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

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

#61

Post by danans » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #55

danans wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the latest thinking is that all people of Japan to varying degrees are descended from the Jomon people along with other populations migrating from mainland Asia over millennia.

This pattern - early hunter gatherer populations forming the substratum that later mixed with larger migrations of agricultural populations - is not unique to Japan.

It's quite similar to what you find in the paleogenetics and history of most regions of the world, including Europe and South Asia.

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

#62

Post by lifthrasiir » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) is what the King Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal, thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle Korean despite of its failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun

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

#63

Post by chaostheory » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

imo Traditional written Chinese (what the Japanese call Kanji and that's used outside of China) is easier than simplified written Chinese. While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. Consequently, you can guess what the word means. Conversely with simplified, there less sub characters, so there's a lot of lost context. Easier to write by hand is also not so much of an advantage anymore given computers.

If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional. It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.

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

#64

Post by bernulli » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

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.

There's a lot more to learning a different language than learning substitutions.

For starters, there is hardly any bijective mapping between words. Translating 'run' to German could mean any of 'rennen, renne, rennst, rennt, renn, laufen, laeuft' and I am sure I am missing quite a bit.

And that only scratches the surface, let's not get started about Grammar or idioms, etc.

The word order really only adds negligible overhead.

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

#65

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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.

So learn it. You'll get to practice it with every sentence you ever use.

Conversely, you'll only use 'ballon' when you take about un ballon. I hope that's frequently enough for you to remember the word & its gender. At least it looks like the word 'ball', something you don't get with Vietnamese's 'bóng' or Chinese's '球[1]'

And you'll still get funny looks if you say you're getting ready to go to the New Year's ballon, because substitutions fail with homonyms in both directions. And you'll have to learn and relearn about ten thousand of these substitutions.

[1]maybe?

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

#66

Post by SeanLuke » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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.

Take Cantonese (or heck, Teochew or Hakka). You really think this language is reasonably mutually intelligible with Mandarin? Or Shanghainese?

I'm a (non-native, formerly fluent but now pretty poor) Cantonese speaker and I'd describe the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin as roughly the difference between Portuguese and Romanian. Sure, they're both romance languages, and maybe with a lot of work and hand-waving and drawing characters on your hands with your fingers you can get your point across to someone who speaks the other language, but in no way would I call them mutually intelligible, even by talking "slower".

Cantonese and Mandarin have very different pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar for common cases. In fact there are extremely common words in Cantonese for which there is no modern chinese character: instead roman words or even single letters (like "D") are substituted in comic strips etc. So you can't even write them down in Chinese for a Mandarin speaker to puzzle through with a dictionary.

I'd say that your perception of these things as "western centric" -- they are not at all -- strikes me as very "northern Chinese centric" view of China. :-)

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

#67

Post by lifthrasiir » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #24

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…

Simplified forms have been common in handwriting for centuries. Korean hanja was also simplified in handwriting when it was in use, even though it never got standardized. The "adoption" thus mostly means the standardization of such established glyphs even in print. (This also partly explains why the second reform in the mainland China [1] wasn't received well and retracted at the end.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...

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

#68

Post by throwaway66554 » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #51

throwaway66554 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Because when you learn Japanese, you have to learn kanji, the more traditional strokes (non-simplified), both Japanese and Chinese sounds, and the grammar is closer to Korean (and closer pronunciation for a lot of words).

So, it's better to learn Japanese, quickly pick up Korean, then learn Chinese.

Chinese last since you have to learn simplified characters, the grammar is different, tonality is quite different, etc.

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

#69

Post by maple3142 » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese:

Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese.

After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by ですないか... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English.

Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as …も…ない and …也…沒… It is easy to find that 訓読み words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin.

IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.

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

#70

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #61

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the latest thinking is that all people of Japan to varying degrees are descended from the Jomon people along with other populations migrating from mainland Asia over millennia. This pattern - early hunter gatherer populations forming the substratum that later mixed with larger migrations of agricultural populations - is not unique to Japan. It's quite similar to what you find in the paleogenetics and history…

My understanding of more recent European population studies is that the genetic signature of the pre-agrarian hunter gatherers is actually quite low. In general they were displaced rather than merged. Or their numbers were so low and diffuse that their contribution was little. Which makes sense when you consider population densities possible/typical in a hunter gatherer vs agrarian lifestyles.

We're back to population migration / replacement theories being ascendant rather than the situation 30 years ago when cultural diffusion theories were preferred.