In Animal Crossing Timmy and Tommy hit you with the 日本語上手 at the beginning of the game if you're playing in Japanese but your location isn't set in japan lol
Speaking as someone who has learned Japanese to a high level and is now learning Korean...knowing Japanese beforehand is almost like a cheat code compared to starting from an English perspective. There is so much overlap in the logic of the languages even if they don't have things that perfectly correspond. Japanese materials for learning Korean are so much simpler. It'll be like は = 은 / 는... On to the next concept. Whereas in English you'll get a roundabout discussion about subject markers and the difference between that and topic markers and all that.
@@stayskeptic3923 I've started studying Korean Grammar with できる韓国語 Just search it on yt, they got like 20-30 初級Ⅰ clips. Couldn't find any books digitally ^^' there are some Japanese youtubers who study Korean. You can check them out too
I've studied Chinese for 8 years. If your Chinese is terrible they say "your chinese is so good!" If your Chinese is middle level they say "how long did you live in China?" If your Chinese is really good they say "why are you speaking Chinese? is there something wrong with my English?" All that time and effort only to be finally told I'm rude for not speaking English *sigh*.
Langfocus has a great video on how similar/different they are as well! Just search "langfocus korean japanese". There's lots of stuff not mentioned here.
Check out the video we made on Sean's channel: bit.ly/2z5N5YR *TIMESTAMPS* 1:00 - Honorifics 7:55 - How Japanese/Koreans react to foreigners speaking the language 10:29 - How Japanese/Koreans react to foreigners showing interest in their country 12:59 - Subjects where Japanese/Koreans are very direct 14:14 - Subjects where Japanese/Koreans are very indirect 17:17 - Nunchi and kuuki 19:06 - The flip-side of politeness 21:42 - Hanja vs Kanji; Hangul vs Hiragana 27:43 - English loan words Also, sorry for the poor audio and video quality!!
I'm a Japanese living in Taiwan and now trying to learn Taiwanese Hokkien and Korean. What I find interesting and also fascinating is that Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese remain final consonants of Chinese origin words which are absent in Modern Chinese Mandarin like 食(しょくin Japanese 식 in Korean), (sit in Taiwanese) 国(こく) 국 kok 説（せつ）설 suat) Chinese Mandarin(食shi 國guo 說 shuo)
@@pokarethats because Cantonese is the most similar to ancient Chinese, which got spread to Korea n Japan I’m ancient times. It originated from the heartland of China since ancient times. But current Mandarin came from the north, Manchu and mogul regions that at one point weren’t even part of China. Then it settled in Beijing area. Hence today China north n south have such diff dialects. Like if one doesn’t make an effort to learn Cantonese or Hakka, one wouldn’t understand a word.
@4:15 the same concept exists in Korean! Interesting ~~ Also one thing that is interesting is that Korean kids all learn honorifics consciously. Their mom and dads and teachers correct them whenever they’re wrong and make sure they have social educate. Koreans won’t do this to foreign adults to the same degree, but it does effect relationships. If your friend introduces you to their friend and you mess up the honorifics while speaking towards that new person your friend will be embarrassed and outright call you out like ‘ hey bro , where’s your manors ? ‘ I’ve experienced this and it’s embarrassing, but a valuable experience.
Regarding polite language, I've always felt that almost every language has some form of it, even if it might not be quite as formalized or intricate as in Japanese or Korean. But even in English, you have shop clerks call customers "sir" or has situations where changing the verb makes it more polite ("can you please" vs. "could you please"). Oh, and Japanese people also do the "use English to explain which homonym you mean" thing, like to explain which せんとう they mean they'd say バトルの戦闘
@@box2572 I definitely agree that tone is very important, but there still are some examples where modifying the word makes it more polite. Like the one I mentioned above, where "can" gets turned into "could". It's not nearly as complex as in Japanese, but you can still communicate a lot of politeness through your choice of words, e.g. "No smoking" vs. "Please refrain from smoking". I've definitely seen foreigners accidentally be rude by using expressions that weren't appropriate to the circumstances.
9:42 this is funny because when I was learning Filipino I would always get "wow your Filipino is so good" even tho I could hear myself make mistakes but the better I actually got they stopped complimenting me and just started talking to me like a local. (I still occasionally get stares since I'm a tall white man tho)
As a Korean halftie who moved to Korea around 5 years ago and is currently studying in a regular school there, there’s a few experiences I’d like to share. During the video, both Matt and Sean wondered how knowledgeable in Hanja the average Korean kid here is. Well, it varies. But, most of the time, out of the 9 levels in Hanja proficiency (with 9 being the lowest, 1 being the highest), people would usually say that they’re somewhere (or used to be somewhere) along level 3-5 and that the disuse after school sort of made them forget about them. Though, there are some exceptions to that. People studying to become lawyers have to have a firm grasp of Hanja in order to have the ability to read certain books and such. A friend of mine, for example, knows how to read and write Hanja because he wants to be an attorney. (Of course, aside from educational reasons, there are personal reasons too. A friend of mine learned Hanja in order to play Japanese games.) Another thing, I’ve seen this a few times in textbooks as well, but some Korean words, for example 매체 (media), is written in the Sino-Korean pronunciation, complete with Hanja (媒體), but often they’d put the English word beside it instead. I don’t know if this has something to do with the fact that the meaning of the individual Hanja doesn’t match the concept it’s describing and was probably more used as a transliteration of the Chinese transliteration of the English loan word “media” (similar to how the Chinese loan word for bus is 巴士 (bashi) which in Korean turns into (파사); Chinese and Korean speakers can correct me if I’m wrong) or something else. One final thing, 눈치 is completely pure Korean. It doesn’t have an associated Hanja but the meaning is roughly the same. 눈 is eye and 치 is a sort of modifier that gives the meaning of “strength” to a word. For example, 솟다 (rise high, come out) becomes 솟치다 (gush out, explode upwards) (native Korean speakers correct me if I’m wrong.) It comes from the Middle Korean word 눈츼. To end on a positive note, I’m really glad guys had this talk! It’s nice to see Korean get the spotlight here after seeing Chinese get it. I’ve been following Matt’s channel and the MIA for a while now after I felt I had stagnated in my endeavors to master Korean. I had been doing a combination of traditional learning and osmosis to get to a sort of “fluent but not really” level. After seeing Matt’s video on MIA, I immediately started doing Korean MIA. I hope I could reach near-native level in the coming years.
not true - most young Koreans are almost illiterate of Hanja ... when presented the characters, they would not be able to read it, besides super basic words Me and GF are Korean, living in Seoul
Let me try to answer to two things you raised. For the example of 매체, I think it could be because of its contextual meaning as well as the lacking knowledge of Hanja these days. 매체 can be used as "media" as in mass media but it can be also used as an "intermediary" that conveys things from one to another. Regarding the 한자 literacy of Korean "kids", I think that is quite impressive as I didn't know about that. From my perspective, who spent 6 years of elementary school education in Korea during the 90s, it was mandatory to study Chinese characters and some ancient poems and verses. Partly due to the patriotic policy of the then-president Kim Young Sam, I witnessed that 한자 got removed from all the publications and newspapers as much as possible or left in brackets. If you look at the old books published in the 70s or 80s, you will see Koreans used 한자 without transliteration in Korean. Also, I'm not sure if it stays the same nowadays but for my university graduation, the 한자 literacy examination was one of the prerequisites. I also often hear this, although I'm not a kid, from mandarin speaking friends that it is unexpected that Korean people fairly understand mandarin without speaking it. I guess it is difficult to generalize that Korean people know very well 한자 overall but indeed, depending on the education requirements, I think the general public's 한자 literacy also varies.
