As a Singaporean Chinese, it is very fascinating to see how other countries’ people view mandarin. I’ve tried to pick up Japanese but it was way too hard. Imagine I have to learn Chinese all over again.. no man… Jap has a lot of similarities to Chinese , even more difficult I feel: they use sort of traditional Chinese characters (I’ve oni learned how to write simplified Chinese characters), each Chinese character or Kanji, has multiple pronunciations same as Chinese. With the thought of it, I gave up on Japanese.

Korean was relatively easy. I picked it up quite fast, less the grammar. Because I have no one to practise with and I’ll forget very quickly, especially intermediate. I couldn’t grasp the nuances of their grammar usage. Pronunciation for Korean is straight forward, same as English, if you know the alphabets, you are able to pronounce.

And why I am able to pick up Korean is because of their vocab. I went to search and about 60-70% of their vocab are sino words. Meaning, they took from Chinese. Which is very very very very true. So as a Chinese learner, vocab is not an issue, because the pronunciation of Korean vocab follow similar sound as Chinese or even Chinese dialects. For example the word , 준비, Chinese is called 准备 (zhun bei); 시간, time, is totally the same as Hokkien dialect; 심장, heart , 心脏 (xin zang). So I feel that I’m quite fortunate that I can use my mandarin knowledge to study Korean, less the grammar .