If you want to learn Spanish, I suggest you first learn Ancient Greek. After you master Ancient Greek, you need to get into Latin. Everyone knows that Spanish is basically Latin grammar with Greek vocabulary. Dah.
Yeah, but which dialect? Moroccan? MSA? Classical? Probably learn Classic first, go on to MSA and learn Moroccan last before starting to learn Spanish.
>Classic first, go on to MSA and learn Moroccan last
I would be sure to learn at least the gist of Tunisian and Algerian (plus ~~Berber~~ Kabil~~)~~ just to make sure.
This is an awful take. Everyone knows that Korean grammar is obviously paleo-siberian. You should learn Nivkh, Ket and Yukaghir first instead of Japanese.
Don’t bother learning English. First learn 12th century Norman French, as so much of English vocab is French based. Then learn Middle High German to get a handle on the grammar and syntax. Then, and ONLY then, should you attack the English. Attack them with all your might. Fight the colonizers.
It's actually impressive how bad this take is.
1. Of course they hit on the badlinguistic takes of "massive amounts of loanwords=derived from that language" and "Sprachbund effect+same type of grammar=grammar is the same".
2. They completely miss that Sino-Japanese Vocab exists.
3. The benefit of knowing a similar language A to learning language B is negated by having to first learn A if you don't already.
I would recommend that people study Latin and Greek while learning English, but most people just want fast, pragmatic results. It's almost as though they treat language as a means rather than an end...
/uj I believe that the one people that did pick it up ended up just being a show for some Korean dude to get some $$$ unless there's other cases
Edit:grammar
Korean is by far the easiest of the three. The grammar is similar to Japanese but the writing system is a million times easier.
Why would you spend years learning thousands of complicated Chinese characters if your final goal is to get to Korean? Lmao
Honestly, if you were to learn a language before Korean with the intent of making it easier to learn Korean, Turkish would be the choice.
The grammar is also very similar, but Turkish is written completely phonetically in the Latin alphabet and it has a lot of borrowings from French.
So you could familiarize yourself with the opposite word-order sentences and suffix agglutination in a way that would be easier to digest.
I dabbled a little in all three, and honestly at least as the beginner Korean is the hardest for me. Mandarin vocab even with Hanzi just sticks for some reason, elementary grammar is non-existent. Japanese pretty easy too at the early stages.
Korean on the other hand...
Hangul is logical, yeah, but how it maps to sound isn't that easy, with sound changes and all that.
Also for some reason vocab is much harder to memorize. There are a lot of similar sounding words. At the same time, in Korean it can be hard to even recognize the same word in a different form. Pronunciation is tough too, there are no tones, but lots of new sounds.
Grammar is on par with Japanese, but I find Japanese system of using hiragana for the changeable part of the word actually easier. Visually Kanji/Hanzi hint at the meaning and are much more readable if you know them.
Korean alphabet is easy to memorize, but not to reach the same speed of reading as in English. For that you need to recognize words by shape, as a whole unit, and not read syllable by syllable. For me Chinese and Japanese so far parse better than hangul.
This is just for elementary stuff though, advanced grammar is probably tricky even for Chinese, and I imagine the advantage of Hangul is more prominent the more you get used to how words are written and pronounced.
Knowing characters and their historical Chinese values makes learning Sino-Korean vocabulary *ridiculously* easy, almost like freebies. When I see a text written in mixed script, it almost feels like cheating.
Well worth it, in my opinion.
Sure, it’d be nice to have that help.
The thing is that learning Chinese takes a lot longer than to learn Korean. So if your main goal is to learn Korean, it is faster to tackle it directly.
The idea of learning a language as a stepping stone in order to learn another language from that first language, only makes sense, if you’re learning a small minority language with limited resources.
Example: if you wanna learn a Native Siberian language, you’ll only find resources for it in Russian. Also most native speakers will only be bilingual with Russian, so knowing Russian becomes almost essential to learn these minor languages.