Nunchi and kuuki are not the same word or cognates to each other. Both nunchi and kuuki originated from Chinese characters. Nunchi actually means eye-measure, in Chinese characters 眼勢 which means eye's force or power. While kuuki, 空氣 in Chinese characters, literally means air, or surrounding, environment, atmosphere figuratively.
I wish you all the best in getting to a near Korean level! I've been living in Austria for seven years now and will live here for at least four more. I stagnated then deteriorated then got back up again in some aspects and stagnated in others... a weird ride but I hope to get to the same level of fluency I have in English which is near native and very fluent and effortless, but I make some mistakes here and there - some are mistakes natives make and some not, but the point it they're rare and my English is (mostly!) very natural. I'd be satisfied with that level even if it's not quite native and I'm still awkward here and there and can't speak in some fancy literary way. Here's to both of us succeeding!
This is the perfect video for me! I just discovered Matt vs Japan and AJATT and decided I would start to do the MIApproach for Korean during quarantine. Awesome 👍
for me, japanese is wildly challenging to read, and Korean is wildly hard to pronounce. So many phonemes I don’t have! At least with Japanese I already have almost all of the phonemes. But then of course, there’s the kanji 😅
Very interesting video! Thank you! I’ve been learning Korean for a bit and it’s a very interesting and unique language! And yes, I love K-Pop lol for whoever asks.
Already knowing English and Mandarin, and then learning Japanese and then Korean after that really allows me to connect the similar words with just the pronunciation
Finally! I've been curious about the similarities of these two languages for so long after hearing words that sound similar, and just couldn't make a direct comparison because I'm not actively studying Korean (although I'd like to someday with all the fantastic immersion content they have).
You can see the difference of knowing how to speak a language and studying it. I'm Japanese and I don't really pay attention to the politeness higharchy so I don't know how it works. Whereas some like Matt who studies Japanese knows why its that way.
Agree, but they seem to think it makes you sound fancier and smarter or more cultured, while their own language is just bland (again, that's what they seems to think of it). I swear if I ever go to Japan I'll use as little english vocabulary (or foreign vocabulary in general) as possible even if everybody else does the opposite.
@@inendlesspain4724 yeah its exactly why they do it. i get, but i still dont like trend, because its seems to be growing more and more over time. sometimes if you use the japanese word instead of the english slang version, youll "sound old" haha
Politeness is one of the first things that come to mind when thinking about japanese (and I am sure also Korean). But now I wonder if they are really more polite than e.g. German. I can think of 10 ways of communicating "give me the butter" all with different levels of politness. Some are not really used anymore but you can still say them for over exaggeration. Because they are not categorized as much as japanese I think it is even harder to find the right nuance.
French has tu and vous, and how you conjugate the verbs in that sense. It's not totally outside of the the western languages to have it codified, even if when it's not it's by implication or how you address the person or people you're talking to, IE starting off by saying ladies and gentleman in english, or sir or ma'am
I think it's the combo of an unusual preoccupation with politeness with an agglutinative language that results in these unique grammatical features. In more analytic languages such a preoccupation tends to manifest more in word choice
I'm a native Italian speaker, and I've just realized how many english words are being internalized in my language. Like "to chill" in Japanese is "チルする" and in Italian is "chillare", "to diss" became "dissare" and so on. It's crazy how much the internet is changing languages
Woah awesome!! I have been using the MIA method to learn Korean for around a month now and that’s after learning Japanese for a few years so this is super cool
「よ」and [요] are different both in meaning and formality level because 「yo」indicates a superior positon from the speaker tp the listener and and can also show that new information is being conveyed whereas in Korean 요 is a formality marker or a type or imperative such as [빨리요].
We also have "chill", "diss" and "try" in Russian :D as well as many other words borrowed from English (and sometimes Japanese and other languages) these days (i guess that happens to any languages and lingua francas). As for the reason people use them when there are already counterparts in the language, i never studied intricacies of borrowing words in ancient times (tho i guess they were at least somewhat similar) but this is how i see it from native speaker perspective now. Most borrowed words (Except some professional ones (like "management" or "team building" for example) actually sound much less formal than their Russian counterparts and it seems to me people use them to kinda fill the lacunas in formality levels or meanings. Like, there are two words for "sorry" (прости and извини) but they both sound kinda too formal (or at best not informal enough) even when you use informal speech patterns. Also, they both literally mean “forgive me” not “sorry” or “my bad” which sucks, so most young people use English "sorry" instead to kinda fill these formality and meaning gaps. The same with "tyan (chan)"\"kun" for "a girl" and "a boy" (we have causal words for those, but they’re all kinda offensive or sound stupid) or "random" for random and many others. I think that’s that’s what’s happening in these languages too. Like I think Japanese people use "thank you" a lot these days right? Mb for the same reason Russians use "sorry" - they as native speakers feel like there're some gaps it fills. Also, sometimes words just better describe things (because they have broader or stricter meanings) and sometimes english words are just shorter (English "user" against Russion "polzovatel") That said just like any slang many borrowed words tend to become less informal as they assimilate more and more into the language. Of course all this above doesn't apply to words that don't exactly have counterparts in Russian or are used to describe new foreign things(that are most of the borrowings I guess) like jeans, jam, shorts, internet etc . Also, these are some people who just know the language well and because of that tend to use a lot more English words than others (by which i mean they use even those words that didn't assimilate in Russian and thus are unknown to most speakers), but most people find it annoying cause most people don't know English and also they find it sounding kinda corny (mb because it just sounds weird to them or mb because this kinda speech became associated with 3/4 wave Russian feminists and most folks are not fans of those, at this point it's hard to tell). Tho of course not only feminist but any group that somehow connected to foreign culture have a habit using that culture words cause there're familiar with the language. And that's how a lot of times they get into vocabulary of general public. Like "diss" originated in rap\hip-hop circle and "tyan\kun" originated in anime circle but now they all used wildly among all young people.
As a Japanese native speaker I say Korean is the closest language to my language. Most of the Koreans living in japan can’t be recognized as Koreans since they look like us and speak perfect Japanese.
@@supercal3944 white is way too broad of a category, Italians and Norwegians look quite different for example, also I have no clue how you can't tell that there is genetic variation between Europeans and Japanese people.
From someone who got lower intermediate in Japanese then switched to Korean it makes learning it so much easier things just come easily lots of grammar points line up like learning Spanish, lots of grammar points line up and alot of things translate alright. Koreans use grammar points was different, personally Korean clicked faster but it's probably because of the Japanese expirence somepeople say Korean has 7 politeness levels but it's not bad it's easier than it seems it would be a contious effort to speak too low to someone, you do it with non super close friends too even if they're months older but most of the time it's just adding 요 I think it's a really cool experience to learn the language
it is 7 but, 4 is common right. I kinda switched from Chinese...the tones are just crazy...My Korean progress is insane now. But, I still have a long way to go.
