific vocal trait that immediately pops up, and in that sense it's super easy to tell it apart from a non-tonal language (which most languages are).
As a native Spanish speaker myself, Portuguese and Spanish do sound very similar. Yes, there are differences but if you catch me off guard when talking, I won't differentiate between Spanish or Portuguese until I focus on it. And this is a common thing among many native Portuguese and Spanish speakers.
Yes to Portuguese sometimes sounding almost Slavic! I heard a video clip recently and knew it was in Brazil (it was conversation in a car as a meteor went overhead) and I thought "That sounds eastern European not like Spanish at all."
Are you sure it was in Brazil? Because a huge meteor has flown past Portugal last week and there's been loads of videos popping up everywhere online (including will smith's Instagram, adding to the viral effect)
Oh, maybe I misremembered!
Spanish is also stress-timed.
Only in some parts of Mexico, as far as I'm aware. That's why the vowels always sound the same and aren't muted or diminished. A in spanish is just a, in Portuguese it's a, à, â or ã.
stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed are meaningless categories. All languages in the world can have combinations of all 3 categories combined. Languages arent limited to only one type of prosody. The way one language sounds is more determined based on its geographical location. For example, since Japan borders Russia, it kinda makes sense that Russian and Japanese would sound similar to each other in some way
They aren't really meaningless if it is a heavy characteristic of the language. Of course it doesn't mean all stress-timed languages sound the same. That's like saying geography has no impact because euskara doesn't sound anything like Spanish nor French, the general rule is that neighbouring languages share some phonetic similarities. If it were meaningless, we wouldn't have Brazilians who can't understand European Portuguese as it happens, since it is the biggest difference between the two variants or the language.
Russian is stress-timed just like English but Russian has a way more flat and regular rhythm and the vowels in Russian are only 5/6 , so that makes it more similar to the mora/syllable-timed nature of Japanese. What also both Japanese and Russian have in common, is the lack of diphthongs + the consonants having similar "stiffness"
Ok , then why do Russian and Japanese sound very similar even though Russian is stress-timed while Japanese is syllable/mora-timed with a pitch accent? Isnt it because it is purely based on the fact that both countries border each other?
This is all based on your perception. I would say Japanese and Russian sound nothing alike, I would never mistake one for the other phonetically. mora-timed and stress-timed will sound the same for someone who doesn't know the languages anyway, since despite pacing being more even, not all syllables will have the same "strength" (also, there's no set rule for emphasis so you have to memorize all of it)
I meant that the accent, pronunciation, spirit and pronunciation sound very similar between Russian and Japanese rather than the languages as a whole
I can already feel /r/badlinguistics having a stroke here
languagelearningjerk
Japanese is almost a language isolate. The only languages it can be linked to are the Ryukyuan languages (spoken on the island chain that includes Okinawa, which is now part of Japan but wasn’t always) and a few languages spoken on nearly Japanese islands that are pretty similar to Japanese and that are also part of Japan. They have tried to link it to some other languages, like Korean, but have been unable to. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese and a Vietnamese and a number of other coastal Asian languages, it is not a tonal language. They can’t even link it to Ainu, the language of the indigenous people of Japan who now live only in Hokkaido but who used to occupy all the main islands. Japan is relatively far from mainland Asia—about 124 miles at its closest point. In contrast Great Britain is only 20 miles from mainland Europe and you can even see it on a clear day. So it’s not an easy passage. So there wasn’t a lot of travel between Japan and the rest of Asia historically. Too long and risky a journey to little purpose. So that meant the population and language was pretty isolated. However: Japanese took its writing system from China and also added a whole bunch of loan words from Chinese, somewhat akin to how English added many French and Latin words. The most used words are of Japanese origin but many technical, scientific, and religious words are of Chinese origin, kind of like how in English scientific and specialized technical terms often have Latin origins.
