I understand the history of Japan's origin coming from China, which is why
Japanese involves Chinese characters. However, I recently realized that there
are some words in Japanese that are actually closer to Korean than Chinese
(verbally, not in written format).

For example, 先輩(senpai) and Korean's 선배(seonbae) sound more similar in
comparison to Mandarin Chinese's 先輩(xiānbèi).

At the same time, the written format of Japanese's 先輩(senpai) is clearly more
similar to, or exactly the same as, Mandarin Chinese's 先輩(xiānbèi).

Does this now have more to do with the more recent history between these three
languages? How does language affect each other while they are considered
foreign to each one of them?

[This](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%88%E8%BC%A9) is the Wikipedia
page I went through today to double-check what each one was to each of those
countries. I also happen to be half-Korean half-Japanese, so I asked my
parents for their thoughts.

I apologize if this question is in the wrong Stack Exchange forum. I know this
involves history, but I thought this would still make sense in a language
forum.
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etymology history spoken-language written-language
Differences of words like 先輩 between Japanese, Chinese, and Korean?
There are multiple different facets to your question. Let me try to address at
least some of them.

# Background

First, some background.

### Languages

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are wholly independent languages.

There is some serious research into the possibility that Korean and Japanese
might share distant linguistic ancestry, in part because the grammars of the
two languages are so similar, but nothing conclusive has yet appeared --
despite the similarities in structure, there is actually very little
vocabulary that is shared between the two that isn't demonstrably borrowed.

Chinese is entirely linguistically unrelated to either Korean or Japanese.

### Words

Due to historical trends and the fact that China has been a regional
superpower for millenia, China has also been a major cultural influence in the
area. This means that the Chinese language has been a kind of _lingua franca_
for trade and diplomacy for many of the nations in the Far East. In turn, this
has meant that Chinese words have been borrowed into many of the other
regional languages. Consider how the Latin and Greek languages have had high
prestige in European history, and how vocabulary from these two has been
borrowed into English (see the _lingua franca_ example in this very
paragraph).

I've read estimates that something like 65% of the words commonly used in the
Korean language are borrowings from Chinese, as mentioned in the ["Korean
language" article on
Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language). Likewise, roughly
60% of the words in a Japanese dictionary are borrowings from Chinese, as
mentioned in the ["Sino-Japanese vocabulary"
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary).

But, just like English isn't Greek or Latin even though we use a lot of Latin-
and Greek-derived words in English, neither Japanese nor Korean are Chinese
even though they contain a lot of Chinese words.

### Spellings

In western Europe, pretty much all of the languages use the Latin alphabet.
Consequently, when a word ABC gets borrowed into another language that uses
the same Latin alphabet, the spelling often doesn't change, or at least
doesn't change that much.

However, in Asia, not everyone uses the same scripts. Written Chinese has been
used a lot by more than just Chinese speakers, but the script is cumbersome,
with thousands of characters. Consequently, some East Asian language
communities have come up with other writing systems. Korean's
[hangul](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul) script is one such example.
Hangul is essentially a (mostly) phonetic alphabet, used to spell out the
sounds of the language, rather than logograms like written Chinese, used to
spell out the ideas of the words (very loosely speaking; see the ["Logogram"
article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram) for more). Consequently, that
65% of Korean words that come from Chinese are almost never written in
[hanja](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja) (Chinese characters as used in
Korean) -- they are written in phonetic hangul instead.

### Sound changes

Most of the Chinese vocabulary borrowed into Japanese was borrowed about 1600
to 1200 years ago. I suspect a roughly similar timeline for Korean terms that
were borrowed from Chinese. Much of this was due to regional politics over
history, and to major cultural events like the spread of Buddhism through East
Asia.

Chinese itself has changed a good bit in that intervening time, as has
Japanese and Korean -- so comparing at modern Mandarin pronunciations with
modern Korean and Japanese will very likely result in the kind of confusion
you express. When most of the Chinese vocabulary was borrowed into the Korean
and Japanese languages, Mandarin didn't exist yet -- the language in China at
the time was [Middle Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese)
instead. So we need to look at the reconstructed Middle Chinese
pronunciations, and compare those to the reconstructed Old Japanese and Old or
Middle Korean pronunciations (where available: Old Korean was primarily a
spoken language, and there are very few records from that period; also, what
records there are, are written using non-phonetic Chinese characters, making
things even more difficult).

# Your question post

Now that we have a conceptual framework in place, we can look more at your
specific questions.

### Origins

> I understand the history of Japan's origin coming from China...

Japan did not come from China.