Thanks for the vid Matt! As a Korean learner I found it really interesting, and enjoyed the conversation between the two of you. I've always found that the similarities and roots of where words come from between Chinese, Japanese and Korean are really interesting. Looking forward to your next vid! :)
In terms of honorifics, I'm not sure about Japanese but Korean also uses completely different words depending on the honorific level. So you can't use the same word for "to eat" or "to sleep" for your grandparents and for your friends. I know of at least three different "levels" of the word "eat" that aren't just a different ending, but completely different words. Growing up as a Korean-American, I was scolded too many times for using the same word for my friends, parents, and grandparents. Also, you mentioned language used in Zen temples. There's also specific language used for religious situations in Korean, such as in prayer, that is a different honorific level (e.g. in the Korean translation of the Bible).
I've been learning Japanese for 9 years and now Korean for about 3 months and this was fun to watch. It's always fun to see a word in a Korean text and connect the 漢字 and whatnot. It's interesting to see how certain ways of thinking and concepts are similar between Korea and Japan. I wonder how much of that was due to the Chinese influence or perhaps the Japanese influence when Japan occupied Korea. Anyway, nice video, dude.
Both Japan and Mainland China started using simplified versions of characters shortly after WWII, so maybe what Korea did by switching to all-hangul text was a slightly more extreme version of that.
I was stationed in Korea and learning how to speak and going out into public Sean gets it. Using Korean with native speakers is a mind blowing event....they really REALLY appreciate that you've taken the time and interest to do so.
I didn't see every interview Matt has done but compared to the one with Steve Kaufmann they seem very relaxed and generally having a good time. would love to see more of this
4:25 Korean also has honorifics where the speaker lowers themselves. To give is 주다 and the lowering one you use to yourself (cuz obviously you cant use normal honorifics where you raise someone to yourself) is 드리다. “뭐 드릴까요?”
I'm a Japanese having a few Korean friends and enjoyed a lot this collaboration! There were many interesting points I hadn't paid attention to before. How do you think people in both the countries see the necessity to acquire English skills? I believe we had had a similar english education in school (intended for college entrance exams, rather than use as a communication tool) and are struggling applying conventional study methods (focusing on memorizing grammars/vocabularies and not encouraging exposure to real native English contents) today the world is getting globalized at the fastest speed.
Honorifics also exist in Javanese and Sundanese. Unfortunately it's one of the reasons why the younger generations tend to abandon speaking it altogether (and use Indonesian instead). The honorifics system can be quite complicated and when you keep on being reprimanded for using the wrong word in the wrong situation, it's no wonder if you end up using Indonesian instead which is much less complicated.
Incredibly interesting discussion and I'm not even learning either language; however I've been watching different language learning channels for the last couple of months as I'm learning Tagalog. As an English speaker trying their first genuine stab at a second language, this was fascinating regarding levels of politeness, as I've been struggling with just two levels in Tagalog! I'm sure we have something similar in English but maybe not in such a formalised structure as other languages. Matt your channel has some of the best in depth videos on learning techniques and methods that have really helped my mindset to immerse myself in Tagalog and its been incredibly helpful on many levels, so thanks and keep up the great content! 😊😊
I would love to see a video about how to correct bad speaking habits which are caused by our great school systems around the world. I would really like to improve my english pronunciation and output in general.
Vocabulary similarities come from the fact that both Japanese and Korean derived so many words from Chinese. Korean no longer use Chinese characters so it’s hard to see similarities visually but if they had still used it, it would’ve been much more easier to see the similarities.
Japanese pared down their honorific system to the 3 levels in everyday speech that Matt points out as a way of standardization when it became more Westernized. It took the more archaic elements that still exist in the Korean language and smoothed it out. It's why some people argue the grammar is more difficult in Korean. The masu/desu form would get you through pretty much everyday life as a consumer in Japan. Obviously, you'll need to know the more formal speech levels if you work there. Korea is the societal embodiment of Confucius values. It's a little less so today, but veeeeeeeeeeery foreign to nearly every non-Korean I've come across. A common meeting between strangers in a Korean conversation is establishing what speech level they need to speak in - that's based on age, occupation, name whatever hierarchical structure you can think of, to establish how to speak to someone. Anecdotal example from my experience: I met my friend's mother for the first time while I was in college. She talked to me like a child (as she would her own child). She asked me what I do (college student), what school I went to, who my father is. My father is someone she's heard of and so happens to respect, my school was at the higher end of what she's used to. All of a sudden, she's speaking to me in honorifics and using humble forms. I'm an ABK and it was crazy to see it in action. You're always a student before this period. I don't think this level of *overt^ form of respect exists as much today. Lots of pros and cons to this system. The Japanese are much less hierarchical in everyday life. But that's probably the major difference. All the differences in grammar/conjugations/etc. are minor on average.
I wonder which language is most efficient to learn first for learners wanting to learn both. On one hand, you can use the large number of Sino-Korean vocabulary you have to build an intuition on what a character means if you start with Korean, making it easier to learn kanji (kind of like how you recommend doing RRTK before RTK). On the other hand, if you start with Japanese, you can use the characters you've already learned to gain an intuition on new words even before learning them, and you can start to disambiguate Sino-Korean words from the get-go. I think Japanese would also help you learn shared Sino-Korean/Sino-Japanese vocabulary more efficiently since you could just recognize their hanja whereas if you're starting with Korean, you have to either have learned hanja or try to figure it out based on similarities in pronunciation. However, I do think Korean pronunciation is also a lot more challenging to get right in the beginning, and it's almost a superset of that of Japanese, so starting with that as a base will probably help you get rid of the gaijin voice almost immediately (though it won't prepare you for pitch accent). But if you start with Japanese, you'll still have a lot of trouble with all the new vowels and consonants.
I think people will naturally drift towards the language that's used by the culture they're most interested in. I'm sure people who started learning Chinese first will have a slight advantage in regards to associating words with hanja/kanji, and that people who are familiar with Korean grammar might find Japanese grammar relatively easy to "hook onto", but a person who is actually deeply interested in Korean cinema, literature, and history will probably not want to spend a lot of time fiddling around with learning a bit of Japanese (or vice-versa) just for the sake of making the process a bit smoother.
I want to try learning Korean after Japanese since the grammar is so similar, in my Japanese 101 class there was a lot of Korean exchange students there for the easy A. One of the Korean guys who roomed with a Japanese guy was near fluent at the end of that semester where the rest of us were still struggling to form a basic sentence.
Not for me. I find korean different from japanese in a lot of little ways that adds up over time. Only thing I find similar are the honorifics, topic marker, word order and postpositions, which most sov languages have anyways.
Regarding people's tolerance for mistakes in polite language usage. When I was in Japan a few years ago, I remember walking by a policeman at a station who was asking something or giving out instructions (can't remember exactly). And when I accidentally replied with casual language , he promptly (and somewhat sternly) corrected me. I was quite surprised because it all happened in passing and I didn't expect him to hold me up to standard. Maybe I pronounced the words well enough that he thought that my language ability was much better than it was :s
As someone who self-taught Japanese for several years (still working on it;) then lived in Korea for two, it was great to see this video! The section on levels of politeness was a little oversimplified, though. I started writing a comment to explain the different aspects that make up both languages' levels of politeness and/or formality (they can be independent of each other to a certain extent!), but it got really long haha. It would take a whole video to properly address the topic, I think...
Re: The English words at the end, all those words you mentioned (vision, incentive, etc.) are essentially buzzwords that get thrown around a lot in business and online and thus find their way into other languages the fastest. It often depends a lot on the speaker whether or not he or she chooses to use the "cool", "hip" English words or the "boring" native ones. It personally makes my skin crawl when I hear someone use some silly English word in a different language when there's a perfectly good word in that language for the same thing, and I think it's why I appreciate Chinese that translates literally EVERYTHING and/or has it's own words for things (网络 for internet, 蓝牙 for bluetooth, etc.).