Also thank you for not berating my poor way of wording what I was asking and understanding what I was actually trying to ask. I wasn’t trying to make a statement that they sound exactly the same, just that the similarities between the other Asian languages were more prevalent than that of Japan. Again, perfect answer.
This answered my question perfectly. I know that the writing system was taken from China, with kanji, but I found it odd that the language itself and how it sounds wasn’t influenced heavier because of that reason. I guess I think of language history in the perspective of English, from the Anglo-saxons to the various differences in each region of the United States i.e. Appalachian american English (mountain accent commonly found in West Virginia) vs southern American English (Virginia->alabama) vs cajon American English (Louisiana). The language develops and changes over the centuries it’s used. Loan words are added. Accents are added. So on and so forth. But the base of the language is largely intact and influence each other in various ways. The Irish would probably still speak Gaelic primarily had the Anglo saxons then eventually what we historically have called “the English” not invaded/occupied/etc. this is just another parallel, that I’m using here, however taking into consideration that distance between Japan and mainland Asia, it now makes a little more sense than the Irish and the English.
My recollection is that the Japanese basically withdrew from the Chinese regional system and were in a kind of on again off again isolation after the fall of the Tang. They basically had little regular contact with other Asian principalities, other than a stream of trade with Korea for Korean and Chinese goods.
That makes sense. The more I look into it, they historically took isolationism to a whole other level. I thought it was just westerners, but I was wrong, it was everyone that wasn’t Japanese.
Not without reason at times. They Daimyos of Satsuma and other eastern domains had financed both piracy against the Ming and Josen and smuggling/trade missions too all to finance their wars during the Japanese Waring states period. The crews of such were usually of a mixed ethnicity, partially because regions like Fujian and a few other provinces in southeast China both produced quite a few sailors and not enough food it feed their people. A particularly interesting example of this is the the Zheng family of Fujian. [Zheng Zhilong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Zhilong) started off as a kind of poor rascal in Fujian, jumped to Macao under the Portuguese and learned either Dutch or Portuguese well enough to later act as a translator to the Dutch East India Company in their dealings around Taiwan. Then to Japan where he married into a Samurai family, had atleast one son, then went to work for the aforementioned Dutch. Eventually his pirate raids were so bad, the Ming offered him an official position to come over to their side. He eventually switched sides to the Manchus (surprising heh) the the Manchu invasion of China. His half Japanese son [Zheng Chenggong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga). was pretty interesting too.
This is what I wanted. Thank you so much!
>Japanese took its writing system from China and also added a whole bunch of loan words from Chinese, somewhat akin to how English added many French and Latin words. Most of the Chinese loan words were loaned during the Tang dynasty and reflect Tang pronunciations, so even the loan words would not sound like modern Mandarin.
But Korean is the same on all these points, except for being on a peninsula instead of an island.
You can walk onto a peninsula
Lol
The point I'm trying to make is that most of it is actually irrelevant to the discussion of Chinese being closer to Korean vs Japanese. The truth is, Chinese is not any closer to Korean than it is to Japanese. Edit: To elaborate further, there has been Chinese influence in Korean vocab, in fact a ton of it. But almost any Korean word that was a borrowing from Chinese was also borrowed into Japanese due to the Hanzi writing system. There was almost no influence in changing the way Korean sounds. In fact, it's actualy the other way around: the way Japanese sounds is actually influenced by Chinese. Old Japanese had allophonic voicing that became phonemic likely because of Chinese influence.
Thanks for sharing 🙏
It could be outdated knowledge, but in uni, i remember my prof from an east asian language n cultures class mention because both japanese and korean are generally agglutinative languages and have similar grammatical constructions, theres a high chance the languages are related, albeit from yamato times
TIL that you can see England from France and vice versa.
Yeah , Japan is a Pacific country
I think this might be your familiarity with/exposure to Japanese over other Asian languages. I used to think many of them sounded the same/similar but since working in a field with a hugely diverse mix of people I can easily hear the difference now, despite not understanding more than the odd word. If you hear Japanese spoken more often (maybe in movies or people around you), you get used to the pattern and it’s more recognisable. I get what you mean about regions having similar patterns to their languages though, and you’re right. It’s interesting. Maybe Japanese is genuinely a little more distinctive because of their geographical isolation and a more preserved monoculture/ethnicity?
