What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan

Chinese characters throughout the world. The darkest green areas (Taiwan and South Korea) use unsimplified characters, China and Japan use their own simplified characters, and the light green areas have done away with them in daily life.

Ever wondered how the Chinese language is perceived in Korea and Japan, two countries located right next to China with languages that are originally unrelated but strongly influenced by Chinese characters? Well, here's how.

(For the purposes of this post, Chinese = Mandarin. There are many other types of "Chinese" in existence of course)

First of all, the basics: Japanese and Korean have a very similar grammar and word order, and may or may not have originated from the same language a long time ago (the Altaic language theory, which includes languages like Turkish, Mongolian and Manchu as well). That's a matter of debate, but from the point of view of the student this is a moot point, because whether or not the languages were originally the same tongue thousands of years ago the similarities they have now make them both incredibly easy to learn compared to a language like English. That's why when translating from Korean to Japanese or the other way around it's largely a matter of retaining the same word order and translating piece by piece, as opposed to having to entirely rearrange the word order as is the case when translating from Korean to English or vice versa.

Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary present in English, which has pervaded the language so much that it's impossible to write anything of any great length without using Greco-Latin vocabulary (I know, I tried translating an article into Germanic-only English and it was pretty much impossible). Korean and Japanese are the same way in that they simply don't function without these loanwords made from Chinese characters. About 70% of the vocabulary in English comes from foreign sources, and the ratio is about the same with Korean and Japanese.

Now, here's what the two languages look like. First Japanese:

ウィキペディアはオープンコンテントの百科事典です。基本方針に賛同していただけるなら、誰でも記事を編集したり新しく作成したりできます。詳しくはガイドブックをお読みください。

(This is from Wikipedia and says "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of online content. Anyone that agrees with the key principles can edit or create new articles. See the guidebook for more detail)

Japanese is written with a mix of hiragana (for Japanese words, grammatical particles and when you don't know the kanji for a word or don't want to use kanji), katakana (mostly for loanwords, places and animal/plant names that used to use kanji) and kanji. If you're Chinese you will probably be able to understand some of the words above but not their context: words like encyclopedia (百科事典), who (誰), new (新), detailed (詳), read (読), etc., so better than nothing at all but certainly not enough to understand what has been written. And since Japanese uses hiragana most of the time to show what role a word is playing in a sentence, knowing the kanji alone won't tell you whether this word:

新しい　

or this word:

新しくない

means new. They both use the character for new but the latter actually says not new (atarashikunai) as opposed to the former which says new (atarashii). So kanji play a crucial role in Japanese but kanji are never used alone.

Korean is largely the same, except that its Chinese characters (hanja) are now mostly hidden. It looks like this:

안녕하세요. 이곳은 한자위키입니다. 현재 한자위키를 어떻게 이끌어 나갈지에 관한 의견을 받고 있습니다. 사용자 모임에 의견을 남겨주시기 바랍니다.

(This is from a hanja wiki here that says "Hello, this is the hanja wiki. We're now taking opinions on how to proceed from here. Please leave your opinion in the user area.)

This is what Korea looks like most of the time now, and it's only every once in a while that you'll see a hanja character here and there, mostly in the newspaper when writing a person's name or using hanja in headlines to save space (日 for Japan, 中 for China, etc). If you take the three sentences above though and include the hanja as the language used to be written though, it looks like this:

安寧하세요. 이곳은 漢字위키(한자위키)입니다. 現在 漢字위키를 어떻게 이끌어 나갈지에 關한 意見을 받고 있습니다. 使用者 모임에 意見을 남겨주시기 바랍니다.

Now once again you have a situation like that with Japanese, with Chinese characters surrounded by unknown grammatical particles that change their role in the sentence, and if you're Chinese you'll only understand a few words: peace (actually means hello), hanja, now, opinion, user.

So that's a basic rundown of the role of Chinese characters in the two languages. So what does Chinese look, feel and sound like to someone from Korea and Japan?

The best analogy to give would be this: imagine a language written in Greek letters that only used simplified Greco-Roman vocabulary, and with different pronunciation as well as tones. You would find words that were only used as word roots in English being used as standalone words, so perhaps words like ornitho for bird (ornithopter), a for no or not (atheism vs. theism), duc for lead (induct), lumin for light (lumination), auto for "by oneself" (automobile), and so on...and then shorten the words somewhat, and add tones. Perhaps auto would sound like àut with a falling tone, duc would become dú with a rising tone or something like that. Also change the word order and simplify the grammar (no irregular verbs, no more cases for pronouns, etc). Add to that of course a ton of unfamiliar words that are present in that language but never adopted as loanwords in English.

