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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)

#81

Post by bllguo »

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…

it's true but also largely moot. mandarin is enough, nearly everyone speaks it.

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

#82

Post by moufestaphio »

Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did the JLPT as a native English speaker.

Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah.

As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences: 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China. With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan

For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified)

I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese.

Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite was:

手紙 The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively.

In Japanese, it means 'Letter'

In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'

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

#83

Post by lifthrasiir »

throwaway66554 wrote: post #78
lifthrasiir wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kanji, the traditional strokes (non-simplified) Uh, both Japan and Chinese use different simplified glyphs. And they overlap a lot because they are different standardizations of handwritten glyphs in the bigger Sinosphere. I would be surprised if you indeed learned the traditional characters while learning Japanese.

>Uh, both Japan and Chinese use different simplified glyphs. Wrong. Though there are divergences, Chinese in mainland China use simplified Chinese characters ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_character... ). Kanji is more closely related to the traditional Chinese characters ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Local_developments_and_d... ) than the mainland simplification. >I would be surprised i…

My understanding of Chinese (the language) is limited, but having learned Hanja (essentially traditional one) first then learned Japanese later the divergence was already significant. Or, more quantitatively, the Joyo Kanji has 364 simplified characters out of 2,136 (~17%) [1] while the mainland China simplified probably about 2,000 out of 7,000 common characters (~28%) [2]. This divergence is not the biggest deal, but still big enough to refute the claim that Japanese is easier to learn because it's "non-simplified" (there may be other valid reasons though).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai#Simplifications_in_J...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...

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

#84

Post by microcolonel »

bgee wrote: post #58
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...

I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed.

As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.

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

#85

Post by jcranmer »

kazinator wrote: post #44
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…

"Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.

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

#86

Post by yorwba »

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.

Here are ten Shanghainese sentences, four short ones and six long ones:

1. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/488406.mp3

2. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/485590.mp3

3. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/485698.mp3

4. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/488621.mp3

5. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/489046.mp3

6. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/489736.mp3

7. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/492871.mp3

8. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/496402.mp3

9. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/485676.mp3

10. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/488252.mp3

They're not especially slow, but you can replay them as often as you want or even slow them down, so I think it should be easier than for someone in Chengdu trying to understand a Shanghainese speaker in person.

For comparison, here are the Mandarin equivalents of those sentences, pronounced by the same speaker:

1. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332870.mp3

2. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332436.mp3

3. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332568.mp3

4. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333012.mp3

5. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333070.mp3

6. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333151.mp3

7. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333392.mp3

8. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333584.mp3

9. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332549.mp3

10. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332788.mp3

And here they're written down, together with translations into various other languages:

1. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488406

2. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485590

3. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485698

4. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488621

5. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/489046

6. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/489736

7. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/492871

8. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/496402

9. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485676

10. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488252

If you want some more examples, this search returns a few hundred: https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/search?query=&from=wuu&to=...

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

#87

Post by bgee »

microcolonel wrote: post #84
bgee wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed. As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversi…

玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade".

[0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

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

#88

Post by microcolonel »

bgee wrote: post #87
microcolonel wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed. As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversi…

玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王.

Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.

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

#89

Post by andrewzah »

brenschluss wrote: post #39
andrewzah wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings. It's always been the handwritten version as depicted.

ㅅ almost looks like 人 [0] (인) on computers (looks like 1 stroke to beginners), but when handwriting it is 2 strokes. ㅈ is also 2 strokes (personal handwriting aside) and looks rather different.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9

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

#90

Post by bgee »

microcolonel wrote: post #88
bgee wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王. Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.

>Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉?

I think we have done exactly that[0], it's just not part of the 1986 proposal in PRC.

[0]: https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%AF

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