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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)

#21

Post by microcolonel »

I agree that 新字体 is preferable to 简体字 for exactly the etymological reason you cite, the thing with 言 only being simplified when it is a radical in 簡體字 really irritates me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me I practice with 正體字 most often despite being more familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes 新字體 > 正體字 > 簡體字.

P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.

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

#22

Post by interestica »

Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know what you're saying.

Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

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

#23

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dfalzone wrote: post #3

Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.

To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother to verify first.

I guess at this point similarities between the two languages are assumed to be a result of regional influence?

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

#24

Post by ilamont »

but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form.

I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional forms. Maybe someone knows the history?

Also, regarding this statement:

臺 (Korea/Taiwan) 台 (Japan/China)

In Taiwan, the latter form of tai (台) is used 99% of the time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (臺) AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money. Street signs for famous buildings all use 台, i.e. 台北101, 台北松山機場, etc.

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

#25

Post by stanrivers »

z2 wrote: post #19
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…

100% agree with this post, which I tried to get at saying that Korean and Japanese are distinct. Apologies for not making that clear. Your post is great to clarify this all more specifically.

The cultural side of things definitely requires a lot of time. And that’s fun.

What also takes time is learned how ideas are shared. Not just grammar, but which version of the multiple correct grammar options that is more common. How are paragraphs constructed? What is usually shared first in an idea or argument versus the end?

You can have someone with completely correct grammar and pronunciation that sounds odd to a native speak because the cultural / idea organization is not “native”.

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

#26

Post by andi999 »

tabtab wrote: post #20
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.

Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if you found a solution.

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

#27

Post by smogcutter »

Kliment wrote: post #9
SwiftyBug wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "g…

For example, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a valid English sentence.

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

#28

Post by yomly »

tabtab wrote: post #20
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.

Your spouse must be fairly old school to be using a dialect that isn't mando/canto...

Most millennials I know from mainland china and even Malaysia/Singapore will speak putonghua with their parents/family now. Ofc people from Sichuan and Shanghai love to preserve their dialect. Plus you got the cantos and hokkien/teochew/hakka and even changsharen.

In any case, my recommendation would be to stay with Mandarin and go deep on it. Learning a dialect afterwards is quite straightforward and you can be 80-90% proficient esp with understanding by just developing a sound mapping of each character from dialect->mandarin.

The common idioms you'll pick up with enough exposure.

You'll never regret learning Mandarin first - you'll be able to read/listen to the news and your relatives will understand you. Whereas if you try to learn dialect first you'll find it harder due to the less set of materials AND less people to talk to.

A lot of chinese people joke that they learned their 2nd/3rd... dialect by doing KTV and there's definitely some truth in that

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

#29

Post by garmaine »

dfalzone wrote: post #3

Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.

The Altaic theory isn't necessary to postulate a connection between Japanese and Korean. It's known that genetically the Japanese population was seeded by Korean settlers which largely displaced the native Ainu populations. Japanese is likely a descendent of the language spoken by these colonists from the Korean peninsula.

The two languages are very divergent, and the usual mechanisms for classifying languages are difficult to apply because the dominant Chinese influence came to each separately after they diverged.

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

#30

Post by andrewzah »

mrob wrote: post #18
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

Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode displays ㅈ/ㅅ, but they're not written like that. It's a common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect characters to be written like they're displayed on a computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written here. [0]

[0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Or...

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