Difficulty of Chinese vs. Japanese vs. Korean

 

I tried comparing the difficulty level as one studies Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (relative to English with Chinese exposure*), and came up with this graph. I asked the opinion of some people, made some fixes, and here is the result.

 

Korean is hard at first because of relatively difficult pronunciation, but gets really easy in the long run because Hangul is really easy to read (unlike Kanji and Chinese characters). In fact, the small spike of difficulty in Korean is because of idioms based on Chinese idioms.

 

Japanese is easy to pronounce, but hard because of its very unique grammar structure and Kanji characters. However the difficulty plateaus in the long run even with some slight increase in difficulty due to idioms based on Chinese idioms. You need to have a good grasp of all forms of sentence patterns to be functional in Japan.

 

Chinese is hard to pronounce at first, but gets easy because of relatively simple grammar structure similar to English. However, the difficulty abruptly spikes upward and goes way, way beyond Japanese because of Chinese idioms, Classical Chinese. There is the demand of knowing a lot of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations in different contexts. On idioms, you need to know the historical context, modern context, etc.

 

What do you think? 🙂

‘Dasein’ Ingrained

In Chinese and Japanese languages, when they try to locate objects, they use a word that means “to exist”.

For example, in Chinese, the word is 【在】or 【存在】:
~ “我在這裏。” (I am here. / I exist here.)
~ “他在。” (He is there. / He exists [here].)

As I study Japanese grammar, my study material mentions that:

“The location of an object is defined as a target of the verb for existence.”
(You can interpret this as a mathematical statement.)

In Japanese, they have two distinct words for ‘to exist’, namely:
~ ある (有る/在る) for inanimate objects
~ いる (居る) for animate or living objects

Note how the Kanji holds the same meaning as the Chinese characters themselves.

~ “猫は部屋にいる。” (The cat is in the room.)
~ “私は当地にいる。” (I am in here.)

However, a more accurate and literal translation of the second sentence would be:

“About me, in here existing.”

This is dasein.

—–

Dasein is a German word that means “being-in-a-world” (da = “there”; sein = “being”), and is often translated into English with the word “existence”. It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger, particularly in his magnum opus Being and Time. (Wikipedia)