On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 12:24:49 +0900, Ryo Furue
<furufuru@ccsr.u-tokyo.ac.jp> wrote (among other things):
Korean and Japanese are *very* similar in grammar and in pronunciation.
So, if you speak Korean, it shouldn't be very difficult to learn to
speak Japanese. Although I have only superficial knowlegde about
Korean, everyone who knows both languages well says the same.
The grammar is definitely close, but I'd disagree that the
pronunciations of the two languages are "*very* similar". True,
Korean pronunciation is closer to Japanese than, say, English or
French. But Korean has many more vowel sounds than Japanese, although
I suspect that the differences aren't easily noticeable to a native
Japanese speaker. For example, both "Ichon" (the name of a station in
the centre of Seoul) and "Icheon" (another town, 60km to the south)
would be pronounced as "ichon" in Japanese, which could lead to some
confusion! On the other hand, Koreans have a hard time with Japanese
"tsu" and "z" sounds, which unfortunately sounds rather like the
pronunciation of young Japanese children! For an English speaker,
most of the sounds of Japanese are fairly easy to pronounce; "tsu" and
"ryo" etc. (hint: it's not pronounced "Rio" 
seem generally to be a
problem, though.
However, since about 80% (I seem to recall) of the Korean vocabulary
is Chinese-character-derived, and the situation in Japanese is about
the same, there are a lot of similar words between the two languages.
It's possible to work things out in the "other" language if you take
account of some simple rules (not an exhaustive or scientific list;
just off the top of my head):
Korean (official RoK romanisation) <-> Japanese (Hepburn romanisation)
eo <-> e
~l <-> ~tsu
h~ <-> k~ (sometimes)
~ng <-> long vowel
~k <-> ~ki or ~ku
e.g. (dots added at Chinese character boundaries for clarity)
ji.ha.cheol <-> chi.ka.tetsu (subway)
hak.saeng <-> gaku.sei (student)
do.seo.gwan <-> to.sho.kan (library)
mu.seon <-> mu.sen (wireless)
yeok <-> eki (station)
If you take account that a voiced consonant at the start of a Korean
word is actually pronounced unvoiced (d -> t; j -> ch) then they sound
quite similar.
Personally, speaking Japanese but little Korean, I find the lack of
Chinese characters ("hanja" in Korean) more confusing, even though
hangeul (the Korean phonetic writing system) is very easy to learn and
read. If you go to Tapgol Park (aka Pagoda Park) in Seoul, you can
see the Declaration of Korean Independence, written in mixed
hangeul-hanja script. Generally, however, you won't see much mixed
script in either Korea these days.
When Chinese characters are used in Korean, though they are the
complex, traditional kind, which means that they are often difficult
for Japanese to read. (Japanese uses many simplified characters,
which are simplified differently to the PRC, but that's another
story.) Sometimes, Koreans use the traditional characters when
writing Japanese, such as in restaurant menus and on some of the
Japanese signs at Incheon airport. I suppose that it must be
confusing for the Japanese, who generally are not familiar with the
old forms.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean you can easily learn to read and
write Japanese even if you read and write Korean fluently. The
problem is that the Japanese language uses Chinese characters
extensively, while modern Korean is usually written without Chinese
characters. I know this from Korean friends of mine who speak fluent
Japanese and yet have difficulty in reading and writing Japanese.
Chinese characters are hard, no matter what you do, although they
aren't as crazy as they seem at first: they are essentially "spelled"
from slightly more than 200 different components ("radicals"). Once
you've learned the components and their variations, it gets a lot
easier.
Personally, I'd advise you to concentrate on learning speaking first:
it's a lot easier to learn to read a language when you already
understand it.
Paul.
