Are Chinese Japanese & Korean Related? 

Do you speak any of these languages?

People often note that katakana is used for foreign words, but what’s less often mentioned is how it’s used for made-up words, too. Like all the Japanese Pokémon names are katakana.

You got some things quite wrong. The words you used for fire were ALL borrowed from Chinese, that's why they sounded similar. For example, the NATIVE word for fire in Korean is 불 "Bul". They don't use Hanja for Korean words, only for borrowed Chinese words. About 60% of Korean vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, and only that (in the modern day) can be written in Hanja, whereas all native Korean words can ONLY be written in Hangeul (for modern usage). And Japanese uses Kanji for both Chinese borrowed words (like the one you said, it is a borrowed word) and for native words. However, there is another twist to this, there IS a history of borrowing Chinese characters for the sound only of the Chinese word, and using it for the native word, which would mean something completely different. While Korea abandoned this use long ago, there are many words in Japanese that were written this way, meaning that the character does not maintain the same meaning in those cases. So the MAIN way which these languages have relation is that they all borrowed words from Chinese into their language. The pronunciation of these words reflect the time and dialect or language of Chinese they were in contact with at the time and that, along with the pronunciation and lack of tones in their language is what causes them to sound different from modern Mandarin (because they mostly were not borrowed from Mandarin nor modern Chinese). Nearly all the native words in Japanese and Korean sound nothing like the Chinese words (like with different consonants, vowels, more syllables, etc). And of course, Japanese and Korean grammar is COMPLETELY different from Chinese, so sentences would be constructed differently (at least in modern usage). Finally, the characters were also changed through history, so, even when using modern Chinese characters (the traditional ones used in Taiwan--the simplified ones in PRC are VERY different), they do not all look the same exactly as the ones that exist in Japanese and Korean.

The character【火】 in Mandarin Chinese: huo in Japanese: borrowed:か/くゎ(ka/kwa) native:ひ(hi) in Korean: borrowed:화(hwa) native: 불(bul) in Vietnamese: borrowed: hỏa native: lửa The analogy is like there is an inherent Germanic word “fire” in English, however if you need to create a proper noun about fire, you need to use the Latin word “ignis” to create the vocabulary, such as ignition, ignatius…. etc.

King Sejong didn't merely *decree* that a new writing system should be made. He was a scholar, and is largely credit as developing the script himself.

This is just my non-academic take but I think that the Sinosphere can be broadly divided into two Sprachbunds (non-genetic groupings of similar languages): The Sino-Vietnamese sprachbund, with languages such as Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Vietnamese all are tonal and analytic languages. Often, Cantonese (spoken in southern china) sounds more like Vietnamese than Mandarin, despite technically being “Chinese”. It just goes to show how close these languages were in proximity. The Koryo-Japonic sprachbund, made up of Korean, Japanese, and the other minor languages. Due to what was probably close contact in the Korean peninsula before the ancestors of the modern Japanese migrated into the Japanese archipelago, Japanese and Korean share a lot of grammatical features and even have similar sounding particles and basic words. These languages are so similar structurally that entire sentences can be translated one-to-one, which is remarkable, because of how unique many of the features of these languages are.

The pronunciation difference of 火 was a bad example cos it actually just represents difference sound shifts these 3 languages went through over the couple thousands of years.

They are not related but Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary plus Japanese and Korean borrowed some vocabulary from each other.

Nowadays Vietnamese mostly uses chữ Quốc Ngữ a script based on Latin script.

Not that many Vietnamese know how to use Chinese characters. My mom is from the (pre-communist) south and she never learned how to use the. Maybe it is more common in the north where they have more influence from the Chinese and maybe it was taught more throughout the country after the war. I understand Chinese characters used to be the writing system of Vietnam, but a new writing system was created during the French colonial era. That's why modern Vietnamese is just roman characters with a bunch of accents.

One thing you didn't mention is that when the Chinese characters were imported, the Chinese pronunciation of a lot of them (or a localized approximation, anyway) was imported too. Japanese has what's called "on-yomi" and "kun-yomi", or "Chinese reading" and "Japanese reading" respectively. The Chinese reading will often be used in multi-character compound words (like "kanji", for instance) and specialized concepts, much the way we in English will use Latin and Greek roots to build new words, like "telephone". Korean is similar, which is why if you speak one language, you can sometimes get the gist of what someone using the other is saying, since they're using the same Old Chinese roots for some of their vocabulary.

