What kinds of language families are in the world?
A lot of language families exist in the world. They are roughly divided into thirteen language families. The biggest family is Niger-Congo, as 1523 languages come from this family. The second biggest family is Austronesian, as 1257 languages come from it. English and European languages come from Indo-European families. Japanese and Korean are not sorted by this language family. The study said they independently developed [1].
In another perspective, sorted by the feature of the language, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Chinese are sorted as Altaic languages. Altaic languages have three features: they have vowels and consonants, follow the subject-object-verb word order, and have glue.
The easiest language to learn in the Altaic family for Japanese
First of all, overall, the easiest language to learn for Japanese is Korean. According to data, the group 1 languages, the easiest languages for Japanese people to learn, are Korean, Indonesian, Swahili, and Malay. Especially, Korean is easier than the mentioned other languages because Hangeul, Korean characters, is easy to learn for everyone. Moreover, both Korean and Japanese pronunciations originated from the Chinese language. It is can be noticed through the similarities in the pronunciation of Chinese, Korean and Japanese words. The group 2 languages are Turkish, Chinese, Spanish, etc. English and French are sorted as group 3. Russian and Polish are sorted as group 4 [2].
The feature of the Korean Language
Korean is a unique language. The Korean characters are named Hangeul, which has 10 vowels and 14 consonants and consists of a combination of vowels and consonants. They put consonants on the right side, vowels on the left. The combination makes it easy to read hangul [3].
What is the most efficient way for the Japanese to study the Korean language?
A baby learns a language in the order of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It is said that this is the most efficient way to be a native speaker of a language. In Japanese school, we learn English in the opposite order. Therefore, if and when you want to learn a new language, you have to listen to the language a lot first [4].
References
- Language Families, mustgo travel, viewed 10.2.2021, https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/language-families/
- 日本人が覚えやすい言語とは？, viewed 10.3.2021, https://passing-notes.com/column/223046/
- Learn How to Read Hangul, viewed 10.4,2021, https://www.howtostudykorean.com/unit0/
- Phillip Balley, 2000, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, viewed 10.4.2021 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X00019004005