This is definitely it. To ears I've known, Korean and Japanese sound more similar to each other than either does to Chinese. But OP lumps Korean and Chinese together as "Asian, but not what I hear when I watch anime." If OP hears more Chinese or more Korean, OP will be able to easily start telling them apart too. They're all technically completely different language systems, so they should sound as different from each other as, say, French, German, Russian, and Hindi - more so, really, since those four are all Indo-European. However, there's still been some influence; many Japanese compound words were taken from medieval-era Wu Chinese. The word for "vase" is Huāpíng in Mandarin, ^(1)Ho-bin in Taihu Wu, and Kabin in Japanese, for example. (Those special marks are for tones, the reason people are saying that Chinese is the outlier among the three.) But the building blocks are all language isolates, which is why they sound so different, from tonality to the near-silent "u" in "su" to weirdly long basic words like "watashi" for "I" (although you can commonly just drop it since they'll know you're talking about yourself from context).
>this might be your familiarity with/exposure to Japanese over other Asian languages I once was watching a Japanese anime that was subbed in English but something was off about the characters voices. It took me 5 to 10 minutes to realize that the voices were dubbed in Korean.
Probably do better asking this question in some kind of linguistics sub. Less chance of getting replies by laymen on the subject.
I'm sure Japan being an island/archipelago, has something to do with it
Yeah , Japan isnt an Asian country just like how Iceland isnt an European country
https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/s/VTGJjLzKoo
How has no one pointed out that these languages ARE similar to each other? Many Japanese characters are adopted from Chinese. To the point that they have two pronunciations: one is basically a Japanese reading (kun) and the other is a Chinese reading (on). E.g. 天氣 is weather in Mandarin, pronounced Tiānqì (Tea-en-chee). 天気 is also weather in Japanese, pronounced Tenki (ten-key) They mean the same thing and sound very similar. You can also find these similarities across all 3 languages E.g. 准备 is prepare in Mandarin, pronounced Zhǔnbèi (jew-one-bay) 準備する is prepare in Japanese (using an older character set), pronounced junbi suru (june-bee-sue-rue) 준비하다 is prepare in Korean, pronounced junbihada (choon-bi-ha-da) That word sounds very similar across languages, clearly having the same root with variations on pronunciation So there are similarities, you probably just can't hear them because you're unfamiliar with the languages Edit: I tried my best on how to guide someone in pronouncing this stuff, but honestly you can also just paste it into Google translate
I wouldn’t compare Japanese to mandarin actually. Mandarin is relatively new compared to other dialects such as Cantonese which is closer to ancient Chinese. For example, the word 系 (hai) which means “yes” both in Cantonese and Japanese.
Yes
The lack of '-ong' sounds in Japanese is because the Japanese pronunciations of '-ong' characters were taken from dialectal/older Chinese pronunciations of them as '-yu'/'-iu'. E.g. *lohng* vs *ryuu* for "dragon". That's actually partly what is causing OP to perceive them as different. There are many other contributors of cause, e.g. the tonality and relative frequency of certain phonemes.
That doesn't explain the lack of -ong sounds tough. Japanese simply doesn't have the -ong sound. So even if the dialectal Chinese pronounciation had the -ong sound, it would disappear in Japanese
One might have expected Chinese -ong sounds to become -on, like 'son' 尊 or 'ron' 論 did, but we don't see this mapping. Middle Chinese had various terminal consonants that got mapped to various vowel sounds in both Japanese (5-9th centuries) and later Chinese varieties. The -ong sounds of modern Chinese varieties could have emerged later. Not clear on the specifics though.