Actually, in Vietnamese, you can call Chinese characters “Hán tự” as well. Well, does it seems similar to “Hanzi”, “Kanji” and “Hanja”? As a Vietnamese, I can explain why Vietnamese no longer use Chinese characters. The reason is Vietnamese does not have as many homophones as Chinese and Japanese. Therefore, we can use the Latin script easily and effectively, whereas Chinese and Japanese have to maintain the existence of Chinese characters.

The thing that U.S & Europeans often forget when comparing East Asian similarities is this: East Asia has been using Chinese ideograms for over 3000 years. Once you start using ideograms, the sound changes completely and it's no longer possible to trace the origin vocabulary by pronunciation. This makes the Indo-European language model theory of tracing origins completely useless. pronunciation doesn't matter at all in ideographs.

0:17 How did all of Thailand get under Water?

Kind of barely touched upon but Classical Chinese was the lingua franca of East Asia for 2,000 years. This is how China, Korea, Japan (and Vietnam) communicated with one another. In fact when Commodore Mathew Perry showed up in Edo Bay in 1853 the documents provided to the Japanese were written in Classical Chinese by Chinese scholars and the Japanese responded in kind.

What confuses me is that while I do not understand Korean or Japanese at all, I swear I have heard similar words when I watch their media (subtitled), like for example the word for "promise".

My daughter took Japanese as her foreign language in college and one of her classmates had lived in Japan. This classmate said what was being taught would not enable them to converse in Japan even though they were learning all three writing systems. Since she took that course I always wondering if someone spoke Kanji if they could converse with someone on mainland China and now I know.

Fantastic video. Love learning about new random stuff I was not expecting.

My favorite channel, I always get so excited to see new uploads!! Always so informative. Keep up the great work 🎉

There's this sophomoric "um ackshually" in linguistic videos where they're like: "Japanese is just as related to Korean and Chinese as it is to German or Hungarian, as they are not related at all" This is very misleading for a introductory video, which this video must be, because it is nowhere close to the quality of the standard youtube linguistics video. These languages are not "related" in the technical, linguistics scholarship sense of a genealogical relations; that is they are not descended from a known common ancestor. In this technical definition, no matter how many borrowings and loanwords you use, you can never make one language related to another language if they didn't start off genealogically related. But when normal people use the word "related", they don't only mean the narrow genealogical sense. If you use the colloquial sense of the word "related", then saying Japanese is just as related to Chinese as it is to Hungarian is clearly nonsense. They didn't limit their inter-cultural influence to just the writing system, obviously, and even just through the writing system, a lot of loan words, compound words, pronunciations and abstract concepts were borrowed along as well. You cannot deny that they're more similar to each other than to some random European language, regardless of genealogical technicalities.

thanks for not forgetting about Vietnamese at the end

5:13 they might be the same for various meanings of “same“. Chinese and Japanese simplified their Chinese characters independently and in two different ways and at two different times. So while simple characters like 火 might be the same, complicated characters are often not.

interesting topic ... and I cannot wait to read the comments / this'll be fire!

Such goodness comes out through every video he makes

Hiragana and Katakana Is kinda like upper and lower case in Latin alphabet, and not exclusivity use for local or foreign words. Normally, the "grammar indicator" would only be Hiragana, and substantive words (not just noun, but any word with actual meaning) could be Hiragana, Katakana, or Kanji. Formally you'd use Katakana as phonetic notation for Kanji, but normally Hiragana would do it anyway. AND YOU DO SOMETIMES USE KATAKANA UNNECESSARILY JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT.

Long ago, Japan adopted kanji and created the phonetic alphabet hiragana and katakana. However, as languages, Chinese and Japanese have different word orders and are fundamentally different. In modern times, on the contrary, 70 percent of the technical terms in Chinese, such as the sentences for Communist Party, cadre, leadership, socialism, market, and economy, are all Japanese-made vocabulary.

Korean doesn't use characters when writing. Korean is written in Hangul which is an alphabetic writing system.

While there are some parallels between the evolution of biology and the evolution of language, the language equivalent of horizontal gene transfer would (I imagine) be vastly more common. People are going to permanently borrow language from anyone and everyone they come into contact with regularly, often out of pure necessity. Not just when one language has features you need, but just understanding them long enough for trade, diplomacy, let alone working together, means you have added to your personal vocabulary, which means you will take what you learned home.