9:00 haha yeah I met an elderly Japanese woman once. I had heard her name , very badly pronounced, was "Noriko". I don't speak much Japanese but I can understand a tiny bit. I just asked her "Your name is Noriko, right?" and just from hearing her name, she was like do you speak Japanese???? That was probably the first time she heard her name pronounced right since she got here! XD. Even her husband didn't pronounced her name right :/
Me watching this discussion : I would never be able to have this kind of conversation in English even after spending my whole life studying it... I am a Korean native speaker working in Japan, trust me you guys have a lot of advantages than I do
There are actually 7 politeness levels in Korean depending upon context, target speaker/listener and environment. Great video and thanks for sharing. I love Pablo and his videos!
Hey Matt, I heard in your interview with Luca you're making a day-off Anki add-on, I was wondering when you think it will be released? I'm really looking forward to it! Thanks
Good video and I liked the cultural comparison a lot. I've studied a ton of Japanese and now I'm starting Korean. To me it seems obvious that the two languages have a common origin somewhere, sometime, maybe a very long time ago. But I commented on this while discussing some similarities between the two languages to a Japanese who was half Korean and she got all quiet and was like そうですか to everything I was saying.. But I wonder about things like the "yo" being added on for politeness in Korean, but in Japanese it's kind of the opposite like listen to me! I wonder if maybe Japanese borrowed the YO from Korean perhaps but the politeness aspect didn't really come across so well. Yeah. I think linguists from both countries deny that the two languages are related so oh well.
I know my comment is irrelevant but Matt really blinks way moore than I do lol I'm comparing him with Sean and I just can't help but see the difference *also his eyes is sooo beautiful
I'm using Matt's videos to improve my english skills. How do you define the level of this kind of content in english, i mean, it is intermediate level or ?
Dash Jubei nah, would say that native level are some more complicated talks like in the jordan peterson's videos. i've got to start understanding his more complex explanations only recently, even though it's been months already since i can understand Matt completely.
When you started talking about bullying it sounded just like here in Mexico, here is different but it has à lot in common. Bullying is really common in here as well
French is very similar to Spanish and so it is easy for me. But, no...I decided to learn the level 5 languages like Japanese and Korean...I still do Duolingo for French to refresh my hs French.
I've noticed that when I'm in groups of people when I'm speaking Japanese, you're right Matt that it's generally blanket statements of "Wow all of you are so good at speaking Japanese!", but they'll almost always show more interest in the person who's Japanese ability is the highest (in the sense that they'll ask more questions to that person about how they learned or like where their parents are from or if you seriously have never 留学'd before). In my last conversation in the wild I had a teenager just directly blurt out that this guy, who was in the same group call, has been in Japan as an ALT for years can barely speak Japanese and then about how I've never set foot in Japan and speak it so well. That felt good lol
If Japan were to adopt a phonetic system they will have to start putting spaces between the words. Korean phonetics still have some problems when taking the hanja from the Chinese languages because of the tone... So you end up with a lot of syllables that have the same pronunciation with a different meaning.
There's 謙譲語 and 尊敬語. One is to put others up and one is to lower yourself down. You have to switch bewteen them to really speak "true keigo" but even Japanese people would need to study that. Then there's also business Japanese which pretty much means you have to go above both to some degree and changes when you speak or write emails or whatever.
In Animal Crossing Timmy and Tommy hit you with the 日本語上手 at the beginning of the game if you're playing in Japanese but your location isn't set in japan lol
Oh my god. You guys have it SO hard. How dare anyone compliment your japanese. SMH! So annoying am i right gaijin tachi?
@@angeldust420pt2 南美 南米
@@angeldust420pt2 Bro. That was the joke :/ I speak japanese
Speaking as someone who has learned Japanese to a high level and is now learning Korean...knowing Japanese beforehand is almost like a cheat code compared to starting from an English perspective. There is so much overlap in the logic of the languages even if they don't have things that perfectly correspond. Japanese materials for learning Korean are so much simpler. It'll be like は = 은 / 는... On to the next concept. Whereas in English you'll get a roundabout discussion about subject markers and the difference between that and topic markers and all that.
@@stayskeptic3923 ^
@@stayskeptic3923 I don't know if that answers your question
@@stayskeptic3923 I've started studying Korean Grammar with できる韓国語
Just search it on yt, they got like 20-30 初級Ⅰ clips. Couldn't find any books digitally ^^' there are some Japanese youtubers who study Korean. You can check them out too
"roundabout discussion" lol. More like an "thesis" on the differences on Ga vs Ha
@@actionverbable links don't show up in RUclips comments, only you can see it
I've studied Chinese for 8 years.
If your Chinese is terrible they say "your chinese is so good!"
If your Chinese is middle level they say "how long did you live in China?"
If your Chinese is really good they say "why are you speaking Chinese? is there something wrong with my English?"
All that time and effort only to be finally told I'm rude for not speaking English *sigh*.
how good is ur chinese would u say? and how many hours did u study chinese per day
@@fisho5139 are you trying to make them feel good or is that a genuine question?
@@w花b I was just curious how they're chinese now
Been waiting for a comparison of these two languages forEVER. perfect.
Me too, I think Korean will be my 3rd language after Japanese.
@@georgemonnatjr.172 Same here
@@georgemonnatjr.172 uP
Langfocus has a great video on how similar/different they are as well! Just search "langfocus korean japanese". There's lots of stuff not mentioned here.
thanks for highlighting the pitch accent in your comment
The ultimate compliment isn't "Your Japanese is so good". For me, the ultimate compliment is - "Wow, you speak English too".
Not many YT vids keep me thoroughly entertained for 30 plus minutes. Fun topic, and well done!
Check out the video we made on Sean's channel: bit.ly/2z5N5YR
*TIMESTAMPS*
1:00 - Honorifics
7:55 - How Japanese/Koreans react to foreigners speaking the language
10:29 - How Japanese/Koreans react to foreigners showing interest in their country
12:59 - Subjects where Japanese/Koreans are very direct
14:14 - Subjects where Japanese/Koreans are very indirect
17:17 - Nunchi and kuuki
19:06 - The flip-side of politeness
21:42 - Hanja vs Kanji; Hangul vs Hiragana
27:43 - English loan words
Also, sorry for the poor audio and video quality!!
"If it's not a HELL YEA it's probably a no" LOL 名言っぽい
Hey! I was curious what "meigen-poi" means? I translated the kanji but had no luck haha! よろしくお願い！
@@robbytheyogi990 PoPuLaR saYinG
Finally, been wondering about this topic ever since i've noticed similar words between the two languanges. Thanks for the cool collab
Didn't expect to see Sean!
I'm a Japanese living in Taiwan and now trying to learn Taiwanese Hokkien and Korean. What I find interesting and also fascinating is that Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese remain final consonants of Chinese origin words which are absent in Modern Chinese Mandarin
like
食(しょくin Japanese 식 in Korean), (sit in Taiwanese)
国(こく) 국 kok
説（せつ）설 suat)
Chinese Mandarin(食shi 國guo 說 shuo)
I’m from HK and these final consonants exist in Cantonese too!
@@pokarethats because Cantonese is the most similar to ancient Chinese, which got spread to Korea n Japan I’m ancient times. It originated from the heartland of China since ancient times. But current Mandarin came from the north, Manchu and mogul regions that at one point weren’t even part of China. Then it settled in Beijing area. Hence today China north n south have such diff dialects. Like if one doesn’t make an effort to learn Cantonese or Hakka, one wouldn’t understand a word.
