Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pagef30.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 187 posts

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

#31

Post by naniwaduni »

dfalzone wrote: post #3

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

For an amateur's blog post in 2009 to call Altaic theory utter horseshit would been rather hubristic to begin with, and moreover, not even the point. The Altaic hypotheses were higher-profile proposals that happened to include common origin for Japanese and Korean. Even dismissing the former, the latter is not exactly out of consideration.

And, as the post points out, the whole line of argument is a curiosity that has little concrete bearing on the fact that the two are very similar from a learner's perspective.

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

#32

Post by free_rms »

jaclaz wrote: post #12
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.

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.

In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen" is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice double entendre).

Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to hilarious translations.

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

#33

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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…

> Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like

That is rather an exaggeration. Korean and Japanese can be used as guides for Middle Chinese pronunciation, but they aren’t all that useful compared to using China’s own rhyme tables and running the comparative method on the Chinese dialects. For stages of Chinese before Middle Chinese, neither Korean nor Japanese are useful at all.

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

#34

Post by andrewzah »

silicon2401 wrote: post #10

Interesting 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 K…

Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much easier to guess the meaning versus french or german.

I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers.

In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.

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

#35

Post by lifthrasiir »

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…

> Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.

As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and Korean.

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

#36

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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?

Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.

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

#37

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

garmaine wrote: post #29
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 di…

While a relationship between Japan and certain lost languages of the Korean peninsula is agreed upon by nearly all scholars, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that Japanese and Korean are related. One recent school of thought, for example, is that pre-Proto-Japanese entered the Korean peninsula from mainland China (Shandong province) while Korean came down from the north, so they would not be genetically related in spite of being neighbours.

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

#38

Post by moogleii »

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.

I came across this quote from the Mandarin wiki:

> The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they cannot understand each other.... [They] also have another language which is like a universal and common language; this is the official language of the mandarins and of the court; it is among them like Latin among ourselves.... Two of our fathers [Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci] have been learning this mandarin language... — Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y progresso de la Compañía de Jesús en las Indias Orientales, I:28 (1542–1564)

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

#39

Post by brenschluss »

andrewzah wrote: post #30
mrob wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is a stylistic/typeface difference between sans-serif and serif text. Some people do write like that, most people don't.

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

#40

Post by kazinator »

> Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary present in English

This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners brought their language, mixed it with the local language and evolved a new one out of that.

Post reply on HN