Study Japanese Or Korean Which Is For You?
Japanese and Korean are both popular languages to study. The rise in popularity of Japanese culture, food and fashion has helped continue the interest in Japan and the Japanese language. At the same time though Korean has also become considerably more popular, due partially to the improved economics conditions in the country. More and more foreigners are spending time in Korea, both for business purposes and for learning about Korea and the Korean language.
Japan was once the preferred country to go to teach English. As well as teaching English, the teacher would also learn the local language, and return to their home country with a useful foreign language skill. These days however, although Japan is still popular, it is now joined by China and Korea as competing destinations for those looking for an adventure abroad and to learn a useful language for the future. If you are thinking of going to Japan, Korea or China, one of the considerations should be if you will be able to learn the language in the time you have there. The most popular period to stay in one of these countries is one year, often a school year. If you are not able to speak, read and write the language after spending the time there, you may be disappointed and think you have wasted your time.
If reading is important to you, then you would only consider Japanese or Korean, as attempting to master Chinese to the point of being able to read would be very difficult in just one year. After all, if you cannot read the language, it makes life much more difficult. If you are not able to read signs, directions, a newspaper or a book, you may get disheartened.
Japanese and Korean are actually quite similar. That makes sense, as both Korea and Japan are close to China and both languages have elements derived from the Chinese language. In general though, the Korean language is simpler than the Japanese language. This applies to grammar and also to the honorific system, which can get very complex in Japanese and hard to master. Japanese also has three different writing systems, whereas Korean has only one.
The three alphabets in Japanese are hiragana, katakana and kanji. It can be difficult to learn to read Japanese, as you must learn the three writing systems to be able to read sentences.Sentences are usually made up of all three alphabets, as they are used for different purposes. The Katakana writing system is used for foreign words, words that did not exist in the Japanese language but were imported and adapted to the Japanese language. Kanji are characters which have been adapted from China and have a meaning of their own and represent a thing or concept. Lastly there is hiragana that is used to complete sentences and for grammatical purposes. The best way to learn Hiragana is to get a Hiragana Chart.
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