leosmith wrote:Sayonaroo wrote:I think it's easier to look up words in Japanese because unlike Korean they don't have multiple ways to spell words since they don't use an alphabet. For Japanese i could just look up the hiragana
Because I studied pronunciation from the beginning, I almost always spell Korean words correctly. When I do make a mistake, I find I'm able to correct it easily. With Japanese, hiragana often wasn't enough with the dictionaries I used. Maybe due to old tools though.I found Japanese to be much easier to learn than Korean precisely because the Japanese language uses chinese characters
I find the opposite to be true, as I think most westerners would, no offense.Can you imagine learning Korean without having first learned some Japanese?
Yes, it would have been harder than learning it after for sure. And I might have told people I thought it was the hardest language in the world, up until the time I learned either Japanese or Chinese that is.I think that would be super inefficient because of all the sinowords
Knowing Chinese characters is helpful for vocabulary acquisition in Korean, but certainly not a necessity. Thanks for posting that thread, by the way.
Japanese doesn't have spelling like Korean because it's not an alphabet. For Japanese if I want to look up a word I just type the hiragana and I find it but for Korean sometimes there's just multiple ways to spell a certain sound and the only way to figure it out is to type all the sounds. You won't know until you look it up until you look it up because you don't know the word. Example 괴변 meaning sophistry and just from hearing it you'll probably go 개변 계변 괴변 while for Japanese you type きべん and find the appropriate entry quickly because of the kanji. This is just one example. There's so many spellings for the same sound. There's also words with crazy bacchim (crazy as in you wouldn't be able to guess the spelling just from hearing the word 읊다 if it's conjugated in a way that they don't voice the consonant explicitly ) that you don't know how to spell just based off hearing it if the verb or adjective isn't conjugated in an obvious way. Also sometimes Korean people say stuff with the double consonant pronounciation when it's not so you might waste time looking up the word with the single consonant versus the double consonant ie ㄱㄲ.
I'm just saying Japanese is just easier to look up because they don't have spelling. I say this as a person who has learned both languages to a high level. I always dread it when I have to look up words in Korean because it sometimes takes extra time/effort than Japanese because of multiple possibilities of spelling ( I love how in Japanese that you type in hiragana and hate how in Korean you gotta try different spelling variations) or I just cannot spell the word just from hearing it from double bacchim or whatever reason. Depending on the word looking up words in Korean can be just as quick and efficient as looking up words in Japanese but sometimes the words are tricky and a pain in the ass to look up. I use the offline dictionary lingoes and Japanese google and Korean Japanese naver dictionary and Korean naver dictionary for Korean so the lingoes helps me save time with the spelling issue usually since there's no lag whatsoever since it's offline and it looks up stuff as you type it
Actually my biggest pet peeve with Korean is I come across of the issue of the word not being in the damn Japanese Korean dictionary ( if it ain't in that one it sure as hell ain't in the English Korean dicitonary) . I almost never have to do this with Japanese but for Korean it feels like it happens all the time so then I have to go to Japanese google or Korean naver dictionary (sometimes this doesn't even have it yet everyone on some Korean tv show seems to know the word) or ask on chiebukuro. One example of This is when Korean speakers say a variation of a word instead of the actual word because they feel like it. I gotta post an example but nothing comes to mind now since my focus on Korean is comprehension and not output
I don't know what Japanese dictionary you use but the ones online are really good and they give you so many ways to look up stuff hiragana or kanji or starts with or ends with or contains and Japanese has rikaismaa and yomichan while Korean has a crappy pop up dictionary that doesn't know how to unconjugate lol. That's one of the main reasons why the kanji is so helpful because that allowed the existence of rikaisama and whatnot.