Nevertheless, we can notice some similarities in the two writing systems. Hiragana are curvy while Katakana are sharp and made of straight lines. For Japanese people, Katakana are easier and quicker to write, so they are used when taking notes in class or elsewhere. Giving the fact that double consonants and composed vowels are formed based on basic consonants and vowels, we often say that the Korean alphabet is actually made of 24 letters. However, double consonants and composed vowels produce their own sound and are considered in the writing system as letters, therefore 40 better corresponds to reality.
It depends on the point of view. Unlike Kana, Hangul is an alphabet composed of letters, not syllables. It is closer to the Latin alphabet in this area. Its specificity lies with the way letters are organized in a sentence. Letters are grouped to form syllables. Each group has between 2 and 4 letters most of the time 2 or 3 with imperatively one vowel and one consonant.
When we observe it from afar, we have the impression to see Chinese characters. Effectively, the writing system having been invented in when Chinese characters were the norm, the alphabet was meant to correspond to the Korean pronunciation of these characters.
This explains why the language is writing in this style. Similarly in Korea and Japan, the Chinese language and the Chinese characters were used. However, each language evolved differently and this is what we are going to see in this section. The more you use them, the more you show good education. This impacts the level of politeness. For instance, in my job, I must communicate with Japanese customers by mail. In these mails, I need to have as many kanji as I can in order to show a good side to my conversation partner.
Kanji have been used for a long time in Japan and Japan made them their own. Meaning that some kanji are different from their Chinese counterparts because the kanji changed over time. By the 15 th Century this led to Korea creating its own written language in an effort to promote literacy amongst common people. It was not an overnight success, however, and people in Korea carried on using Chinese characters for a prolonged period. The Korean language only really started being used more widely in the 20th Century.
Economic growth is one of the reasons for this, especially as the Korean language is easier to use and to learn than Chinese. Whilst there are thousands of Chinese characters, the Korean alphabet consists of 14 main consonants and 10 main vowels.
The Chinese language at the risk of stating the obvious is a very complex language, but a simple way to identify Chinese characters is that they are square and not curvy. Japanese characters look rounder and more curvy. Visually, both Japanese and Korean are also more open and spacious than Chinese, which is denser. Another way to recognise the Korean alphabet is from the main circular shapes it features, which are unique to it and are not found in Japanese or Chinese.
Ancient Chinese used to be written from up and down, right to left, but after the cultural revolution in China, Traditional Chinese has become more modernised and it is now written horizontally.
At Creative Translation the differences and similarities of every language fascinate us. They both have different writing systems. On the other hand, the Japanese writing system consists of three different ones, the kanji, the katakana, and the hiragana. The kanji system is made up mostly of adopted Chinese symbols. Both of the languages use some form of the native script as well as the adoption of Chinese characters for their writing.
However, it is far less common to find Chinese characters hanja in the Korean language. The exception is when it is used as a means of clarifying homophones.
This happens on television subtitles, historical studies, and legal documents. In North Korea in particular, the use of hanja has been removed because of the Sinic influence. Kanji and kana are the most commonly used systems in Japan and both are combined together. As we know, the kanji is the name given to the adopted Chinese symbols. The kana is actually a combination of two different systems used together to represent the same sounds.
They have composed primarily of syllables and each used for a different purpose. While hanja cannot be used to write Korean words, the Japanese equivalent kanji can be used to write both native Japanese words and Sino-Japanese words. Korean and Japanese also differ when they are being spoken. That is, they use different sounds.
You may think that this means nothing in the bigger picture. Surely if you have the bases of the word or sentence right then people will still understand what you mean.
However, this is not true. In both Japanese and Korean, the use of pitch is very important and can change the meaning of your whole sentence immediately. The tone is also very important in the Korean language, but we will explore this in greater detail in the next section. In Japanese, the way the language is spoken and the pitches used can also be important. However, unlike Korean, they are not tonal. They do have a similar issue to Korean with many words looking and sounding the same but having different meanings.
Instances like this are extremely common in both languages. It is often said that Japanese and Korean are very similar languages.
More importantly, they have different sounds that go along with them. There are more Korean sounds than there are Japanese sounds. They just add on a few more extra sounds. This means that if you can grasp an understanding of the sound in Japanese this language is known to be the easiest of the languages in Asia for an English speaker to learn , then you are set in good stead to understand the sounds of the Korean language.
We mentioned in the previous section that tones are very important. Now, the concept of tone is not used in Japanese, but in Korean, it is very important. The tone you use when speaking can completely change the meaning of what you are trying to say. It depends on the pitch you use to say it. The Korean language uses four tones, this means that a word could possibly have four different meanings, depending on what tone you use.
On the other hand, in the Japanese language, there are no tones used although, as you know from the section above, the language does use pitches to great effect. Expressions and idioms are the best parts of any language in our opinion, and both Korean and Japanese are full of some wonderful ones.
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