@4:15 the same concept exists in Korean! Interesting ~~ Also one thing that is interesting is that Korean kids all learn honorifics consciously. Their mom and dads and teachers correct them whenever they’re wrong and make sure they have social educate. Koreans won’t do this to foreign adults to the same degree, but it does effect relationships. If your friend introduces you to their friend and you mess up the honorifics while speaking towards that new person your friend will be embarrassed and outright call you out like ‘ hey bro , where’s your manors ? ‘ I’ve experienced this and it’s embarrassing, but a valuable experience.
Interesting... especially the kanji and hanja part.
Regarding polite language, I've always felt that almost every language has some form of it, even if it might not be quite as formalized or intricate as in Japanese or Korean. But even in English, you have shop clerks call customers "sir" or has situations where changing the verb makes it more polite ("can you please" vs. "could you please").
Oh, and Japanese people also do the "use English to explain which homonym you mean" thing, like to explain which せんとう they mean they'd say バトルの戦闘
@@box2572 I definitely agree that tone is very important, but there still are some examples where modifying the word makes it more polite. Like the one I mentioned above, where "can" gets turned into "could". It's not nearly as complex as in Japanese, but you can still communicate a lot of politeness through your choice of words, e.g.
"No smoking" vs. "Please refrain from smoking". I've definitely seen foreigners accidentally be rude by using expressions that weren't appropriate to the circumstances.
I believe it's called register.
@@BigPelikan Are You A 日本方
@@ADeeSHUPA You mean a 日本の方? No, I'm not Japanese, but I've been studying the language for a couple years.
BigPelikan English sounds a lot more rude when learners forget words imo. Such as not using the word “the”.
2:45: I myself am Korean, but he describes way better than I would about the different levels of honorifics in Korean. Much respect!
Before : Matt vs. Japan 🇯🇵
Now : Matt vs. Japan & Korea 🇰🇷
After : Matt vs. Japan & mandarin 🇨🇳
Me : Matt vs. (Polyglot community)🌍🌎🌎 tips 🌍🌎🌏
Christian Bai huh? Source ? Lol
@ hH
He knows Mandarin?
@@dumalun8388 iirc he's studying mandarin
So he’a against a country and a language..? 😂
9:42 this is funny because when I was learning Filipino I would always get "wow your Filipino is so good" even tho I could hear myself make mistakes but the better I actually got they stopped complimenting me and just started talking to me like a local. (I still occasionally get stares since I'm a tall white man tho)
As a Korean halftie who moved to Korea around 5 years ago and is currently studying in a regular school there, there’s a few experiences I’d like to share.
During the video, both Matt and Sean wondered how knowledgeable in Hanja the average Korean kid here is. Well, it varies. But, most of the time, out of the 9 levels in Hanja proficiency (with 9 being the lowest, 1 being the highest), people would usually say that they’re somewhere (or used to be somewhere) along level 3-5 and that the disuse after school sort of made them forget about them.
Though, there are some exceptions to that. People studying to become lawyers have to have a firm grasp of Hanja in order to have the ability to read certain books and such. A friend of mine, for example, knows how to read and write Hanja because he wants to be an attorney.
(Of course, aside from educational reasons, there are personal reasons too. A friend of mine learned Hanja in order to play Japanese games.)
Another thing, I’ve seen this a few times in textbooks as well, but some Korean words, for example 매체 (media), is written in the Sino-Korean pronunciation, complete with Hanja (媒體), but often they’d put the English word beside it instead. I don’t know if this has something to do with the fact that the meaning of the individual Hanja doesn’t match the concept it’s describing and was probably more used as a transliteration of the Chinese transliteration of the English loan word “media” (similar to how the Chinese loan word for bus is 巴士 (bashi) which in Korean turns into (파사); Chinese and Korean speakers can correct me if I’m wrong) or something else.
One final thing, 눈치 is completely pure Korean. It doesn’t have an associated Hanja but the meaning is roughly the same. 눈 is eye and 치 is a sort of modifier that gives the meaning of “strength” to a word. For example, 솟다 (rise high, come out) becomes 솟치다 (gush out, explode upwards) (native Korean speakers correct me if I’m wrong.) It comes from the Middle Korean word 눈츼.
To end on a positive note, I’m really glad guys had this talk! It’s nice to see Korean get the spotlight here after seeing Chinese get it. I’ve been following Matt’s channel and the MIA for a while now after I felt I had stagnated in my endeavors to master Korean. I had been doing a combination of traditional learning and osmosis to get to a sort of “fluent but not really” level. After seeing Matt’s video on MIA, I immediately started doing Korean MIA. I hope I could reach near-native level in the coming years.
not true - most young Koreans are almost illiterate of Hanja ... when presented the characters, they would not be able to read it, besides super basic words
Me and GF are Korean, living in Seoul
Let me try to answer to two things you raised. For the example of 매체, I think it could be because of its contextual meaning as well as the lacking knowledge of Hanja these days. 매체 can be used as "media" as in mass media but it can be also used as an "intermediary" that conveys things from one to another. Regarding the 한자 literacy of Korean "kids", I think that is quite impressive as I didn't know about that. From my perspective, who spent 6 years of elementary school education in Korea during the 90s, it was mandatory to study Chinese characters and some ancient poems and verses. Partly due to the patriotic policy of the then-president Kim Young Sam, I witnessed that 한자 got removed from all the publications and newspapers as much as possible or left in brackets. If you look at the old books published in the 70s or 80s, you will see Koreans used 한자 without transliteration in Korean. Also, I'm not sure if it stays the same nowadays but for my university graduation, the 한자 literacy examination was one of the prerequisites. I also often hear this, although I'm not a kid, from mandarin speaking friends that it is unexpected that Korean people fairly understand mandarin without speaking it. I guess it is difficult to generalize that Korean people know very well 한자 overall but indeed, depending on the education requirements, I think the general public's 한자 literacy also varies.
@@DRK0114 Are You A 韓國분
Nunchi and kuuki are not the same word or cognates to each other. Both nunchi and kuuki originated from Chinese characters. Nunchi actually means eye-measure, in Chinese characters 眼勢 which means eye's force or power. While kuuki, 空氣 in Chinese characters, literally means air, or surrounding, environment, atmosphere figuratively.
I wish you all the best in getting to a near Korean level! I've been living in Austria for seven years now and will live here for at least four more. I stagnated then deteriorated then got back up again in some aspects and stagnated in others... a weird ride but I hope to get to the same level of fluency I have in English which is near native and very fluent and effortless, but I make some mistakes here and there - some are mistakes natives make and some not, but the point it they're rare and my English is (mostly!) very natural. I'd be satisfied with that level even if it's not quite native and I'm still awkward here and there and can't speak in some fancy literary way. Here's to both of us succeeding!
This is the perfect video for me! I just discovered Matt vs Japan and AJATT and decided I would start to do the MIApproach for Korean during quarantine. Awesome 👍
Check out r/akatt !
I want to use the MIA for my Spanish
for me, japanese is wildly challenging to read, and Korean is wildly hard to pronounce. So many phonemes I don’t have! At least with Japanese I already have almost all of the phonemes. But then of course, there’s the kanji 😅
I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion! Thank you both for sharing your knowledge of two great cultures with us! 😁💜
i used to look at dogens videos about all of these english loan words as a joke
now i know,
they were a warning....
