Trio Dictionary of Japanese Korean English

Book excerpt: Japanese and Korean are sister languages basically based on the same Chinese character words. Through extensive interactions in various fields for a long time, the two countries have many similarities in terms of language much more than any other country in the world. Of course, Japan has "Kana", while Korea has "Hangul" as own characters, but they are phonetic characters. More than 90% of Japanese and more than 80% of Korean language derive from Chinese characters words. Surprisingly, 2/3 of the two language share exactly same Chinese character words. That means, if one knows basic educational Chinese characters, one can understand the other language and can communicate easily if only know how to pronounce equivalent words. This book lists 8,759 core Japanese words with Korean and English equivalents. Main entries are in Kana (Japanese alphabet) alphabetically with Chinese characters, if any, followed by parts of speech label. In the second line, the entry’s Korean equivalents followed by romanized Korean pronunciation. Finally, in the third line, the entry’s English equivalents with standard American pronunciation. いふく(衣服) [名] 의복(衣服) ui bok garment [ga:rmənt] いぶつ(遺物) [名] 유물(遺物) yu mul relic [relik] Japanese is written with three different scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji (Chinese character). Typical Japanese words are written with Hiragana andChinese characters. Chinese characters must be used since almost 90% of the language derives from Chinese characters. Katakana is usually used to write foreign words other than Chinese. Korean is written with two different scripts: Hangul and Hanja (Chinese character). While Hangul is mostly used, Chinese characters must be used in order to clarify meaning and almost 80% of Korean language derives from Chinese characters.