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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)

#41

Post by throwaway66554 »

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.

I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English.

An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max.

Words like "library" use the same Chinese letters, and have very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent.

I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did).

Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

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

#42

Post by naniwaduni »

smogcutter wrote: post #27
Kliment wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Syntactically defensible, sure. But what anglophone not seeking to deliberately confuse an interlocutor would call bison from upstate New York "Buffalo buffalo"? What action could such bison perform on other bison that can reasonably be construed as "buffaloing"?

Semantics and pragmatics are part of the language, too.

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

#43

Post by moogleii »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #17
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'.

I found their bewilderment a little puzzling as well, but I believe it's due to the simplification of the last character. If you watch the older Canto/Traditional version of the video, the Japanese folk get the ramen part immediately.

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

#44

Post by kazinator »

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…

Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust".

Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending particle like よ. E.g. "ばかだよ私は". Sometimes that can be because the speaker realizes mid-sentence that it requires a topic to be clear, and you can tell when this is the case when the topic is preceded by a pause. But it has a nuance of its own, so it is used deliberately, even in writing.

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

#45

Post by em-bee »

interestica wrote: post #22

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 des…

i learned hangul characters by reading street signs while travelling through south korea. most signs were both in hangul and latin characters.

then i found a keyboard typing practice program where i patched the letter images and replaced them with the appropriate hangul character parts, to practice typing.

this skill came in handy when i needed to write down some korean words when hearing them.

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

#46

Post by danans »

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…

> It's known that genetically the Japanese population was seeded by Korean settlers which largely displaced the native Ainu populations

It's even more complicated than that. In addition to the Ainu there were the Jomon people, a non-agricultural but nonetheless settled society who are believed to be the first people in the world to use pottery - which is surprising for a non-agricultural people.

They might in turn have been an offshoot of the first migration of modern humans out of Africa along the south coast of Asia, whose haplotypes [1] occur today at some of the highest frequences in Japan and as far north as Mongolia and as far south as Australia. Some sub-branches spread west all the way to the edge of Europe.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M_(mtDNA)

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

#47

Post by baobrain »

moogleii wrote: post #38
tabtab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always find the claim that dialects in China vary so much that people cannot understand each other very western-centric. As a native speaker, there are shockingly few dialects that are completely incomprehensible. Someone from Shanghai will be able to speak to someone in Chengdu with their own dialect, just slower.

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

#48

Post by 49531 »

throwaway66554 wrote: post #41
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. I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English. An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max. Words like "library" use the sa…

That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.

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

#49

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

kazinator wrote: post #40

> 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 inf…

I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least. The original immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of Chinese writing by Japan’s learned elites. Any introduction to Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.

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

#50

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

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…

>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)

I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and refined consistently over many years. All of these become harder the further the target language is from the ones you already know. Would French really be significantly harder to learn if they said 'Je le ballon frappe'?.

I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms). Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you need to listen and read for.

Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.

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