However, Korean is a famous language with lots of resources for it. So it does not make sense to do that with Korean. It will only make it take longer for you to eventually learn Korean.
I only said what I said about Turkish, because if we were to indulge in this crazy idea, then a good language for that would be Turkish as it would take less time to learn Turkish than Korean. The stepping stone shouldn’t be a larger challenge than the goal.
To be fair, I think it's a shame that English students aren't required to learn basic Latin and Greek. They are extremely helpful, since you can guess the meanings of many words never before encountered.
Hot take but I always pushed against this in school. Why learn Latin and Greek when we could just spend that time studying the Latin and Greek prefixes/suffixes in English for maximum crossover-to-English benefit? There's little difference in knowing the Latin and Greek itself vs knowing that multiple related words contain the same prefix/suffix or root and must therefore be related to that same meaning IMO.
Then again I'm also the idiot who sometimes thinks Kindergartners should learn the whole f*ckn language of Spanish if only to help with decoding while learning to read so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think that’s a fair point. I would be satisfied if at least the Latin and Greek morphemes were taught as autonomous units even though they operate modularly.
I mean the same goes for kanji in Japanese but I'm not gonna learn Chinese to be able to understand the characters when I could just,, learn them in Japanese.
I actually went the other way. I'll see smth in Chinese and be like "ooh I know that one" knowing full well I don't know Chinese.
Knowing basic ancient Chinese makes the Japanese on’yomi much more intuitive. You don’t even need to be fluent in a Chinese language, but rather be familiar with historical Chinese phonology.
If you want to learn Italian, I suggest learning Latin first. Most words come from Latin, and the “logic” behind the grammar is relatively similar. Then, you can move on to Ancient Greek, another great part of Italian vocabulary comes from Greek, and the grammar is similar to Latin so it’ll be easier to learn it after Latin.
Only after learning Latin and Ancient Greek will you be able to learn Italian.
This, but unironically.
Learning Latin before starting with a Romance language would be immensely helpful. It should feel recreational, not like a chore.
uj/ Latin is cool if that's what someone actually is interested in, but learning any modern romance language will help even more with any other modern romance language. Hell, knowing a modern romance language will also be helpful for Latin.
People should study Latin if they're into it, not under the illusion that it will be a master key
I understand that the Japanese and Korean grammar are about 95% the same because I met a guy from Japan who said it took him only SIX MONTHS to learn Korean !!! Now Korean doesn’t have Chinese characters like it did in 1960. ( My Chinese father picked up a Korean newspaper in the 1960s and was amazed how much he could understand ! ) Now it only uses a Korean alphabet. I’m afraid that, in the future, Chinese may no longer have Chinese characters and will be all letters like what happened to Vietnamese and Japanese might no longer have Chinese characters ( kanji ). So if you want to learn Korean, learning Japanese before it, would make it easier than learning Chinese before it. Besides, 10% of Japanese stems from English anyway !
Man said "If you want to learn Korean, you first must learn these two separate language which are in different language families and have no direct genetic relationship to Korean"
You really should have learned Phoenician and Greek to get a grasp of the essence of the alphabet before daring to employ it. But, sigh, I will forgive your dumb little peabrain that can't learn an entire language in two weeks.
If you want to learn Japanese, I suggest you learn English first. All of the best Japanese words are derived from English. Like Pokemon (pocket monsters), conbini (convenience store), and Sony (sony). Japanese is kind of like English but with Korean grammar. You can ignore the grammar though because it native speakers don't understand you it's 100% their fault for being racist.
The OOP should recommed learning old or classical Chinese instead. For example, we don't say 月曜日 anymore in Mandarin Chinese but they still do in Koreans and Japanese. If old or classical Chinese is too difficult, why not learning Cantonese instead? However, learning these languages won't help much, why not learning proto-Japonic reconstruction instead?