Very interesting video! Thank you! I’ve been learning Korean for a bit and it’s a very interesting and unique language! And yes, I love K-Pop lol for whoever asks.
I saw that if you play Animal Crossing on the Switch in Japanese on a foreign console, it'll say, "日本語上手"
Matt has amazing eyes and sean has the best smile lol 💕💖 This was an amazing collab
Already knowing English and Mandarin, and then learning Japanese and then Korean after that really allows me to connect the similar words with just the pronunciation
mandarin japanese and korean are completely different pronunciation .....
@@바보Queen yea but same word, I just have to rmb the diff pronunciation. Eg 使用 is shi3yong4, shiyou, and sayong.
Finally! I've been curious about the similarities of these two languages for so long after hearing words that sound similar, and just couldn't make a direct comparison because I'm not actively studying Korean (although I'd like to someday with all the fantastic immersion content they have).
You can see the difference of knowing how to speak a language and studying it. I'm Japanese and I don't really pay attention to the politeness higharchy so I don't know how it works. Whereas some like Matt who studies Japanese knows why its that way.
Wow you’re so good at english.
@@budgetstylestories8357 i think Mt English is a bit better than my Japanese
You two have stellar chemistry! Awesome video
I hate how both Japanese and Korean are replacing their words with English. It takes a way a special part of the language
Agree, but they seem to think it makes you sound fancier and smarter or more cultured, while their own language is just bland (again, that's what they seems to think of it).
I swear if I ever go to Japan I'll use as little english vocabulary (or foreign vocabulary in general) as possible even if everybody else does the opposite.
@@inendlesspain4724 yeah its exactly why they do it. i get, but i still dont like trend, because its seems to be growing more and more over time. sometimes if you use the japanese word instead of the english slang version, youll "sound old" haha
Then just talk it pure. I’ll try it with Japanese. I won’t use any English loan words
Yeah katakana words are harder to read and understand than well crafted kanji words
Politeness is one of the first things that come to mind when thinking about japanese (and I am sure also Korean). But now I wonder if they are really more polite than e.g. German. I can think of 10 ways of communicating "give me the butter" all with different levels of politness. Some are not really used anymore but you can still say them for over exaggeration. Because they are not categorized as much as japanese I think it is even harder to find the right nuance.
French has tu and vous, and how you conjugate the verbs in that sense. It's not totally outside of the the western languages to have it codified, even if when it's not it's by implication or how you address the person or people you're talking to, IE starting off by saying ladies and gentleman in english, or sir or ma'am
I think it's the combo of an unusual preoccupation with politeness with an agglutinative language that results in these unique grammatical features. In more analytic languages such a preoccupation tends to manifest more in word choice
I'm a native Italian speaker, and I've just realized how many english words are being internalized in my language. Like "to chill" in Japanese is "チルする" and in Italian is "chillare", "to diss" became "dissare" and so on. It's crazy how much the internet is changing languages
Woah awesome!! I have been using the MIA method to learn Korean for around a month now and that’s after learning Japanese for a few years so this is super cool
I wonder. Is it possible to learn Korean with Spanish
Are you going to take on Chinese next Matt? 😄
「よ」and [요] are different both in meaning and formality level because 「yo」indicates a superior positon from the speaker tp the listener and and can also show that new information is being conveyed whereas in Korean 요 is a formality marker or a type or imperative such as [빨리요].
We also have "chill", "diss" and "try" in Russian :D as well as many other words borrowed from English (and sometimes Japanese and other languages) these days (i guess that happens to any languages and lingua francas).
As for the reason people use them when there are already counterparts in the language, i never studied intricacies of borrowing words in ancient times (tho i guess they were at least somewhat similar) but this is how i see it from native speaker perspective now.
Most borrowed words (Except some professional ones (like "management" or "team building" for example) actually sound much less formal than their Russian counterparts and it seems to me people use them to kinda fill the lacunas in formality levels or meanings.
Like, there are two words for "sorry" (прости and извини) but they both sound kinda too formal (or at best not informal enough) even when you use informal speech patterns. Also, they both literally mean “forgive me” not “sorry” or “my bad” which sucks, so most young people use English "sorry" instead to kinda fill these formality and meaning gaps.
The same with "tyan (chan)"\"kun" for "a girl" and "a boy" (we have causal words for those, but they’re all kinda offensive or sound stupid) or "random" for random and many others. I think that’s that’s what’s happening in these languages too.
Like I think Japanese people use "thank you" a lot these days right? Mb for the same reason Russians use "sorry" - they as native speakers feel like there're some gaps it fills.
Also, sometimes words just better describe things (because they have broader or stricter meanings) and sometimes english words are just shorter (English "user" against Russion "polzovatel")
That said just like any slang many borrowed words tend to become less informal as they assimilate more and more into the language.
Of course all this above doesn't apply to words that don't exactly have counterparts in Russian or are used to describe new foreign things(that are most of the borrowings I guess) like jeans, jam, shorts, internet etc .
Also, these are some people who just know the language well and because of that tend to use a lot more English words than others (by which i mean they use even those words that didn't assimilate in Russian and thus are unknown to most speakers), but most people find it annoying cause most people don't know English and also they find it sounding kinda corny (mb because it just sounds weird to them or mb because this kinda speech became associated with 3/4 wave Russian feminists and most folks are not fans of those, at this point it's hard to tell). Tho of course not only feminist but any group that somehow connected to foreign culture have a habit using that culture words cause there're familiar with the language. And that's how a lot of times they get into vocabulary of general public. Like "diss" originated in rap\hip-hop circle and "tyan\kun" originated in anime circle but now they all used wildly among all young people.
really interesting talk!
i loved that you checked your facts after saying them
Woah! Sean Pablo + Matt Vs. Japan??? How did this happen? Two of my favorite channels just collided!
Korea is by far the best place I've visited. It's amazing.
ngl, korean pronunciation probably scares me as much as kanji scares others.
日本で6年住んでる韓国人ですが、シャン・パブロさんと韓国語と日本語の違い面白かったです。
自分は韓国人なので今でも日本語が難しいとは思ってます。日本語の場合、ビジネス用語で自分を下げるか相手を上げるかによって使う言葉が違うと思います。
確か、韓国にもビジネス用語はあると思いますが、日本くらい分けてないですね。
とにかく、面白かったです！マットさん日本語上手い！
션은 일본어에서는 ショーン 이라고 합니다
距離的には韓国と日本こんなに近いのに結構
文化も違うもんなあ
As a Japanese native speaker I say Korean is the closest language to my language. Most of the Koreans living in japan can’t be recognized as Koreans since they look like us and speak perfect Japanese.
No what are you talking about?? white people and Japanese look the same.
@@supercal3944 white is way too broad of a category, Italians and Norwegians look quite different for example, also I have no clue how you can't tell that there is genetic variation between Europeans and Japanese people.
@@saltyegges5957 I don't think you understand sarcasm
@@supercal3944 jajaja They(Japanese ) really think so
From someone who got lower intermediate in Japanese then switched to Korean it makes learning it so much easier things just come easily lots of grammar points line up like learning Spanish, lots of grammar points line up and alot of things translate alright. Koreans use grammar points was different, personally Korean clicked faster but it's probably because of the Japanese expirence somepeople say Korean has 7 politeness levels but it's not bad it's easier than it seems it would be a contious effort to speak too low to someone, you do it with non super close friends too even if they're months older but most of the time it's just adding 요 I think it's a really cool experience to learn the language
it is 7 but, 4 is common right. I kinda switched from Chinese...the tones are just crazy...My Korean progress is insane now. But, I still have a long way to go.