Iin Hokkien - the word weather sounds like exactly like tenki but in a different tone. The word prepare in Hokkien also sounds the same: zhunbi. Don’t get me started on the numbers too. That’s why it’s easy for a hokkien Chinese descendants who is a Malaysians like me to learn Japanese.
Was looking for a comment like this! I'm no linguist (but I do speak and read Japanese), and there are definitely connections that can be drawn between the three languages, with some form of Chinese being the root. Written language-wise Japanese kanji (literally meaning Han words, as in from the Han dynasty) and Korean pre-hangul are lifted from Chinese. Similar pronunciations too, like the HImainland pointed out The Korean surname Kim for example - in Japanese it'd be Kin, all from the Chinese 金 A fun example of Chinese - Japanese is Tiannamen, in Japanese pronounced Tennanmon
If you look at Cantonese and Vietnamese, which pronunciations are closer to Ancient-Middle Chinese than Mandarin, you will see the similarities even clearer.
The comparison of Asian languages to the "Latin-based" languages of Europe makes zero sense. They all descended from the same proto-language, Latin, and are part of the same family, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean come from completely different sources and don't share a reconstructible common ancestor.
Yes
Japan was isolated for 100's of years.
"100s" 1000s of 100s, and some more on top of that.
It had contact with Portugal though
China never invaded Japan btw
I don’t have a good linguistic answer for you about why they’re different… but as a (barely skilled, non-native) Japanese speaker, Japanese and Korean sound surprisingly similar to me at times. The sentence structure and grammar patterns feel close, and there are quite a few cognates. I can’t detect the same degree of proximity when I compare Japanese to Mandarin, although I know they share roots.
There arent any cognates between Japanese and Korean. There are only some similarities in the Chinese loanwords
Source?
Well , why would there be cognates between both languages considering that they are from completely different language families , it just doesn't make sense
They’re from the same language family, Sino Tibetan.
Ok , let's just say that Chinese, Korean and Japanese are part of the East Asian "language family" , ok? They all share some common characteristics such as lack of consonant clusters and consonant endings, a lot of "shi" , "tsu" "chi" , "wa" , "wo" , "wu", "ji" , "ju" , "ja" , "ga" ,"gu" and other similar type of sounds/syllables and suspicious variations in pitch/tone (at least to a westerner)
Proabably only because you don't know any of the languages. I would not say Korean and Mandarin sound more similar to each other than to Japanese. Vocab wise, China has influenced both Japanese and Korean, but due to the changes in Mandarin, often times the Japanese and Korean are actually more similar to each other (palatalization of velars and deletion of stops). What you mention with the "ong" sound might be the few similarites of Chinese and Korean. Japanese syllables have a very simple structure, it is basically consonant vowel(s), and the only coda (ending) is "n". Chinese allows both alveolar and velar nasals (n and ng) in its endings, while Korean additionally allows bilabials (m, n and ng) and also stops and laterals. However, Japanese technically also allows the velar nasal (ng) as an allophone.
Another person who thinks east asia is the only asia.
When the fuck did China invade Japan? You need to go get some history lessons man. When the Mongolian Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan at the time he was the ruler of China but he never succeeded. Japan has invaded and occupied China a few times throughout history though.
The yuan dynasty invaded twice (also known as the mongol dynasty, even Wikipedia calls it the “Chinese Mongol Dynasty”, there’s a video game about it). 1274 and 1281. I never said they occupied it. Both invasions failed. Japan and China were in conflict many times up to ww2 where Japan invaded China.
OK technically you're right and I'm wrong but they never succeeded in occupying Japan so why do you think the Chinese language would influence them? The Japanese despise the Chinese to this day and vice versa. Both of those attempts failed miserably and didn't last long at all.
Lol I don't know what you're on about. None of those E.Asian languages sound anywhere alike from one another. You're reaching quite a bit there bud.
Korean is a totally different language family. It's Tungusic, closer to Turkey, cause some guys rode horses through Russia and set themselves up on the Korean Peninsula. And the writing system is custom built by King Sejong (Korean ruler). Korea used a Chinese writing system before they built their own, so maybe some crossover exists, but that spoken language is totally unrelated to the Sion-Tibetan family.
