Even more, if you consider both Spanish and Portuguese come from the Iberian-Latin languages, so, they’re even more closer to each other than for example to Italian or French, which are also derived from Vulgar Latin. That would be the same as saying Spanish and Portuguese just happens to be written with the Latin alphabet, when they’re derived from the same source, Vulgar Latin. Both Mandarin and Cantonese derived from the same language known as Middle Chinese. Cantonese is a Sino-Tibetan language much like Mandarin, more exactly, Cantonese is a Chinese language, which is a language family within the Sino-Tibetan tree. IME’s are for Latin alphabet users to be able to input other character sets on their computers, but a standard Korean, Japanese, or Chinese computer is already equipped with this function.Ĭantonese is not a “different language” who happens to be written with Chinese characters. It’s no slower for a good typist to enter hangeul or katakana than it is English, and with practice, Chinese character selection can also be done extremely quickly. The standard keyboard layout in Japan also has a number of differences with the standard American keyboard to accommodate some extra settings and marks.įor example, here’s a standard layout Japanese keyboard: The keyboard is also clearly labeled with Korean letters as well as English.
Learning to read may be easier (although learning hangeul is not necessarily any easier than learning hiragana or katakana), but it is a complex language that isn’t any “easier” to learn than Japanese or Chinese.Īlso, I’m typing on a Korean keyboard right now, and while it does have a standard QWERTY layout, there are some special keys to allow me to switch between Korean and English and to use Chinese characters.
First, Korean is not “easier” than Japanese or Korean because it has an alphabet.