From what I recall of recent academic research, here's a rough outline of the
theories:

  * Humans have been in the Japanese archipelago since around 10,000 BCE, maybe even a bit earlier. These earliest human populations _might_ be related to the modern Ainu people now living mostly in Hokkaidō (the northernmost of the four big Japanese islands). Notably, people then didn't have horses, sheep, or metalwork. They were also primarily hunter-gatherers, leaving behind little evidence of much by way of farming.
  * Starting some time around 1,000 BCE, and really picking up during the period of 200 BCE to 200 CE, we see a sizable migration of people from the Korean peninsula across to the Japanese islands. These newcomers brought over horses, sheep, and metalwork, and their skeletons and genes are also distinct from the people who were already on the islands. They also had different architecture, and introduced intensive farming.
  * These two groups -- the hunter-gatherers, and the farmers -- seem to have mixed mostly where they were in close contact.
  * In some of the earlier records about any nation-state in the Japanese islands, we learn that the Yamato court in Japan had close friendly relations with the Baekje nation-state on the Korean peninsula. There is some scattered linguistic evidence that these two cultures may have also been linguistic cousins. When the Baekje kingdom was conquered by neighbors in the 600s, the Baekje aristocracy moved to Japan and they were accepted as aristocrats in the Yamato court.

As best we can tell, both genetically and linguistically, neither the
indigenous hunter-gatherers nor the immigrant farmers were Chinese.

> ... which is why Japanese involves Chinese characters.

Written Japanese uses Chinese characters for the reasons outlined further
above: China was the dominant political and cultural power of the region.
Japanese uses Chinese characters for basically the same reason that English
uses Roman characters (i.e. the Latin alphabet) -- neighboring nations adopted
the writing systems of their nearby regional powerhouses.

### The word 先輩 / _xiānbèi_ / _seonbae_ / _senpai_

> For example, 先輩(senpai) and Korean's 선배(seonbae) sound more similar in
> comparison to Mandarin Chinese's 先輩(xiānbèi).

As noted above, sound changes that have happened in Chinese, Korean, and
Japanese mean that we cannot compare the modern pronunciations very usefully.

Let's look at a comparison of Middle Chinese, and compare that to what we know
about older Korean and Japanese and any sound changes there.
[Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/) has pretty good coverage of Chinese
characters and the Middle and Old Chinese reconstructions, so I use their
entries as my source here.

Language | 先 reading | 輩 reading  
---|---|---  
Mandarin | _xiān_ , //ɕjɛn⁵⁵// | _bèi_ , //peɪ̯⁵¹//  
Korean | _seon_ , //sʰʌ̹n// | _bae_ , //pɛ//, //pe̞//  
Japanese | _sen_ , //sen// | _hai_ , //hai//†  
Middle Chinese | //sen//, //sien// | //puʌiH//, //puɑ̆iH//  
Old Japanese | _sen_ , //sen// | _pai_ , //pai//  
Middle Korean | _syeon_ , //sjən// | _poy_ , //pʌi//*  
  
  * _†Note: when used in isolation or at the start of a word._
  * _*Note: based on reconstructions for similarly pronounced terms. The[Wiktionary entry for 輩](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%BC%A9#Korean) does not include anything older than Modern Korean._

As we can see in the older pronunciations, there is less variance between the
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The differences in the two Middle Chinese
pronunciations might be due to regional differences as well, which could also
account for the differences between the older Japanese and Korean
pronunciations. At any rate, as we travel back in time, the pronunciations of
先輩 in all three languages converge pretty closely.

### The spellings

> At the same time, the written format of Japanese's 先輩(senpai) is clearly
> more similar to, or exactly the same as, Mandarin Chinese's 先輩(xiānbèi).

See above, about spellings and scripts. Japanese continues to use a lot of
Chinese characters in its writing, while Korean has mostly abandoned Chinese
characters in favor of phonetic hangul. This is purely about the written form,
and has nothing whatsoever to do with the origins of the word.

By way of example, the English word _" knight"_ means "a specific kind of
warrior, usually on horseback". This is cognate with the German term _"
Knecht"_. If we start spelling the English word more like it is pronounced,
perhaps as _" nait"_ or even _" neyet"_, that doesn't change the fact that
this is still cognate with the German term _" Knecht"_. So it is with Korean
-- the change in how the term is written doesn't alter the fact that Korean 선배
is, etymologically (in terms of derivations and origins), the same word as
Chinese and Japanese 先輩.

# Afterthoughts

If you're interested in how similar words in different languages might be
related, read up on the specific languages, in particular with regard to sound
changes, and vocabulary and borrowing patterns.
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