What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
1–10 of 187 posts
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#2That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand:
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#3Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#4That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU
It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#5This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got married after we both moved back to the States.
If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner.
Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)
Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language.
The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.
Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they can’t have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages.
Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago.
The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#6Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.
Thank you for this; I wish we could be friends
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#7Just some context on Simplified Chinese, the origin of Simplified Chinese came before the communist years and was mainly aimed at modernizing the Chinese written language and making it easy to learn for the general population as the many strokes to write a character in Traditional Chinese was making it hard to spread knowledge and increase literacy rates among the poorer and rural populations in China.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#8That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU
That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#9That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU
It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.
While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in many western languages too. Here's an example in English. Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not. Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that are specific to one or several. There are many other words like that, and you find things like this in almost every language family.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#10Interesting article, though it feels pretty unpolished, like a step above someone's train of thought.
Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish.
Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're a Korean speaker and vice versa?
Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would feel like.