To illustrate this I'll take the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities and transform it into a Catalan-looking text with fewer consonant endings and a different word order. The original English:

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair...

Il milló de tempo es,
il pitjó de tempo es,
il era de saviesa es,
il era de stupidesa es,
il època de creença es,
il època de noncreença es,
il stació de Llum es,
il stació de Tenebra es,
il primavera de sperança es,
il hivena de nonsperança es...

This is roughly what Chinese feels like to someone from Korea or Japan.

Now some more basic facts on the current situation:

Chinese characters used to have a unified script, but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. The two countries each adopted their own simplified forms however, and at the same time Taiwan certainly didn't want to have anything to do with what the PRC was doing, and both Koreas were working toward getting rid of the characters in everyday life, and thus there was no drive for simplification in Korea (technically they have simplified characters which are largely the same as in Japan but with some resembling Chinese but they are largely unused). This resulted in Korea and Taiwan using the same script for their Chinese characters, but of course since Koreans don't use them in daily life much at all anymore the majority of people in their 30s or so can't read for than a few dozen.

Here's what the three systems look like.

First of all, simplification doesn't apply to every single character, which means that there are a large number of characters that are still written exactly the same no matter where you are: 人　
古　
民　
各
表
There are also a lot of characters that are written in largely the same way but have a few stylistic differences:

敎 (Korea/Taiwan) 教 (Japan/China)
魔 (Korea/Taiwan) 魔 (Japan/China)



then there are those that have been partially simplified and usually in the same way, meaning that if you know a character in one language and also know how the one part is simplified in another you can then read them all (kind of like how the suffix -ity in English usually becomes -dad in Spanish and -ité in French). Learning how each country simplifies its radicals in this way will take care of the majority of what you need to know when getting used to another script.

飮 (Korea) 飲 (Japan/Taiwan) 饮 (China)
誰 (Korea/Taiwan/Japan) 谁 (China)
經 (Korea/Taiwan) 経 (Japan) 经 (China)

That means that every time you see the character on the left you can be almost certain that it will be simplified in exactly the same way in the other two scripts. The characters in the middle for example have the seven-stroke radical on the left in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and this is simplified every time to two strokes in Chinese, except for this one:

言

when the radical itself stands alone. When it's on the left though it is always simplified.

There are also characters that don't resemble each other much at all or at all in the other scripts anymore:

體 (Korea/Taiwan) 体 (Japan/China)
邊 (Korea/Taiwan) 辺 (Japan) 边 (China)
臺 (Korea/Taiwan) 台 (Japan/China)
驚 (Korea/Taiwan/Japan) 惊 (China)
親 (Korea/Taiwan/Japan) 亲 (China)
頭 (Korea/Taiwan/Japan) 头 (China)

You can see that a lot of the time Chinese stands alone in the simplification it has adopted, which makes it a lot harder to read at first until you've gotten used to the characters. That's why the Chinese in Taiwan is generally much easier for people in Korea and Japan to get used to - Korea because it's nearly identical to the Chinese characters in Korean, and Japan because 1) they resemble simplified Japanese characters more, and 2) many educated Japanese also have a familiarity with the traditional characters, called kyuujitai (旧字体).


Edit 1: in response to the first comment. I'm fluent in Japanese and Korean, somewhat proficient in Chinese but not even close to fluent. Having learned the two others before Chinese I find it easiest to read. Personally I prefer the Japanese kanji, because the unsimplified ones take forever to write (體 is just way too many strokes for a character you use all the time - means body) while the simplified Chinese ones are simplified to the point that their etymology isn't as obvious anymore. For example 電, which means electricity, is simplified to 电 - the original has the 雨 radical on the top and characters with this usually have something to do with weather, but without it on the top it doesn't look like anything. At the same time, the radical doesn't take long to write at all so there's not really much time saved there either. Another example is 産 (birth or production) becoming 产. Without the 生 character inside it (meaning life or raw) once again the meaning isn't obvious and you're not saving much time.