Learn which languages are similar to Korean
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Intro |
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| Michael: What languages are similar to Korean? |
| Soyeon: And are they mutually intelligible? |
| Michael: At KoreanClass101.com, we hear these questions often. Imagine the following situation: Ben Morris is a foreign exchange student and he is meeting another exchange student, Jing Liu, for the first time. When he hears Jing speak, he asks |
| "Is Korean similar to Chinese?" |
| Ben Morris: 한국어, 중국어랑 비슷해? (Hangugeo, junggugeorang biseutae?) |
| Dialogue |
| Ben Morris: 한국어, 중국어랑 비슷해? (Hangugeo, junggugeorang biseutae?) |
| Jing Liu: 아니, 일본어랑 비슷해. (Ani, ilboneorang biseutae.) |
| Michael: Once more with the English translation. |
| Ben Morris: 한국어, 중국어랑 비슷해? (Hangugeo, junggugeorang biseutae?) |
| Michael: "Is Korean similar to Chinese?" |
| Jing Liu: 아니, 일본어랑 비슷해. (Ani, ilboneorang biseutae.) |
| Michael: "No, but it's similar to Japanese." |
Lesson focus |
| Michael: If you look at European languages, you'll find a lot of similarities between them. Even though there are many independent language families in Europe, they were all deeply influenced by Latin, so if you learned any of the Indo-European languages before, you might have noticed that some words and grammatical structures overlap with English. |
| In this lesson, we'll try to find out if Korean also has this kind of relationship with any other language, and if being able to speak Korean will allow you to communicate in other languages as well. |
| [Recall 1] |
| Michael: To answer this question, let's take a closer look at the dialogue we just heard. |
| Do you remember how Ben asked "Is Korean similar to Chinese?" |
| (pause 4 seconds) |
| Soyeon: 한국어, 중국어랑 비슷해? (Hangugeo, junggugeorang biseutae?) |
| Michael: This question might appear obvious, due to the geographical proximity between Korea and China. The answer to this question isn't that easy. |
| To begin with, linguists consider Korean to be a ‘language isolate,' with no one direct ancestral language. However, nearby countries and their national languages have undoubtedly influenced the Korean language over the years. Chinese characters, for example, arrived in Korea as far back as the 1st century BC. |
| Together with the Chinese characters, a lot of Chinese loanwords such as |
| Soyeon: 감사(gamsa), |
| Michael: meaning " thanks ," were adopted into the Korean language. This is referred to as |
| Soyeon: 한자어(hanjaeo) |
| Michael: or Sino Korean, and many aspects of it, like, for example, a Sino Korean counting system, are a part of the language to this day. |
| It's important to remember, however, that the Korean language has seen some big changes since then. The Chinese characters have been replaced by a unique Korean writing system called |
| Soyeon: 한글 (hangeul), |
| Michael: first developed during the 15th century. Unlike Chinese, |
| Soyeon: 한글 (hangeul) |
| Michael: utilizes a phonetic alphabet system. Also, if we look at the Sino Korean words, we might see similarities to their Chinese counterparts, although the pronunciation changed enough for Korean natives to not be able to understand Chinese. |
| [Recall 2] |
| Michael: Now, let's take a look at our second sentence. |
| Do you remember when Jing Liu answers, "No, but it's similar to Japanese?" |
| Soyeon: 아니, 일본어랑 비슷해. (Ani, ilboneorang biseutae.) |
| Michael: In many ways, Korean is actually similar to Japanese. These two languages are not mutually intelligible, meaning a speaker of one language is not able to automatically understand the other based on similarities between the languages alone. However, there are significant vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure similarities that do make learning Korean easier for Japanese speakers, and vice versa. |
| Let's look at sentence structure, for example. Both Japanese and Korean utilize the SOV, or Subject, Object, Verb word order. They're topic-prominent languages, meaning the topic of a sentence is considered more important than the object. In fact, you'll often notice that the subject of a sentence is even omitted, for the same reason. |
| To give you an example of this, let's look at the following sentence: |
| Soyeon: 영화를 봤어요. (Yeonghwareul bwasseoyo.) |
| Michael: Or "I saw a movie." You will notice that the subject "I" has been omitted from the sentence. |
| We can also notice many similarities between the Korean and Japanese vocabulary. Let's take the word for "tea," for example. In Korean, we say |
| Soyeon: 차(cha), |
| Michael: while the Japanese word for tea is pronounced in a very similar way. The Japanese word for the verb "become" is also very similar to the Korean verb meaning "goes out" or "is born." |
| Soyeon: 나(오다) (na(oda).) |
| Michael Also, the word for 'woman' or 'wife' in Japanese sounds similar to the Korean, |
| Soyeon: 며느리(myeoneuri), |
| Michael: which also refers to a woman. This time, the meaning is 'daughter-in-law.' Some linguists chalk these similarities up to loanwords, while others insist that many of the words are true cognates. Either way, noticing these similarities between Korean and Japanese will surely help you in your Korean language studies. |
| [Summary] |
| Michael: In this lesson, we learned that Korean is a so-called "language isolate," and while it actually was influenced by the languages of the neighboring countries, it can't be used intelligibly with any other language. However, knowing Korean makes it easier to learn Japanese, due to some grammatical similarities. |
Outro |
| Michael: Do you have any more questions? We're here to answer them! |
| Soyeon: 안녕히 계세요 (annyeonghi gyeseyo) |
| Michael: See you soon! |
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