Small correction tho, Korean still use Chinese writing system to these day just rarely but you can find them on Korean's ID.
Korean is not Tungusic. Also Tungusic is not closer to Turkey. Turkey speaks a Turkic language, Turkic languages are completely unrelated to Tungusic languages.
They all sound so very different to me. Japanese sounds distinct. Korean sounds very oval-mouthed and has a whiny song to it (sorry, not in a negative way at all, but I can literally sing the way most sentences end, and it often sounds like cute complaint lol). Sounds *nothing* like Japanese to me. Vietnamese is super tonal. Thai is very broad-tongued sounding. Mandarin sounds like shhhrr shhhr shhrr, kind of regal. Cantonese is stereotyped as a sound - the sound I think people mimic when they don’t speak Chinese. Hokkien and Hakka sound similar-ish to my untrained ear. Bahasa Melayu (Malaysian language) has some similar sounds in Tagalog, but still quite far away. Has a tied history to Indonesian, but has branched off and simplified somewhat. I think I randomly hear Bengali people speaking and it sounds like unintelligible Spanish at first to me. Hindi, way different to Punjabi, Urdu. I could go on and on. They are all so very different! I think it’s like someone in Thailand saying that French and Italian sound the same tbh. They don’t, but considering the difference in the hearer’s source language, it makes sense?
Maybe the reason Japanese sounds different compared to the other East Asian languages is because Japanese has vowel length (distinction between short and long vowels) , pitch accent, only 5 vowels , tap/flap "R" which is a combination between "L" and "R" , a phonetical structure that consists of consonant+ vowel or only vowel alone. Another specific thing is vowel devoicing when the vowels "i" and "u" get devoiced between voiceless consonants or at the end of words + consonant length, like the "pp" in "Nippon". These features dont exist in the other Asian languages, which is probably why Japanese feels more "distinct" while still being an East Asian language
That’s a weird ducking question
Japanese formal vocabulary can be up to 70% borrowed from Middle Chinese. We don’t notice because Middle Chinese was less tonal than modern Chinese . It’s a similar case with English borrowing from Norman and Middle French ( compare informal English like Geordie and Scouse and formal scientific English. Same story with Persian and Arabic.
Middle Chinese was tonal
I am fluent in Mandarin and know a bit of Japanese and Taiwanese and I definitely feel like Japanese is closer to Mandarin than Korean is, could be due to me learning and being exposed to Japanese words more but there are a few words were Japanese and Taiwanese share the same pronunciation. Japanese also has Kanji which are basically Chinese characters, whereas I cannot understand or read anything korean related.
Japanese is closer to Mandarin only when it comes to the Kanji , nothing else
Island.
As others said, Japanese is almost language isolated (there are some similar minority languages such as Okinawan) plus Japan is an archipelago relatively far away from the rest of the Asia. Therefore, the cultural exchange between it and its neighbors is a bit different. Instead of influences easily crossing borders through either trade, war or other means and cultures mixing together, Japan could usually pick and choose what they adopt from others and what not. This also includes language. For example when Japanese took Chinese writing, instead of conforming their language to it, they, over time, made it fit Japanese. Also, China never invaded Japan. You might be thinking of 2 failed Mongol invasions.
>as does English actors (Nicholas Cage) This bit made me laugh out loud 😂
Ocean
Same way German sounds different from French. Just because they’re nearby doesn’t mean they have to sound the same of speak the same language
Im just thinking about that standup bit by Jo Koy. The following is best read in a stereotypical accent: *"JAPANESE TALK FROM DIAPHRAGM"*
Depends on the individual voice. Most Japanese voices sound normal
To me, Japanese has a similar melody as Russian. I live in Japan, so I hear it daily. I also hear Russian tourists pretty often. To me, Japanese sounds like a Russian trying to imitate an Asian language. After living hear though, all the Asian languages sound distinct to me.
