Title: Differences between Chinese and Korean
What factors cause you to learn a new language? Is the attractive culture in that country the reason why cause you to learn a foreign language? Or you just want to learn a new language to kill time? Some people said that language is the gateway into another culture. Because when you learn a foreign language, you are automatically interested in the culture traditions. Language learning not only makes you immerse in a different culture but also become more open-minded to understand the other country. In recent years, more and more people start to learn Korean because Korean culture has significant influences on our daily life. For instance, we often watch Korean dramas during leisure time and eat Korean delicacies or snacks. Those who want to get close to Korean culture will have the motive to learn Korean. This is the reason why more people in Taiwan start to learn Korean. Before starting to learn Korean, it’s important to understand the difference between these two languages. The differences between Chinese and Korean can be divided into three parts: characters, pronunciation, and grammar.
Initially, compared with Korean, Chinese is specialized in ideograms. What does this mean? Ideograms refer to the combination of two words, “ideas” and “-gram”. That means, the characters represent the idea, concept or object directly without indicating the speech sounds. Thus, we have to memorize the words and the systems of pronunciation respectively. On the contrary, the phonetic character is a system to show pronunciation and speech sounds. In other words, when we see the words, we’ll know how to pronounce. According to the differences between ideograms and phonetic, Korean is easy and uncomplicated to learn.
Subsequently, there are some noticeable differences between the pronunciation of Chinese and Korean. When learning Korean, we can barely rely on the international phonetic system. Take consonant for example. There is no retroflex in Korean while there are lots in Chinese. Retroflex, which means coronal consonant, is a voice that articulate between the alveolar ridge and hard palate. For example, /r/ is retroflex. In addition, the nasal sound, like /n/ and /m/, is more common in Korean. Thus, if we depend on the international phonetic system, we will pronounce the words incorrectly. What’s more, the consonant in Korean cannot exist alone. That is to say, the consonant has to be combined with the vowel to produce correct speech sounds. Pronunciation plays an important role when learning foreign languages; thus, we must be careful about the different speech sounds between Chinese and Korean.
Lastly, Korean has different grammar and sentence structure from Chinese, such as suffixes, an affix that is added at the end of the word, and sentence structures. While Chinese tends to add some words in the middle of the sentence, Korean uses tenses and suffixes to represent respect to others. Moreover, different suffixes will be added following the verbs or adjectives when expressing different tense. The sentence structure in Korean is also different from Chinese. Korean has a complex system of particles, yet Chinese only has a few. In addition, the order of the sentence is always subject, object, and verb, but the position of the verb is between subject and object in Chinese. Moreover, Korean sometimes omits subjects in the sentence. After sorting out the grammatical differences between Chinese and Korean, we can clearly learn Korean grammar without affliction.
To conclude, we can learn there are many disparities in characters, pronunciation, and grammar between Chinese and Korean. No matter what factors cause you to learn new language, the most important is to know the disparities between two languages. By comparing the difference between Chinese and Korean, we can put more emphasized on the disparities and make an effort to master in second language.
References
崔銀淑 2010/06/25 韓中文的差異
韓語小幫手 2016/09/06 韓語發音與漢語發音的區別