@@lewessays yeah now with summer around the corner I haven't been studying much but I can't wait to just improve like crazy in the summer
Thanks for the vid Matt! As a Korean learner I found it really interesting, and enjoyed the conversation between the two of you. I've always found that the similarities and roots of where words come from between Chinese, Japanese and Korean are really interesting. Looking forward to your next vid! :)
In terms of honorifics, I'm not sure about Japanese but Korean also uses completely different words depending on the honorific level. So you can't use the same word for "to eat" or "to sleep" for your grandparents and for your friends. I know of at least three different "levels" of the word "eat" that aren't just a different ending, but completely different words. Growing up as a Korean-American, I was scolded too many times for using the same word for my friends, parents, and grandparents. Also, you mentioned language used in Zen temples. There's also specific language used for religious situations in Korean, such as in prayer, that is a different honorific level (e.g. in the Korean translation of the Bible).
Japanese has that as well. You cannot use the same verb to say "the kid is sleeping" or the "grandpa is sleeping"
I love it when I finish a video feeling I spent my time well
Very enjoyable discussion. Thanks for sharing it.
1:26 „what are you doing“ is 뭐 하고 있어”. there is a difference between „what do you do“ and „what are you doing“ in korean too
I've been learning Japanese for 9 years and now Korean for about 3 months and this was fun to watch. It's always fun to see a word in a Korean text and connect the 漢字 and whatnot. It's interesting to see how certain ways of thinking and concepts are similar between Korea and Japan. I wonder how much of that was due to the Chinese influence or perhaps the Japanese influence when Japan occupied Korea. Anyway, nice video, dude.
Both Japan and Mainland China started using simplified versions of characters shortly after WWII, so maybe what Korea did by switching to all-hangul text was a slightly more extreme version of that.
Just came from Pablos channel to check you out Matt!
NIce to see another video like this. It's really insightful to see the similarities and differences between languages.
I was stationed in Korea and learning how to speak and going out into public Sean gets it. Using Korean with native speakers is a mind blowing event....they really REALLY appreciate that you've taken the time and interest to do so.
I didn't see every interview Matt has done but compared to the one with Steve Kaufmann they seem very relaxed and generally having a good time. would love to see more of this
4:25 Korean also has honorifics where the speaker lowers themselves. To give is 주다 and the lowering one you use to yourself (cuz obviously you cant use normal honorifics where you raise someone to yourself) is 드리다. “뭐 드릴까요?”
as someone who has immersed themselves in anime for over 10 years, Korean is much more difficult for me
Holy crap this video is timely.
Wolfe Mooney lmao right? I literally just watched parasite
I'm a Japanese having a few Korean friends and enjoyed a lot this collaboration! There were many interesting points I hadn't paid attention to before.
How do you think people in both the countries see the necessity to acquire English skills? I believe we had had a similar english education in school (intended for college entrance exams, rather than use as a communication tool) and are struggling applying conventional study methods (focusing on memorizing grammars/vocabularies and not encouraging exposure to real native English contents) today the world is getting globalized at the fastest speed.
さすがマットさん。このビデオも素晴らしいですね！感謝しています。
Honorifics also exist in Javanese and Sundanese.
Unfortunately it's one of the reasons why the younger generations tend to abandon speaking it altogether (and use Indonesian instead).
The honorifics system can be quite complicated and when you keep on being reprimanded for using the wrong word in the wrong situation, it's no wonder if you end up using Indonesian instead which is much less complicated.
Yay! I've been having so much fun studying Japanese and making insanely fast progress because it's so easy to compare it with Korean :)
Incredibly interesting discussion and I'm not even learning either language; however I've been watching different language learning channels for the last couple of months as I'm learning Tagalog. As an English speaker trying their first genuine stab at a second language, this was fascinating regarding levels of politeness, as I've been struggling with just two levels in Tagalog! I'm sure we have something similar in English but maybe not in such a formalised structure as other languages. Matt your channel has some of the best in depth videos on learning techniques and methods that have really helped my mindset to immerse myself in Tagalog and its been incredibly helpful on many levels, so thanks and keep up the great content! 😊😊
Beautiful video, much love ❤️. I enjoyed every bit
There is a Sam Kim song called No Sense and in the chorus he sings "no nunchi" :D You've helped me gain a more nuanced perspective on the song!
I would love to see a video about how to correct bad speaking habits which are caused by our great school systems around the world. I would really like to improve my english pronunciation and output in general.
Vocabulary similarities come from the fact that both Japanese and Korean derived so many words from Chinese.
Korean no longer use Chinese characters so it’s hard to see similarities visually but if they had still used it, it would’ve been much more easier to see the similarities.
if you are ever confused, just look up the character's Hanja, it is very helpful.
Awesome video! I never knew there were such similarities between the two languages and cultures.
재미있게 봤어요. 감사합니다
Japanese pared down their honorific system to the 3 levels in everyday speech that Matt points out as a way of standardization when it became more Westernized. It took the more archaic elements that still exist in the Korean language and smoothed it out. It's why some people argue the grammar is more difficult in Korean. The masu/desu form would get you through pretty much everyday life as a consumer in Japan. Obviously, you'll need to know the more formal speech levels if you work there. Korea is the societal embodiment of Confucius values. It's a little less so today, but veeeeeeeeeeery foreign to nearly every non-Korean I've come across. A common meeting between strangers in a Korean conversation is establishing what speech level they need to speak in - that's based on age, occupation, name whatever hierarchical structure you can think of, to establish how to speak to someone.
Anecdotal example from my experience: I met my friend's mother for the first time while I was in college. She talked to me like a child (as she would her own child). She asked me what I do (college student), what school I went to, who my father is. My father is someone she's heard of and so happens to respect, my school was at the higher end of what she's used to. All of a sudden, she's speaking to me in honorifics and using humble forms. I'm an ABK and it was crazy to see it in action. You're always a student before this period. I don't think this level of *overt^ form of respect exists as much today. Lots of pros and cons to this system.
The Japanese are much less hierarchical in everyday life. But that's probably the major difference. All the differences in grammar/conjugations/etc. are minor on average.
I wonder which language is most efficient to learn first for learners wanting to learn both. On one hand, you can use the large number of Sino-Korean vocabulary you have to build an intuition on what a character means if you start with Korean, making it easier to learn kanji (kind of like how you recommend doing RRTK before RTK). On the other hand, if you start with Japanese, you can use the characters you've already learned to gain an intuition on new words even before learning them, and you can start to disambiguate Sino-Korean words from the get-go. I think Japanese would also help you learn shared Sino-Korean/Sino-Japanese vocabulary more efficiently since you could just recognize their hanja whereas if you're starting with Korean, you have to either have learned hanja or try to figure it out based on similarities in pronunciation.
However, I do think Korean pronunciation is also a lot more challenging to get right in the beginning, and it's almost a superset of that of Japanese, so starting with that as a base will probably help you get rid of the gaijin voice almost immediately (though it won't prepare you for pitch accent). But if you start with Japanese, you'll still have a lot of trouble with all the new vowels and consonants.
