Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif.
Gan is the closest variety of Mandarin Chinese. Spoken by around 48 million people.
Because Japanese and Korean have Chinese roots, there's a lot of similar vocabulary between these three languages. Linguists believe that around 60% of Korean words and 50% of Japanese words come from Chinese. So if you know one of these languages, it gives you a massive head-start when learning the others.
Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and about 400 other languages all belong to a group called Sino-Tibetan languages because of their shared origin.
Apart from other Sinitic languages, there are some tonal languages spoken in surrounding countries such as Burmese, Vietnamese and Thai sound quite similar to Mandarin. Take Vietnamese for example, over 50% Vietnamese lexicons were borrowed from Chinese.
Tones appear to be pretty similar
They're both tonal languages, but they're not in the same language family, despite what linguists tended to believe some 15 years ago. Thai belongs to the Kra-Dai language family and has 5 tones. Mandarin is related to the Sino-Tibetan language family, and the Chinese uses 4 tones.
However, the fact that the two languages share similar linguistic history has motivated the usage of similar words in the languages that have distinct meanings. Chinese and Japanese languages use words that are similar but with different pronunciation in their respective languages.
Linguistically, Korean isn't related to Chinese but is similar to, but still distinct from the Japanese language. One of the hardest aspects of Korean is that it is a hierarchical language which means different words are used depending on who you are communicating with.
The Korean language is much more related to Chinese than one might think. Korean is also very closely related to Japanese, probably even more than Chinese, but Chinese words actually make up about 60% of the Korean vocabulary, though in actual speech (especially informally) native Korean words are more common.
Japanese is slightly easier to learn. But, Chinese is much more widely spoken. Both languages have their pros and cons. Ultimately whichever language pulls on your heartstrings the most is the winner.
East Asians is a term used for ethnic groups that are indigenous to East Asia, which consists of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, and South Korea. The major ethnic groups that form the core of East Asia are the Han, Korean, and Yamato.
Chinese and Indian society is very similar; they are just on different timelines. Listing out the similarities first, Chinese and Indian cultures are the most ancient living cultures in the world and both of them are more family-oriented as compared to western societies.
About 1.13% of the Vietnamese population are Chinese-Vietnamese.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Chinese speaking countries. Chinese is an official language in Hong Kong, China, Macao, Taiwan and Singapore and is spoken in 20 other countries as monther tongue by a part of the population. With 1.31 billion native speakers, Chinese has the highest prevalence in China.
Generally speaking, we might assert that Korean is easier for an English speaker to learn than Mandarin Chinese. But this is very relative. In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute assigns Mandarin Chinese and Korean the same level of difficulty. Both languages are in “Category Four”.
So let's begin! We'll start with Chinese, since it is the oldest out of the three languages. In fact, the land of the red dragon has the oldest spoken language currently being used in the world. We are talking about a language that dates back to over 3,000 years ago!
Mandarin Chinese
Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet.
Michael: In many ways, Korean is actually similar to Japanese. These two languages are not mutually intelligible, meaning a speaker of one language is not able to automatically understand the other based on similarities between the languages alone.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
The study revealed for the Japanese as a whole, some genetic components from all of the Central, East, Southeast and South Asian populations are prevalent in the Japanese population with the major components of ancestry profile coming from the Korean and Han Chinese clusters.
Korean uses a lot of words similar to Taiwanese Hokkien. This is because these words came into the Korean language borrowed from Chinese at that specific time of Chinese language development (the Old/ Middle Chinese period).
Traditional Japanese kanji is the same as traditional Chinese characters. However, simplified Japanese Kanji (shinjitai) and simplified Chinese characters can be written differently and have different translation.