Great video!

A character like 火 represent a meaning. In theory it could be used as a representation of fire in every country. I wonder if this will happen in the future. That some hanzi will become international. In my local supermarket here in Norway, 小心 = careful, is written on the escalator. With the Norwegian translation underneath 😀

Is the current consensus that language families aren't probably all related if you go back far enough? I get that the language families we know are as far back as we can currently reconstruct, but is it believed they are more connected if you go back thousands more years and we just can't figure out how, or is it more believed that different groups of ancient humans developed languages independently from each other somehow and just had proto languages before?

In East Asia in the past, Chinese was a language in the same position as Latin. Just as there are many words derived from Latin in English, there are many words from Chinese in Korean and Japanese, but the three languages are very different languages.

Chinese does have it's own original phonetic script, called Bopomofo or Zhuyin. It's just not used very often compared to Hangeul, Hiragana, and Katakana. Also, Zhuang (a Kra-Dai language) is another language that historically used Chinese characters, where it was known as Sawndip. There's a few other languages that occasionally used Chinese characters but never really caught on, like Sanskrit, Mongolian, and the extinct Khitan language, which was related to Mongolian. Khitan actually had not one but two scripts of it's own that were based on but very distinct from Chinese characters. Tangut, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language (but with a closer relation to Tibetan than Chinese), had a similar story with it's script.

The Latin alphabet doesn’t have 26 characters, it has 52, because capitals and lowercase are not the same characters (even if most are incredibly similar). This is similar to how hiragana and katakana use different characters for the same sounds

You could've made a comparison to English having a majority of its vocabulary from the romance languages (mainly French and Latin) while actually being a Germanic language. It sounds like the languages discussed in the video are all in separate language groups but have a lot of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese, one of the languages being discussed. This would've made the video more relatable especially because the video was made in English.

Iirc sth like this also happened in the Ottoman Empire - they wrote Turkish which Arabic script despite not being related to Arabic since one is Turkic and the other is Semitic before switching to Latin alphabet (there's obviously a religious connotation there, so it's not surprising)

Having different pronounciation for the same characters for different languages also present in the case of the Latin alphabet. The most prominent case is the letter [C]. In many Austronesian languages, the letter [C] is pronounced /tj/ or /ch/ In many Turkic languages, it is /dj/ In West Slavic and some South Slavic languages, it is /ts/ In Welsh, it is straight up /k/ In Somalian, it is similar to Arabic [ع] They either adopted the letter when the Romans still had only /k/ sound for the letter, or adopted it later during colonial times and changed the sound to reduce redundant sounds (the letter [C] can be replaced by the more consistent [K] and [S]) and avoiding digraphs for some common sounds (example: letter [C] produces its own unique sound but only if it is paired with [H], but again, for some reason it can also be redundant; "cheap" vs "chemistry")

I got two spend a year in Okinawa and two in South Korea. I found that Hangul was so much easier to learn than Japanese. Japanese is not impossible to learn, it’s just for me? Having an alphabet helps a lot

7:45 hiragana is used for words native to japanese as well as particles, verb conjugations and adjective endings while, katakana is used for foreign words and proper nouns, names of animals and plants (not all), interjections, onomatopoeia and many slang or colloquial words

The fact that you say Japanese and Korean took the symbols from Chinese and applied them to their already existing sounds is partially wrong. The symbol for fire that you mention is pronounced extremely similarly in all three languages because both Japanese and Korean have Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean readings for those symbols (localized pronunciation of the original chinese sound “huǒ” - 'ka' for Japanese and 'hwa' for Korean). While if you write the symbol for fire in Japanese, it can be read as ‘hi’ or ‘ka’ (derived from the Chinese pronunciation) if part of a compound word like ‘volcano’ (‘ka-zan,’ where ‘-zan’ is actually ‘san’ from ‘Fuji-san,’ where ‘san’ is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the word mountain and which is pronounced ‘yama’ as a pure Japanese word). (And note that ‘-san’ is not the same as the title suffix, as in last name + ‘san.’) The grammar for Japanese and Korean is extremely similar but very different from Chinese. So saying that Korean and Japanese are related is more than logical, and the proof is in the linguistic pudding. I could go on but I'll stop here because it's getting too long. PS source I am a double major in Japanese and Korean, and an intermediate speaker of Chinese.

I think for English speakers the best example of one character having the same meaning but different words in different languages would be numbers. 7 has different words but would be understood across speakers of most European languages.

