Learning Japanese from a Korean Textbook

For a while, I tried studying several foreign languages. I had spent years in a workplace where I used English every day, and it had become familiar enough that I felt I could put formal study aside.

Now that I no longer use English at work every day, I can feel some of that fluency slipping away. I have started thinking seriously about studying it again.

Over the years I studied English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese, in that order. If brief experiments count, Arabic and Hebrew were on the list too.

These days I do just enough Japanese to keep it going, and the others are on hold. I want to get my feel for English back first.

A Korean Textbook Written in Japanese

I was studying Japanese while working with native English speakers. One American colleague who joined the team had a particular talent for languages. He came from a Spanish-speaking background, spoke Spanish and English at a native level, and had also studied Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

His Japanese was already quite good, as I remember it. He gave me one of the books he had been studying from. It turned out to be a Korean textbook written in Japanese, and he had been using it to work on both languages.

Looking at Korean Through Japanese

A textbook written for Japanese speakers was something I rarely came across. Korea and Japan are close geographically and their languages share enough familiar features that the book itself held few surprises.

In format, it looked much like the Japanese textbooks you find in Korea. What stayed with me was the experience of opening a Korean textbook and finding Japanese on the page.

It was of limited practical use to me. Korean is my first language, and Japanese was what I needed to learn. The Japanese explanations often used kanji that, as a beginner, I could neither pronounce nor easily make sense of.

Even so, the book offered a fresh view of my own language. It was fun to see familiar Korean expressions like annyeonghaseyo (“hello”) and gamsahamnida (“thank you”) written out in Japanese hiragana and katakana.