Japanese VS Korean - The similarities

Hello there! I don't speak Korean!

Well, now that you know that, let me start explaining some of the similarities between Japanese and Korean!

I want to learn Korean and hopefully in the future I can start taking a course or something, because I am not very good at motivating myself to learn stuff on my own without some sort of pressure, like the kind of pressure you get from knowing there will actually be a test coming up. I am not one to accept failing a test, haha.

Anyway, yesterday I started looking into Korean again, like we all do when we don't have enough pressure from school to be able to focus on school work.
And I find that every time I look up Korean words I discover words that are almost the same as a word in Japanese. This time was no different, among others I found that "picture/photo" and "moment" are almost the same in Japanese and Korean.

Picture is in Japanese: Shashin, and in Korean: Sajin.

Moment is in Japanese: Shunkan, and in Korean: Sungan.

There are word that I would've never realized were almost the same just by hearing them being spoken in Korean. I had to actually see the word written on a paper, with the English translation, to be able to realize this.
Even the word "Shigan"/"Sigan" in Korean, a word which I've heard time and time again, did not register with me as being the word "Time", which is "Jikan" in Japanese. But then when I see it on paper, it's so obvious!

It's annoying to have all these similar words and not be able to notice them in speech. But at least it's somewhat helpful when it comes to writing, and it's always funny to have that kinda "Aha!" moment, when you realized that you have been blind/deaf(?) all along!

Anyway, I just came to think about this other thing too. How kanji also helps you (well, me atleast) to map Korean words to Japanese words:
If you know Japanese (probably works if you know Chinese too), you can sometimes guess what the kanji should be for Korean words. Back in the days, they used to use Chinese characters in Korea to write, before a guy came up with Hangul (glad that happened!).

Take for example the Korean words "Yoja" and "Namja", meaning "woman" and "man". My guess is that they used these symbols for these words back in the day (altough I am writing in kanji so it might be a bit off stroke wise n stuff): 女者 for woman and 男者 for man. In Japanese both these symbols exist but would not be used in this way. The "equivalent" of the Korean Yoja in Japanese would be Joshi 女子, and to Namja would be Danshi 男子.  Well, not exact equivalent, since danshi and joshi have the kanji for child in them, which implies that we are talking about young people specifically.

If you want to be precis I suppose the equality would be "Onna no hito" 女の人 and "Otoko no hito" 男の人 in Japanese, but I liked the other comparison better, since they have the non-japanese reading of 女 and 男. Namely "Jo" and "Dan".

"Dan" (男) by the way also has the reading "Nan", which is very similar to the Korean "Nam".
And "Jo"(女) in Japanese, does sound a bit similar to the "Yo" they use in Korean.
Then there is also 者 ("Ja" in Korean), which kinda means person. This generally has the reading "Sha" in Japanese.
So if we would try to turn 女者 and 男者, into Japanese it would sound like "Josha" and "Nansha". In my opinion they sound very similar.

I have found that it often helps to try to remember the kanji symbols of a word, if you can't really remember what the word means. There are only so many different kanji with the same sounds used on a daily basis, so often it's not that hard to come up with fitting kanji that might help you remember a certain word.



So if you already know Japanese and want to learn Korean, or vice versa, I've found that it's a lot easier to learn one through the other. Since English is not very similar to Korean, it's not very helpful.

Well, that's my post. Not sure where I was going with it, but here it is. Cheers!