Japanese or Korean?

[opper567]

I am an Undergraduate student in Chinese at an American University. I really want to go to graduate school for Chinese and I was wondering if I should take Japanese or Korean for a research language? I'm enrolled in both for next semester, but which one should I take most seriously for developing reading knowledge?

[atitarev]

Are you an American? So you're learning Chinese and Japanese or Korean? Why not use Chinese for your reasearch?

My preference between Japanese and Korean is Japanese but it's really up-to-you.

Few things for Japanese over Korean choice:

1. There are much more resources for Japanese. The amount of written material on the web is massive, especially taking into account that although Japanese is a major country, its population is not so large. Anyway, there are much more Japanese speakers than Korean speakers.

2. If you are learning Chinese, Japanese language is another language that currently uses Chinese characters - called "kanji" in Japan. Note that there are much less "kanji" in the current usage in Japanese than in Chinese, there are big differences in pronunciation and usage. You can't simply transfer your knowledge of Chinese characters from Chinese to Japanese but it may make it easier.

3. Japanese pop-culture industry is much more developed and interesting (this is my subjective opinion) than Korean, so learning Japanese will give you benefits of getting to know manga, anime, pop-songs, movies, which, of course, also exist in Korean but to a lesser extent. Also, again my subjective opinion, I like the sound of Japanese more than Korean but you'll be the judge.

Korean over Japanese:

1. More people use Japanese than Korean, perhaps you want to be different from the mainstream?

2. Koreans effectively stopped using "hanja" (=kanji/hanzi), making it easier to read but it's harder to relate a big number of common words between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, if you don't know how those words were written in Chinese characters.

Perhaps, this is not what you're asking but your question wasn't very clear.

[Hofmann]

From Chinese, I think Japanese is easier (but then again you might not be going for the easier language). As atitarev said, there are more resources.

I don't know much about Korean, but the lack of Hanja (Chinese characters) can deprive you of a shortcut to figuring out the meaning of a passage. I can usually muddle my way through a Japanese web page by looking at the Kanji (Chinese characters). I'm totally illiterate in Korean if it doesn't have any Hanja.

However, the pronunciation of Chinese cognates in Korean is more conservative.

[Lu]

I've been told that a lot of good research on China is done in Japanese, so if I were you I'd definitely go for Japanese. At my university, students of Chinese used to have to study Japanese on top of Chinese for this reason (a long time ago, when some of my professors were students).

[jslee]

I guess it depends if you're only using it for research or if you want to seriously learn the language well and have a liking to the culture.