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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)

#51

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

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

Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when visiting Japan in recent years.

What's your rationale for this ordering?

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

#52

Post by otoburb »

andrewzah wrote: post #34
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…

>>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.*

I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers. My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V" and "Z" sounds.

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

#53

Post by kazinator »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #49
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.

I'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks about any writing system at all, let alone any specific timeline regarding the development of literacy.

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

#54

Post by lhorie »

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…

You can definitely get a deeper appreciation of a language and get extra decoding tools for learning related languages when you learn about the history and etymology of words.

As a romance language speaker, knowing about greek and latin particles helped me greatly in learning english of all languages, just because of the sheer amount of appropriations english does.

Something that sticks with me from my early japanese learning after all these years is that, for example, "あ" (japanese "a") is a stylization of "安" (pronounced "an"). This helps make an association similar to how some kids books overlay hiragana over pictures of things that start with that letter, e.g. overlaying "い" (i) around a strawberry (ichigo). There are tons of similar examples in both japanese and chinese (pronunciation prefixes being a common tool used by chinese learners)

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

#55

Post by cmrdporcupine »

danans wrote: post #46
garmaine wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

I thought the latest thinking was that the modern day Ainu are descendants of the Jomon population.

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

#56

Post by laurieg »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #50
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 lear…

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.

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

#57

Post by stanrivers »

stanrivers wrote: post #6
dfalzone wrote: post #3

Article 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

Ok - this chain is interesting; didn’t have this background; I deserve the downvote. Thanks for context... will go read some more

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

#58

Post by bgee »

microcolonel wrote: post #21

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…

Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0].

I can provide a few examples where characters are more "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: 國 vs 国，黨 vs 党

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhu...

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

#59

Post by adrianN »

laurieg wrote: post #56
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 lear…

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.

The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.

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

#60

Post by ginko »

baobrain wrote: post #47
moogleii wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The claim may be misguided or wrong perhaps, but how is it Western-centric?
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