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East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) are becoming more and more popular among language learners, and polyglots often decide to learn several of them at the same time. Even though these languages each belong to separate language families, they share many common words, with about 60% of the vocabulary of Japanese, two thirds of the vocabulary of Korean, and one third of the vocabulary of Vietnamese being of Chinese origin. These shared words can be written the exact same way in all four languages when using traditional Chinese characters, i.e. Chinese characters in their original, unsimplified forms, unaltered by modern language reforms.

Sadly, when learning Chinese (particularly Mandarin), polyglots often choose to learn that language using simplified Chinese characters, the script variant in official use in Mainland China, instead of their traditional counterparts, still used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, due to the fact that much more learning material is available in simplified characters and that the large majority of native Chinese speakers come from Mainland China. Likewise, when learning Japanese, polyglots rarely learn the traditional forms of the simplified Chinese characters used in Japan, and when learning Korean or Vietnamese, they generally do not learn the Chinese character spelling of words of Chinese origin in those languages.

In this presentation, we examine how traditional Chinese characters can offer polyglots precious mnemonics that can help them learn multiple East Asian languages more efficiently.

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Filming & Editing: Simos Batzakis