Native Korean learning Chinese discount

[outcast]

I was taking a placement test yesterday, a de facto HSK 5 exam (though not official in any way), and in a classroom of about 25-30 students, I would say 90% were Koreans. It could be 98%, I just could not tell if some were Japanese or not. I was the only western student there.

Last semester I clearly noticed how I have to work 1.5 to 2 times as hard to progress at the same level as the Koreans (and faster than some of them). Several Chinese have told me their pronunciations tend to be more natural or it's easier for them to have good Mandarin pronunciation. I just spoke to a Korean friend and she found the test about as hard as I did, but I know she does not put the time I do in learning.

I had always thought the discount was minimal, having read things in the past about how these languages are not really related, and the fact many Koreans no longer study characters (which is a big part of the discount for Japanese learners). Taking out the idea Koreans study hard (some do, some do not... in any event I also study hard), it's now evident there absolutely is a discount.

I wonder how much it is (20-50%?), and what would be analogous from English or Spanish as the mother language... Danish and Romanian, respectively? Or more distant perhaps?

[Marah]

I don't know about Korean but in Japanese there are plenty of words that are cognates in Chinese. These cognates aren't obvious because pronunciation has changed a fair bit but once you learn a word you might realize "hey, this word is actually quite close to this one" and it makes it easier to learn them.

If you go to forvo and write words in Hanzi you will find their counterparts in Japanese Kanji and Korean, it'll become quite obvious then.

For instance, the Chinese word for sports is yun4dong4, in Japanese it's undou and in Korean it's uendong.

[outcast]

Yes I figure now reading Chinese to them must be naturally easier, and if they are good at reading Hanzi then getting through reading texts is faster of a task than for someone like me.

I am in no way using this as a crutch, Mother Nature, the Heavens, and the 12 dimensions all know all along my goal has been to be among the best students, which means keeping pace with the likes of Korean and Japanese learners of Chinese which may have some natural linguistic/cultural edge. To me ultimately that is irrelevant and I have to perform just as good as they do, no excuses. But from a language lover's standpoint, I am curious how easier it is for them. The shoe is usually in the other foot, I as a westerner native speaker of IE languages have enormous advantages learning French, German, and even Russian over Chinese and Korean learners. So it all evens out.

[Sizen]

I've mainly studied Japanese, but I've also spent time learning Mandarin and Korean.

The biggest boon for Koreans learning Mandarin is, of course, the vocabulary. Chinese-derived words are common in Korean, so not only are the sounds familiar to Koreans, but also the structure (i.e. affixes and compound nouns). While phonetic similarities between certain words may not be transparent initially, with enough exposure to Mandarin, the similarities start to pop out. Even without a knowledge of hanja, the phonetic and etymological similarities can be rather striking.

As you've mentioned, Korean and Mandarin are genealogically different languages and therefore don't share common grammars. In comparison to English, however, certain aspects of Mandarin grammar seem much less foreign to Koreans: left-branching relative clauses, topic-comment sentence structure and a certain degree of pro-drop behaviour. Initially, these are much bigger roadblocks for English speakers learning Mandarin.

In terms of phonology, the two languages do share some phonemes that are absent in English. That being said, I'm not sure how much of an advantage this would confer to Koreans learning Mandarin, seeing as Korean consonants have a tendency of sliding between two allophones depending on the surrounding sounds.

At the end of the day, the only big advantage is vocabulary. I felt this firsthand when I was studying Mandarin in Taiwan and all of my Indo-European language speaking classmates had great difficulty acquiring vocabulary, whereas I absorbed the vocabulary relatively painlessly thanks to my knowledge of Japanese. This gave me more time to focus on sentence structure and speech patterns.

As for your question about a pair of languages similar to Korean and Mandarin, I think you'd be hard pressed to find many good examples, considering there aren't many languages that share a great deal of vocabulary, all the while possessing highly divergent grammars. Spanish and Romanian might initially seem like a good comparison in this respect, but I think you'd find that after a few months (or weeks) of Romanian, the language would lose its mystique. The same goes for English with respect to Danish, where vocabulary would end up being the biggest difficulty in the long run.

I get the feeling that Latin and Spanish would probably be a more apt comparison, though still not 100% accurate. Vocabulary acquisition would be fairly easy for the most part, but some of it would still be opaque and the grammar would throw you for a loop.

[Star1]

I wonder how much it is (20-50%?), and what would be analogous from English or Spanish as the mother language... Danish and Romanian, respectively? Or more distant perhaps?

I think you'd be hard pressed to find many good examples, considering there aren't many languages that share a great deal of vocabulary, all the while possessing highly divergent grammars.

What about creoles? Creoles often take vocabulary from one language and grammar from another. Take a look at these, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_languages

That is just a list of English-based creoles. There are many more than that.

[Sizen]

What about creoles?

I've only really read somewhat in depth about the French-based Reunion creole and even if the differences are there, it didn't strike me as so different from French that it would take a considerable effort to learn it for a French speaker.

As for English creoles, on the whole, most of the ones I've been exposed to haven't had overly different grammars that would make them difficult for a native English speaker to learn. In fact, most of them are, from what I've seen, still analytic SVO languages like English, just with some other quirks. Between Korean and Chinese, were looking at the differences between a synthetic SOV language and an analytic SVO language. There are probably some creoles that are more out there. I just don't know of them, so I couldn't say.

[Star1]

Maybe something like Mednyj Aleut instead (not English based)? A Russian speaker would get a "discount" but the grammar would still be foreign in many aspects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medny_Aleut_language

[langwijes]

Last semester I clearly noticed how I have to work 1.5 to 2 times as hard to progress at the same level as the Koreans (and faster than some of them). Several Chinese have told me their pronunciations tend to be more natural or it's easier for them to have good Mandarin pronunciation. I just spoke to a Korean friend and she found the test about as hard as I did, but I know she does not put the time I do in learning.

Another reason why Koreans may have a leg up specifically on the written sections of Chinese exams (traditional or simplified) is because Koreans are still taught hanja[1] (Korean-flavoured Chinese characters and pronunciations) in their primary and secondary education systems. Some high-brow S. Korean newspapers even incorporate hanja characters in their articles, so to completely understand the newspaper one often has to have a decent vocabulary of Chinese characters. Koreans didn't only just incorporate some Chinese-derived vocabulary, but also a portion of the writing system and accompanying pronunciations.

However, regarding pronunciation, I'd imagine that Koreans have just as difficult of a time with tones as English-natives. As far as I know, hanja pronunciations are not tonal, so Koreans would need to practice these just as diligently as any other non-native speaker. Arguably, given my life-long experience with Koreans and their English pronunciations, if I had to wager I'd bet that any Chinese dialect will be harder for Koreans to speak as they find it very difficult to distinguish and produce on-demand the English "l" and "r", "v" and "b" and "f" and "v" pairs.

Hence, any native Korean advantages reading and writing (a small subset of) Chinese characters would be somewhat negated by a slightly corresponding need to work harder on their spoken Chinese.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja