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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)

#91

Post by dumb1224 »

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.

> Someone from Shanghai will be able to speak to someone in Chengdu with their own dialect, just slower.

This is definitely not true (if they were to use their own dialect).

I'm from the same region surrounding Shanghai and although there are some intelligibility between dialects, it is hard if not completely impossible to have a conversation even between people from adjacent towns. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese

I'm a bit surprised about your claim. Anyone from China with a sense of the dialects of the south would know this.

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

#93

Post by numpad0 »

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.

More like building a completely different persona for each family of languages. “Learn a bunch of substitutions” approach only goes so far, your language specific part of identity must be separated at where thought processes for languages diverge and necessary new parts must be built.

Philosophers deny linguistic determinism(a notion that language sets the ceiling for thoughts) but that’s just talking Turing Completeness.

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

#94

Post by silicon2401 »

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…

yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is French/German.

I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line up with your account as well.

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

#95

Post by numpad0 »

andrewzah wrote: post #89
brenschluss wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

人 is 2 strokes tho

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

#96

Post by yorwba »

andi999 wrote: post #26
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.

Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if you found a solution.

The English and Chinese Wikipedia articles about the dialect will usually have at least some useful information e.g. about the phonology and maybe links to other resources.

You can also try Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese#Abou...

https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ has IPA pronunciations for single characters across many different dialects.

https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ may have some recorded vocabulary.

https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime has input methods for many dialects that can also be abused as a dictionary (associating romanization with Chinese characters you can look up).

https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-k... may have flashcards if you're lucky.

You'll probably also want to make your own flashcards. https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump is helpful for getting voice messages out of WeChat.

If you want to practice by passive listening, you can try http://phonemica.net/ , searching on https://youku.com/ or check whether there's a local TV station that has programs in dialect.

Reading material will be almost impossible to find, but maybe there's a bible translation from the 19th century or something.

Also check whether there's a local language preservation group.

Finally, https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ is supposed make a lot of material available to the public soonish (right now I get a certificate error in Firefox, but you can see the landing page in a less strict browser).

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

#98

Post by andrewzah »

numpad0 wrote: post #95
andrewzah wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

人 is 2 strokes tho

Sorry, I meant that it looks like 1 stroke to beginners. Visually ㅅ looks similar to 人 on computers but in handwriting it's different.

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

#99

Post by garmaine »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #37
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…

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…

I was referring to human genetics.

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

#100

Post by throwaway66554 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #83
throwaway66554 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, b…

>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].

It's 17% and 28%, but much, much higher for the most commonly used characters, which is where the divergence between simplified and traditional grows even more.

>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).

I didn't make that claim. Maybe your talking about another thread?

It's not that it's easier to learn, it's that the path of going Japanese -> Korean -> Chinese is the easier, most logical path. The diverging simplified Chinese standard characters being a large reason behind that.

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