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What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

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Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#11

Post by ekianjo »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #4
Tade0 wrote: post #2

That 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.

That's the key difference between ideograms (based on pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based writings (alphabet and the like).

Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#12

Post by jaclaz »

SwiftyBug wrote: post #4
Tade0 wrote: post #2

That 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.

Can you explain better?

There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages.

As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#13

Post by HuShifang »

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#14

Post by danso »

Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#15

Post by philliphaydon »

stanrivers wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

> 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)!

Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#16

Post by naniwaduni »

philliphaydon wrote: post #15
stanrivers wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

> 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)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#17

Post by mytailorisrich »

Tade0 wrote: post #2

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU

The first question is funny because the pronunciation of the last 2 characters (拉面 - lamian) is why Japanese call Chinese noodles 'ramen'.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#18

Post by mrob »

HuShifang wrote: post #13

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it…

Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being commonly used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#19

Post by z2 »

stanrivers wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

I totally agree with this analogy, though maybe to add some nuance (or pedantry), I'd claim that to start learning Chinese, you need to pick a modern dialect (probably Mandarin), which is like choosing Spanish over Portuguese or Catalan. Then, learning Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese) is like learning a nearby but non-Romance language that was heavily influenced by Latin or Romance languages, like English. Knowing Spanish will let you appreciate the similarities with English, but you'd still need to delve into historical Spanish (or French) to really see the connections.

Chinese is a pretty old and continuous language, so at the advanced level, learners could delve into Classical Chinese, which is truly analogous to Latin, and was also a dominant lingua franca in written form across East Asia. Pieces of Classical Chinese are 'alive' in everyday use, kind of like how Latin is 'alive' in the Romance languages through general and obvious similarities, or specific vocabulary, (e.g. "quid pro quo", "ad hominem"). But Classical Chinese is radically different from any dialect of today's vernacular Chinese.

In any case, the similarities and overlap definitely make learning between CJK(V) easier!

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#20

Post by tabtab »

stanrivers wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

My spouse is Chinese and I tried to learn Chinese for obvious reasons. However, they speak multiple dialects in practice such that it's hard to focus, and there are limited training materials for some of the dialects. Generally there is Cantonese, Mandarin, and their local dialect, which is what they use most often.
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