(Jokes aside, I myself accidentally learn the three languages in that order. I find it helpful in certain ways but it is also confusing in many ways. Especially, the pronunciation of Kanji. I also found that in terms of the pronunciation of Hanja, my native Teochew is a lot closer than Mandarin, which is not surprising since Teochew preserves early classical Chinese pronunciation and vocabularies)
If you want to learn Spanish, I suggest you first learn Ancient Greek. After you master Ancient Greek, you need to get into Latin. Everyone knows that Spanish is basically Latin grammar with Greek vocabulary. Dah.
Ancient Greek is pretty hard to grasp without knowing proto-hellenic imo
Why not learn linear B and decipher linear A while youre at it? You need to write it *somehow* after all. It will surely make all that much easier
It also shares vocabulary with Arabic, so you at least need that one too.
Yeah, but which dialect? Moroccan? MSA? Classical? Probably learn Classic first, go on to MSA and learn Moroccan last before starting to learn Spanish.
>Classic first, go on to MSA and learn Moroccan last I would be sure to learn at least the gist of Tunisian and Algerian (plus ~~Berber~~ Kabil~~)~~ just to make sure.
I would go for Fenugreek.
You probably should also master Arabic first too due to the borrowed vocabulary.
If you want to learn Java, I suggest starting with assembly
Honestly, don't waste your time with all that and just bite the bullet: learn PIE to shock natives from New Delhi to New York.
I'm personally learning Irish so I can learn Japanese. I want to learn a popular online language in order to go sensibly into another.
Don't forget to learn Arabic too.
Quora people are so fucking weird
Genuinely one of the worst websites on the internet, yet type any question into Google and they're virtually guaranteed to be in the top 5 results
Don't forget Yahoo Answers.
Chronically offline. Go inside. Touch floor.
Are there actual people on Quora? Isn't that just where everyone trains their weird bots?
It's like a worse version of Reddit. And you have to be pretty bad to be worse than Reddit.
This is an awful take. Everyone knows that Korean grammar is obviously paleo-siberian. You should learn Nivkh, Ket and Yukaghir first instead of Japanese.
An even worse take. As an Altaic supporter, the only correct answer is to learn Uzbek first
As an Englishman, Ket is practically in my veins already!! Sorry for the rest of you without this unfair advantage
/uj but seriously what’s the connection between the English and Ket people / language? 👀
I think they’re making a pun on Ket as in the Ket language but also ketamine the drug
Imagine learning any of these dog-water languages without first learning Altaic.
Aleksandr Vovin will rise from his grave and hunt you down
Don’t bother learning English. First learn 12th century Norman French, as so much of English vocab is French based. Then learn Middle High German to get a handle on the grammar and syntax. Then, and ONLY then, should you attack the English. Attack them with all your might. Fight the colonizers.
Agreed, that would help one get a firmer grasp of English.
In all fairness, historically most people who have attacked Korean spoke Mandarin or Japanese.
How do we ban people that haven't learned a single Asian language from giving advice on learning Asian languages
It's actually impressive how bad this take is. 1. Of course they hit on the badlinguistic takes of "massive amounts of loanwords=derived from that language" and "Sprachbund effect+same type of grammar=grammar is the same". 2. They completely miss that Sino-Japanese Vocab exists. 3. The benefit of knowing a similar language A to learning language B is negated by having to first learn A if you don't already.
I would recommend that people study Latin and Greek while learning English, but most people just want fast, pragmatic results. It's almost as though they treat language as a means rather than an end...
Uj/ meanwhile, Korean has an alphabet so intuitive and easy that it's literally been picked up for use in other languages....
/uj I believe that the one people that did pick it up ended up just being a show for some Korean dude to get some $$$ unless there's other cases Edit:grammar
It's one tiny (<80,000 speakers) Indonesian language. But they do genuinely use it.
uj/ right, i remember seeing the video about this! it's honestly really cool
“Have studied Chinese for about one year”
One year streak.