I think people will naturally drift towards the language that's used by the culture they're most interested in. I'm sure people who started learning Chinese first will have a slight advantage in regards to associating words with hanja/kanji, and that people who are familiar with Korean grammar might find Japanese grammar relatively easy to "hook onto", but a person who is actually deeply interested in Korean cinema, literature, and history will probably not want to spend a lot of time fiddling around with learning a bit of Japanese (or vice-versa) just for the sake of making the process a bit smoother.
I'm confident that they are as similar as Swedish and Sanskrit.
I want to try learning Korean after Japanese since the grammar is so similar, in my Japanese 101 class there was a lot of Korean exchange students there for the easy A. One of the Korean guys who roomed with a Japanese guy was near fluent at the end of that semester where the rest of us were still struggling to form a basic sentence.
Not for me. I find korean different from japanese in a lot of little ways that adds up over time. Only thing I find similar are the honorifics, topic marker, word order and postpositions, which most sov languages have anyways.
Regarding people's tolerance for mistakes in polite language usage.
When I was in Japan a few years ago, I remember walking by a policeman at a station who was asking something or giving out instructions (can't remember exactly).
And when I accidentally replied with casual language , he promptly (and somewhat sternly) corrected me.
I was quite surprised because it all happened in passing and I didn't expect him to hold me up to standard.
Maybe I pronounced the words well enough that he thought that my language ability was much better than it was :s
As someone who self-taught Japanese for several years (still working on it;) then lived in Korea for two, it was great to see this video! The section on levels of politeness was a little oversimplified, though. I started writing a comment to explain the different aspects that make up both languages' levels of politeness and/or formality (they can be independent of each other to a certain extent!), but it got really long haha. It would take a whole video to properly address the topic, I think...
Re: The English words at the end, all those words you mentioned (vision, incentive, etc.) are essentially buzzwords that get thrown around a lot in business and online and thus find their way into other languages the fastest. It often depends a lot on the speaker whether or not he or she chooses to use the "cool", "hip" English words or the "boring" native ones. It personally makes my skin crawl when I hear someone use some silly English word in a different language when there's a perfectly good word in that language for the same thing, and I think it's why I appreciate Chinese that translates literally EVERYTHING and/or has it's own words for things (网络 for internet, 蓝牙 for bluetooth, etc.).
North Korea actually has a policy of trying to purge loanwords from 조선말
This video was very interesting, I’d love to see more like it 😁
I'm learning Japanese and I can't wait to get to an intermediate level to pick up some Korean!
9:00 haha yeah I met an elderly Japanese woman once. I had heard her name , very badly pronounced, was "Noriko". I don't speak much Japanese but I can understand a tiny bit. I just asked her "Your name is Noriko, right?" and just from hearing her name, she was like do you speak Japanese???? That was probably the first time she heard her name pronounced right since she got here! XD. Even her husband didn't pronounced her name right :/
行けたら行くわー！って言いますね確かに😂
大体の人は、実際には行かないんだけどやんわりと「お断り」を臭わせるために言うけど、
私は本当に行ける時は行ってしまうので、
当日になると「え！本当に来たの？」と言われることもあってモヤモヤするパターン😂
to chill seams like a verb with a nuanced meaning thats missing in a lot of languages. In germany we also adopted it. ("chillen")
Me watching this discussion : I would never be able to have this kind of conversation in English even after spending my whole life studying it... I am a Korean native speaker working in Japan, trust me you guys have a lot of advantages than I do
There are actually 7 politeness levels in Korean depending upon context, target speaker/listener and environment. Great video and thanks for sharing. I love Pablo and his videos!
And koreans even don’t know that
Hey Matt, I heard in your interview with Luca you're making a day-off Anki add-on, I was wondering when you think it will be released? I'm really looking forward to it! Thanks
The beta version is already released. You can access it on the MIA patreon, it's called the "vacation addon"
이 분야에 흥미가 있는건가 재밌넹 ㅎㅎ 잘봤습니다 뭦랒늕겆짖? 영엊늕 엊렺웢 ㅠㅠ
ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
난 외국인인데 이해했네
@@why-cooking 오오오오오오올 학ㄴ국거 꽤 하시나봐요
@@goldenmouse3320 아니요. 님도 "c0riAn iZ hrAD"을 읽어서 이해할 수 있지 않을까요?
왜쿸잉 항구거 어려와요
Good video and I liked the cultural comparison a lot. I've studied a ton of Japanese and now I'm starting Korean. To me it seems obvious that the two languages have a common origin somewhere, sometime, maybe a very long time ago. But I commented on this while discussing some similarities between the two languages to a Japanese who was half Korean and she got all quiet and was like そうですか to everything I was saying.. But I wonder about things like the "yo" being added on for politeness in Korean, but in Japanese it's kind of the opposite like listen to me! I wonder if maybe Japanese borrowed the YO from Korean perhaps but the politeness aspect didn't really come across so well. Yeah. I think linguists from both countries deny that the two languages are related so oh well.
In the beginning, I swear i thought they were in the same room😂
enjoyed this video!
I know my comment is irrelevant but Matt really blinks way moore than I do lol
I'm comparing him with Sean and I just can't help but see the difference *also his eyes is sooo beautiful
I probably blink a lot because there's a bright light shining on my face while filming lol
@@mattvsjapan なるほど~ Oh my my comment is so embarrassing lol didn't expect the reply 🤣
This was really good
I'm using Matt's videos to improve my english skills. How do you define the level of this kind of content in english, i mean, it is intermediate level or ?
Out of 10 I’d say this is a 7
It's native level.
6-7? but i mean if you can understand this youre doing a great job dude! :D
Depende bastante do video, mas diria que uns 7,5 ou 8
Dash Jubei nah, would say that native level are some more complicated talks like in the jordan peterson's videos. i've got to start understanding his more complex explanations only recently, even though it's been months already since i can understand Matt completely.
めっちゃ勉強になる！
Why did matt delete the video again? The MIA 10#
When you started talking about bullying it sounded just like here in Mexico, here is different but it has à lot in common. Bullying is really common in here as well
アメリカ人なので見れる日本と韓国の類似点を示すいい動画ですね。
It was a fresh perspective for me.
32분이 순식간에 지나갔습니다.
行けたら行くわ〜！
ってめっちゃ言う😂
French is very similar to Spanish and so it is easy for me. But, no...I decided to learn the level 5 languages like Japanese and Korean...I still do Duolingo for French to refresh my hs French.
I will watch Jean now.
You, Xaioman, Jean you guys are diplomats
I've noticed that when I'm in groups of people when I'm speaking Japanese, you're right Matt that it's generally blanket statements of "Wow all of you are so good at speaking Japanese!", but they'll almost always show more interest in the person who's Japanese ability is the highest (in the sense that they'll ask more questions to that person about how they learned or like where their parents are from or if you seriously have never 留学'd before).
In my last conversation in the wild I had a teenager just directly blurt out that this guy, who was in the same group call, has been in Japan as an ALT for years can barely speak Japanese and then about how I've never set foot in Japan and speak it so well.
That felt good lol
If Japan were to adopt a phonetic system they will have to start putting spaces between the words.
Korean phonetics still have some problems when taking the hanja from the Chinese languages because of the tone... So you end up with a lot of syllables that have the same pronunciation with a different meaning.
There's 謙譲語 and 尊敬語. One is to put others up and one is to lower yourself down. You have to switch bewteen them to really speak "true keigo" but even Japanese people would need to study that. Then there's also business Japanese which pretty much means you have to go above both to some degree and changes when you speak or write emails or whatever.
if anyone wants to see a foreigner who managed to get super close to sounding like a native korean, look up Guillaume Patry