6:58 There is a phonetic writing system called Bopomofo, used primarily for Mandarin, especially Taiwanese Mandarin. Japanese has two pronunciations for kanji, one that's native Japanese, and one that's borrowed from Chinese. The borrowed pronunciation for fire is "ka." Also, they have kanji that don't exist in Chinese. And some meanings, though perhaps derived from Chinese, aren't the most common. For example, there is a kanji in Japanese for "like" is usually used in Chinese for other (somewhat related) words, and a different hanzi is used for "like." I recently discovered that Chinese has some hanzi with more than one pronunciation as well.

There is a Chinese phonetic script that looks like katakana. I don’t know the English name, in Chinese it sounds like Ber Per Mer Fer

10:03 that's spelt 'Chữ Hán' which just means 汉字 (Hàn Zì). However this hasn't been used for centuries, instead 'Chữ Nôm' was used. A Chinese script designed specifically for the Vietnamese language. Neither of these are in use anymore, as Chữ Quốc Ngữ (National Script) is now used, this is just the latin characters. The vast majority of Vietnamese these days can't read Chinese characters, and it's not taught in schools anymore.

It's interesting that they're not considered related. There are a good number of words that sound common between Chinese, Japanese and Korean... though, sometimes not "standard" Chinese, but Cantonese or other dialects.

Some words though (not generally accepted as Sinitic words) are related. For example bear, Japanese "kuma" compared with Korean "gom" and Mandarin "xiong" meaning bear. Some other examples such as Korean "garam" and Mandarin "jiang" meaning river, and Korean "baram" and Mandarin "feng" meaning wind.

You sound like Lola from this series Big Mouth on Netflix! hahaha! Also, learned a lot from this video. So, thanks. :)

If you do do a video on controversial language families, please include Nilo-Saharan.

There is an interesting Japanese channel called minerva scientia. This channel goes through a lot of linguistic theory on Japanese and it's connections to proto Korean, Ainu, Ryukyu languages, but also has recordings of the different dialects as well as bizarre jokes or "what-ifs..." It's not.in English, but I really recommend a look see thru

Their writing system is Logographs, is that same as Egyptian Hieroglyphs ?? I think those 10,000 logographs in China is their 10,000 words. So they dont have alphabets system ?? That’s kinda strange, coz most in Asia nations have alphabets systems like in Latin script. From Hebrew, Arabia to Persia, even the Abugida writing system common to Brahmic script family of Tibet, South Asia and Southeast Asia nations. Actually, Im guessing that Japanese - Kanji, and Korean - Hanja might be relatively new or heavily borrowed from Chinese system when its quite obvious China would be their biggest Economic partner in ancient times. But I think Korea & Japan should have an ancient alphabet system they have forgotten, due to disruptions like Mongolia Empire invasion & expansion in their territories, coz their ancient neighbor in Manchuria region have a language & alphabet system same as Abugida script system of Southeast Asia. North Korea’s Dictator Kim ancestor were said to be of Manchus. This same people the Manchus is the foundation of the last Qing Dynasty of China. I think the Manchus never impose their language & culture to China during their power, they just adapted to the majority Chinese culture & way of life.

I'm kind of impressed that the Chinese were such a completely dominant cultural force in the region that they got their writing system adopted by speakers of three unrelated languages.

thx 4 that.

Chinese did not even have a method of recording pronunciations before adopting the Roman alphabet in 1960s, and thats just for Mandarin, a language made in 1600s.

Aren't there a basic subset of Chinese characters that have memorable mnemonic references? I knew a Vietnamese that said that the Vietnamese language derived from Cantonese. Is that true?

I feel like leaving out Manchuric in this video and in the comments critiqueing it is a big blind spot for comprehending this

There is a video by Joshua Rudder of NativLang that talks about Altaic. I could help you with yours, since he left information out.

5:15 and all three words have the same ethymological origin. 7:02 I believe it was during the 20th century, perhaps late 19th century, when they developed pinyin, which is a phonetic alphabet for Chinese.... that they seldomly use. 10:34 at some point, every language spoken near China by a citybuilding civilization has used those characters; some languages (most of them dead now, and Chinese did it at least once) tried to make their own writing systems separate from that, while some others changed to sanskrit script after converting to Buddhism.