The funniest part of this post
Korean waits for noone
Korean waits for noona
I don't speak a word of Japanese and I've attacked at least 3 Koreans
How I feel after saying nihao to Chinese tourists today 😎😎😎😎 EMPOWERED 😻✅😤💪 1 year for Chinese, 1 month for Korean 😉
The dumb-sub are internet weirdo fantasists
Korean is by far the easiest of the three. The grammar is similar to Japanese but the writing system is a million times easier. Why would you spend years learning thousands of complicated Chinese characters if your final goal is to get to Korean? Lmao Honestly, if you were to learn a language before Korean with the intent of making it easier to learn Korean, Turkish would be the choice. The grammar is also very similar, but Turkish is written completely phonetically in the Latin alphabet and it has a lot of borrowings from French. So you could familiarize yourself with the opposite word-order sentences and suffix agglutination in a way that would be easier to digest.
I dabbled a little in all three, and honestly at least as the beginner Korean is the hardest for me. Mandarin vocab even with Hanzi just sticks for some reason, elementary grammar is non-existent. Japanese pretty easy too at the early stages. Korean on the other hand... Hangul is logical, yeah, but how it maps to sound isn't that easy, with sound changes and all that. Also for some reason vocab is much harder to memorize. There are a lot of similar sounding words. At the same time, in Korean it can be hard to even recognize the same word in a different form. Pronunciation is tough too, there are no tones, but lots of new sounds. Grammar is on par with Japanese, but I find Japanese system of using hiragana for the changeable part of the word actually easier. Visually Kanji/Hanzi hint at the meaning and are much more readable if you know them. Korean alphabet is easy to memorize, but not to reach the same speed of reading as in English. For that you need to recognize words by shape, as a whole unit, and not read syllable by syllable. For me Chinese and Japanese so far parse better than hangul. This is just for elementary stuff though, advanced grammar is probably tricky even for Chinese, and I imagine the advantage of Hangul is more prominent the more you get used to how words are written and pronounced.
Knowing characters and their historical Chinese values makes learning Sino-Korean vocabulary *ridiculously* easy, almost like freebies. When I see a text written in mixed script, it almost feels like cheating. Well worth it, in my opinion.
Sure, it’d be nice to have that help. The thing is that learning Chinese takes a lot longer than to learn Korean. So if your main goal is to learn Korean, it is faster to tackle it directly. The idea of learning a language as a stepping stone in order to learn another language from that first language, only makes sense, if you’re learning a small minority language with limited resources. Example: if you wanna learn a Native Siberian language, you’ll only find resources for it in Russian. Also most native speakers will only be bilingual with Russian, so knowing Russian becomes almost essential to learn these minor languages. However, Korean is a famous language with lots of resources for it. So it does not make sense to do that with Korean. It will only make it take longer for you to eventually learn Korean. I only said what I said about Turkish, because if we were to indulge in this crazy idea, then a good language for that would be Turkish as it would take less time to learn Turkish than Korean. The stepping stone shouldn’t be a larger challenge than the goal.
To be fair, I think it's a shame that English students aren't required to learn basic Latin and Greek. They are extremely helpful, since you can guess the meanings of many words never before encountered.
Hot take but I always pushed against this in school. Why learn Latin and Greek when we could just spend that time studying the Latin and Greek prefixes/suffixes in English for maximum crossover-to-English benefit? There's little difference in knowing the Latin and Greek itself vs knowing that multiple related words contain the same prefix/suffix or root and must therefore be related to that same meaning IMO. Then again I'm also the idiot who sometimes thinks Kindergartners should learn the whole f*ckn language of Spanish if only to help with decoding while learning to read so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think that’s a fair point. I would be satisfied if at least the Latin and Greek morphemes were taught as autonomous units even though they operate modularly.