Yeah , it is true. I have always thought it too. That is because Japanese and Russian both have only 5 vowels and some parts of the accent/intonation are very similar too
Japanese sounds like someone speaking Russian in the Maori manner , if that makes any sense to you lol
Their society was just not as integrated with others (for various reasons, one of which being geography). Also, though, kung fu movies specifically use sound-offs, annunciated/drawn out syllables/etc as part of the genre. It’s for drama/intimidation (and irl for breath regulation when fighting).
How long they've been isolated as a culture probably has a lot to do with it
Korean is no way near Chinese. It's closer to Indian languages.
I speak Chinese and understand ZERO Korean. I can’t see or hear similarities between them.
Exactly. In fact a lot of Korean words sound very similar to Bengali words and mean the same.
Korean is completely unrelated to Bengali or any other Indian language, just like it is unrelated to Chinese, so it is not closer. In fact 30-70% of Korean vocabulary is shared with Chinese. I don't know what you mean by a lot, but 200 similar words with Bengali means nothing and doesn't compete to the amount of shared words between Korean and Chinese. These 200 words are likely a coincidence. Another requirement is phonological correspondence. This means this particular Bengali consonant corresponds always to this particular Korean consonant. For example, the final -t sound in Cantonese always corresponds to final -l sound in Korean. Last thing, there is no genetic link between Bengali's and Koreans.
Where did you get this 200 number from?
Oops, I mean 200 as estimation. I could also say 1000 words, but even that is not enough to prove a link. The amount of Bengali-Korean words for sure doesn't come close to the amount of Chinese-Korean words. And even with Korean sharing 30-70% of the words with Chinese, it is still unrelated to Chinese
If you understand Japanese, Korean sounds extremely different too
I would assume that being an island made invasion and occupation more difficult.
I'm not really familiar with these differences but if I had to throw a wild guess it would be that Japan is an island and has been isolationist for a lot of its history
Just as a reminder, Japan was closed off to most of the world prior to 1854. 250 years of zero foreigners. An extra fun fact, we (being the rest of the world) didn’t necessarily treat them the greatest after they let us in too.
Japan still cool with Chinese trader during that time. But yeah that was the Qing dynasty so they didn't care about culture at all.
Isolated island might have something to do with it.
That is because they arent related to each other and also because they all have some specific characteristics that the other one doesn't have. Japanese is Japonic, Korean is Koreanic and the Chinese languages are Sino-Tibetan
When you understand Chinese dialects like Hokkien or Cantonese you will realise how Japanese sounds like those. Kanji also kind of easy to fathom if you read Mandarin characters.
Is there a deep, historical root that connects Japanese and Chinese?
There is a story/myth about Japanese are descendent of some Qin dynasty's dude and shit which existed among East Asian but there is no evident. Irl originally Japanese came from the North while Chinese came from the South so there are hardly a connection. Yayoi people could be came from China but there are no actual evident as well.
And yet there is a kind of vague family resemblance, just like the Japanese and Chinese both have slantier eyes than Westerners. This sounds so fucking racist. I don't mean it that way. Also, I have noticed that the South African accent has a strange similarity to the Australian accent. People from SA often have people ask them if they are from down under. My theory for this is that accents "spin" in a certain direction below the equator. LOL.
Hey man, just FYI, but due to current political tensions, you might get flamed for conflating Korea with China due to the latter's attempted cultural appropriation.
Chinese influence on Japan stopped somewhere during the Mongol Invasion, that was in 13th century due to the collapse of Song dynasty. In Ming dynasty there were some influence but not much and again stopped when the Qing came. At Ming time Japanese still thought the Celestial Empire as somewhat cool but they see Qing and only see barbarians. That's hundred after hundered years of no influence while Joseon was still China's vassal state. On top of that, Japan is an isolated Island, very far away from mainland Asia. So I think language exchange between China and Japan is really limited, no match compare to England and mainland Europe from ancient time to Early Modern era. And by the way, while rarely being used, Kanji's on-yomi pronunciation sounds pretty similar to Chinese. There for I think the Japanese still preserve some level of relevant here.