I'm surprised, as while learning Korean and Japanese I saw a lot of helpful parallels in grammar. But maybe the similarities are only visible because both are so different than Indo-European solutions?

Character meanings can and did change. E.g. for I (me) Japanese uses the 私 character, while Chinese uses the 我 character. While both basically means the same, there are some differences in what kind of pronoun they are. I don't remember exactly, but may be politeness or something. Like there are a couple of other "I" in japanese, and you can't use arbitrarily any of them e.g. when you talk to your boss.

Hi in Japanese is known as the onyomi, or Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the fire character. The kunyomi, or native Japanese pronunciation of it, is Ka.

I'm not a linguist but I think Japanese and Korean may be related, because their grammars are very similar - yes, they do differ, eg adjectives work a little differently, but the logics of both languages are really alike, at least that's what it seems. Hence I think they might be related, but they just separated a very long time ago, before any written form of those languages emerged. But that's my theory as a learner of both languages. May be true, may not be true. After all a similar logic of two languages is common between those related ones. European language's grammars differ a lot, but they still follow a similar logic, especially when it comes to languages from a single family, like Romanic. It's not that I wanna play smart, it's just that I'm really for the theory that the Altaic group is real hah Edit: woah, I see I started a discussion. Quite some interesting data, thanks! And don't be rude :(

What's Chinese Japanese? One of those peninsular Japonic languages? (there's a mildly puzzling missing comma in the title lol)

I think you mispronounced Jeju as Teju for some reason. It's just a J sound at the beginning, like how it's spelled.

And a language on sulawesi(celebes),indonesia using hangul as their written form despite they dont have any historical connection at all

I learned Hangul in Korea very quickly- I could pronounce anything but didn’t know what most of it meant.

I think Korean language is very different from the others. Korean language use their own literature system called Hangeul. It can be written according to the sound it pronounced so it can express almost all sound. Very useful and scientific.

in Taiwan there's 注音 or zhuyin or bopomofo, all the same name for a unique writing system that taiwanese people use to transliterate Chinese characters. It always reminded me a little of hiragana in the Japanese script

Chinese was indeed a hard language to learn back in the days. But it's kinda awkward now when nearly all Chinese including many Malaysians and Singaporians read and speak Chinese with no problem at all.

Why is Thailand underwater? 😅

I wouldn't say that Hanzi are called different things in Japanese and Korean. Are tomato's are called something else in Spanish because they pronounce it differently. Sure Kanji and Hanja look and sound very different than Hanzi, but this mostly because we transcribed it from three fairly different languages into English. Further it's not like these transcriptions are unique, Hanzi could be transcribed as Hantzu using the older Wade Giles systems.

Vietnamese people used to use kanji as well... Such as Korean also used to decades ago

Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese have Chinese root words similarly to how English has Latin and French root words, even though the majority of English words are derived from Italic languages, the core vocabulary is still Germanic. Likewise, the core vocabulary of the East Asian languages is not Sino-Tibetan.

I’ve noticed that you almost exclusively use the phrase “in example” as opposed to “for example” (not trying to be rude or anything-your videos just get me thinking about language). It got me thinking about where little changes like these even come from and the divergent evolution of languages.

4:07 It’s pronounced as (tsang-jee-yeh), your pronounciation caught me off guard 😅

I remember I Japanese class, we had to learn both the Japanese word for each Kanji, but also the Chinese one.

If they share the same surnames, they are likely related. Many Han Chinese and Koreans are having same surnames, they may related in the past. These days many people speak English, it doesn't mean they are all Anglo Saxon.

Well... of all alphabet sounds used in family names chinese and koreans use the letter N in more names than any other letter of the alphabet. But so do the Irish. It means they share an ancient origin.

I've lived in Korea for 14 years. I have never met a Korean person who uses Hanja. These days, it is a very niche skill that very few people study. But while the Korean language can be challenging to learn, I can confirm that the writing system, Hangeul, is very easy to pick up. I learned it just by studying the subway map. I just matched the Korean letters to the Latin letters on the stop names and listened when they stops were announced. I think practiced sounding out the letters when I saw signs, food packages, and anywhere else I saw writing.

9:00 Its a bit funny tho... How can you keep saying hangul in 4-5 different ways xDDD I mean.. Its kinda impressive rly :P

This seemed a rather long-winded 'No', although there were one or two interesting facts that I learned, so it's not all bad news. We had in our household an old 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' set from the late 19th and early 20th Century when I was growing up, with a 'Maps' volume and it had translations/transliterations of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descriptions of certain geographical features and I was always struck by some remarkable coincidences between the three, so I'm not sure if that points to any etymological links or whether it was a case of unrelated borrowing.