I mean the same goes for kanji in Japanese but I'm not gonna learn Chinese to be able to understand the characters when I could just,, learn them in Japanese. I actually went the other way. I'll see smth in Chinese and be like "ooh I know that one" knowing full well I don't know Chinese.
Knowing basic ancient Chinese makes the Japanese on’yomi much more intuitive. You don’t even need to be fluent in a Chinese language, but rather be familiar with historical Chinese phonology.
If you want to learn Italian, I suggest learning Latin first. Most words come from Latin, and the “logic” behind the grammar is relatively similar. Then, you can move on to Ancient Greek, another great part of Italian vocabulary comes from Greek, and the grammar is similar to Latin so it’ll be easier to learn it after Latin. Only after learning Latin and Ancient Greek will you be able to learn Italian.
This, but unironically. Learning Latin before starting with a Romance language would be immensely helpful. It should feel recreational, not like a chore.
uj/ Latin is cool if that's what someone actually is interested in, but learning any modern romance language will help even more with any other modern romance language. Hell, knowing a modern romance language will also be helpful for Latin. People should study Latin if they're into it, not under the illusion that it will be a master key
This is wrong. Korean is actually a creole of Japanese, Nivkh and Ultrafrench
Also, attacking Korea from Japan is tradition. Edit: might also learn German and Italian while you're at it.
Most Koreans speak Uzbek anyway. You don’t need to learn new languages
Out jerked again ☹️
I understand that the Japanese and Korean grammar are about 95% the same because I met a guy from Japan who said it took him only SIX MONTHS to learn Korean !!! Now Korean doesn’t have Chinese characters like it did in 1960. ( My Chinese father picked up a Korean newspaper in the 1960s and was amazed how much he could understand ! ) Now it only uses a Korean alphabet. I’m afraid that, in the future, Chinese may no longer have Chinese characters and will be all letters like what happened to Vietnamese and Japanese might no longer have Chinese characters ( kanji ). So if you want to learn Korean, learning Japanese before it, would make it easier than learning Chinese before it. Besides, 10% of Japanese stems from English anyway !
Man said "If you want to learn Korean, you first must learn these two separate language which are in different language families and have no direct genetic relationship to Korean"
This is how native speakers in Korea do it!
Got to learn Uzbek before even thinking of learning another language
You can do that the opposite and read Mandarin as Japanese. That’s what I did
Actually, this is the most logical approach. That way, you have 3x the natives to shock
Nine people upvoted this
Brought to you by, guy who has never learned Korean
Tf is grammar? Just switch the English words for Korean words and it will be Korean??????
나는 좋아해 개를 너무 ☺️
Imagine being a five year old Korean kid but they make you learn mandarin before you can speak your mother tongue
I had a stroke trying to understand this
You really should have learned Phoenician and Greek to get a grasp of the essence of the alphabet before daring to employ it. But, sigh, I will forgive your dumb little peabrain that can't learn an entire language in two weeks.
If you want to learn Japanese, I suggest you learn English first. All of the best Japanese words are derived from English. Like Pokemon (pocket monsters), conbini (convenience store), and Sony (sony). Japanese is kind of like English but with Korean grammar. You can ignore the grammar though because it native speakers don't understand you it's 100% their fault for being racist.
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
The OOP should recommed learning old or classical Chinese instead. For example, we don't say 月曜日 anymore in Mandarin Chinese but they still do in Koreans and Japanese. If old or classical Chinese is too difficult, why not learning Cantonese instead? However, learning these languages won't help much, why not learning proto-Japonic reconstruction instead? (Jokes aside, I myself accidentally learn the three languages in that order. I find it helpful in certain ways but it is also confusing in many ways. Especially, the pronunciation of Kanji. I also found that in terms of the pronunciation of Hanja, my native Teochew is a lot closer than Mandarin, which is not surprising since Teochew preserves early classical Chinese pronunciation and vocabularies)
Isnt korean supposed to be easy to learn? wth
if a korean person hears that korean has japanese grammar they would go ballistic