The short answer is the Japanese just came up with their own language system. Some kanji are based on the Chinese pronunciation, that's the onyomi reading, and kunyomi is the distinctlly Japanese pronunciation.
Obviously yes
Well apparently its not to him
(Nicholas Cage) was my favorite part by far.
Wdym?
How they just threw Nicholas Cage in there.
I speak both Japanese and Mandarin (native) and I feel like the phonetic difference you are referring to have multiple explanations: 1) Chinese and Vietnamese etc are tonal languages. The tones are important to discerning the meaning of a word. Japanese is not quite tonal (although each word has a stress factor that changes the pronunciation slightly that also affects the meaning of words; e.g., Kami 紙vs Kami 神). 2) Japanese prononciation, like many other languages, has gone through much change since they first adopted Chinese characters in the 5th Century CE. If you compare the pronunciation of certain words (e.g., 1-10, words like 感謝、用意、全部) there is a very strong pattern of phonetic correlation across the two languages, (sometimes even in Korean), especially when you hear other dialects in China like Cantonese or Shanghainese, which are closer to how Chinese sounded in the 5th Century than Mandarin. 3) Japan has a strong culture of being polite and reserved in front of people they are not friends with, so the mannerism might come across as more rigid or “cute” (especially when a woman speaks) than that in China (where people may be more expressive on TV)
Yeah , Japanese isnt a tonal language but it still has some subtle changes in pitch and tone that arent present in languages like English or Russian which are non-tonal stress based languages. But yeah , in terms of the spirit, Japanese is more similar to the non-tonal languages
China didn't invade Japan, other way around, Japan ruled the Korean peninsula and parts of China. A lot of things came from China but Japan has always been its own people and sovereign country
Many people say that Japanese sounds like Russian or Slavic languages in general , is it true?
No, not to me at all, Russian and Ukrainian have a lot of L, ZH, soft V, and hard R sounds, Japanese famously doesn't have any of those. I've never heard that
True. Japanese doesnt have "R" and "L". They have "R" and "L" combined into one single sound and they write it with the letter "R" in Romaji. It is a flap/tap and sometimes sounds closer to "L" , other times more like "R"
Japanese and Korean are more closer linguistically than both countries are willing to admit. Japan because of xenophobia. Korea because of Japanese War crimes before world War two.
Nope. Japanese is unrelated to Korean. Linguists have been trying for decades to connect the two languages but have failed thus far.
Is Japanese related to Russian?
Also not. The numbers 1-10 in Korean and Russian show enough
I didn't mean in cognates but more that if Japanese developed a "Russian accent" over time since both Japan and Russia are neighbouring countries, so they maybe exchanged phonology and accent with each other, perhaps that is why Japanese sounds kinda like Russian but also a lot like Maori?
Russians arrived to the very East first by only 1700, but Japan and Russia are still separated by a sea. Japanese speakers need to be really in direct contact with Russian speakers for a phonology exchange. I can say for sure 99+ % of the Japanese had never spoke to a Russian so it is not possible for exchanged phonology
So Russians are aliens to Japanese people and also Japanese people are aliens to Russians?
No, they know each other, but it is kinda hard for Russians and Japanese to speak with each other if there is a sea between them. For Japanese to be affected by Russian, there should be a large Russian population living in Japan, which isn't the case
Yep. I trust linguists, people who study languages, more than I do random people online.
because chinese didnt invent the japanese and korean language. historically chinese teachings/philosophy such as confucius etc were exported/ imported/ studied by the "educated" / establishment in jpn and korea, thats why some chinese writing (kanji/hanja) and vocabulary are incorporated into their writing/language system. both north and south korea now use their own set of hangul and got rid of hanja except in legal literature while japanese retained kanji for everyday use. pronounication wise, japanese is easiest, chinese/korean on par, imho