Vietnamese is much more close to Chinese than Korean and Japanese.

Get a bunch of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese people together and ask them if you want to see an argument

The only similar thing I can find is that they have mixed r/l and each sounds different

The same view is applicable to various "dialects" spoken in China? The "dialects" dont have writing system either.

What happened to thailand in ur map

Ok 🤦‍♂️. Chinese characters actually have quite a lot to do with phonology and it's impossible to properly understand them without understanding their phonological aspect. The languages that borrowed them, like Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese, pretty much swallowed the Chinese language whole, partly because of the importance of the phonological values of the characters to their use. Also, it's been credibly proposed that Korean and Japanese are related.

I heard some tribes of japan is related to eastern tibetans

Koreans always assume that Manchu and Mongolian are the same language despite that they are completely different languages. This kinda annoys people who actually studied Mongolian or Manchu.

So, is lithography just an all-around inferior writing system by nature? Plenty of lithographic languages decided "this is too hard, let's make a phonetic language" 😅 What advantaged might a lithographic writing systen have over a phonetic one?

Patrick do an altaic vid plz

Ah, yes. Mongolia speaks Chinese, India speaks Korean, and where my dad is right now speaks Japanese.

Korean and Japanese pronunciation on Chinese loan words are closer to various southern Chinese dialets than Mandarin

Thank you Stefanie P.!

Finally someone said it 🫡👍🏽

Austroasiatic as in Austria? Probably not, but where does the name come from?

4:05 - "Cangjie" 5:04 - "Kanji" Coincidence? I mean, probably. But it's a pretty cool coincidence imo.

Just as Japan was able to import many words from China in the past, in modern times there has been a reverse import from Japan to China. As the Japanese learned about Western civilization, they converted many foreign words into kanji and incorporated them into the Japanese language. These Japanese-style Chinese words were then adopted as they were by China and Korea. This is the convenience of kanji, where the meaning can be understood even if the pronunciation is different.

The indo-euorpean Aryan speaking peoples very early on sweep through vast regions including just about all of Europe and large parts of Asia. By Roman times they were even spread into North Africa, but the arabic muslim invaders displace latin derived languages in North Africa and also the Greek in the middle east and the Tocharian languages of central Asia are also gone, but the Indo-European languages still include Iran, Pakistan, and northern India. While Chinese did conquer a lot of territory, they just did not spread across entire continents. There are a few areas of Europe with other language families, but only Basque is an original language predating all of the others.

3:30 “these characters has different names in different languages” That is misleading. It is saying /bus/ and /bys/ and /bʌs/ are all different words. But in fact they are all just “bus”. I mean you could say that but it doesn’t sit well, does it? 4:01 “we don’t know how exactly it came into being” Actually we do. We found hierograph not unlike Egyptian ones in archaeological artefacts and can trace the etymology of many of the characters directly. 6:42 “Japanese and Korean languages apply their own words into this character” For Japanese this is true. This is called kun’yomi or meaning pronunciation of the kanji. But this doesn’t happen after quite a long time after kanji is borrowed. For Korean i think it is more complicated. I don’t think they ever used kun’yomi. Like when i write 火, no Korean will read it as “bul” ever. But I’m not sure on this one. 7:78 your two tables are transposed 90° with each other. Counting from top left, (1,1) hiragana corresponds to (1,5) katakana and (2,2)h corresponds to (2,4)k. 8:30 “hanja it is still taught and understood in Korea” I’m sure it is still taught in some degree. Most Korean probably recognise their name in hanja. But from an article i read 10 years ago, most Korean don’t understand hanja apart from very elementary ones or specialised vocabulary. 9:00 “king Sejong wanted the masses to read and write Korean” No. He wrote in the preface of his book detailing Hangul, that he wants the ALREADY LITERATE people to be able to write Korean instead of only able to write in Classical Chinese. Hanja is probably only used to write Chinese in Korean courts and government up till that point. It is like how Latin is the only written language for a long time until some people repurpose the Latin alphabet to write their own non-Latin European languages. 10:07 “chữ hán” is actually written 𡨸漢. 漢字 is pronounced “hán tự”.

Yeah, they all got the same granddaddy. His name is Franklin