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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)

#101

Post by kwillets »

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…

Just learning the words sounds great until you find out that Korean is agglutinative, and Koreans don't even agree on where the word boundaries are.

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

#102

Post by foysavas »

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.

Mandarin speakers ability to understand slowed down Shanghainese is likely a recent development. This is because much of traditional Shanghainese diction, grammar, and even pronunciation has been reduced or morphed to better suit the newer generations of speakers whose principal language is Mandarin.

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

#103

Post by eindiran »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
dfalzone wrote: post #3

Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.

To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother to verify first. I guess at this point similarities between the two languages are assumed to be a result of regional influence?

Many mainstream linguists have been against the hypothesis since the 1950s, but there are still plenty of linguists who contend that the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian families form a family; a smaller number have arguments in support of the stronger claim that the Koreanic, Ainu and Japanese–Ryukyuan languages are connected as well. See eg: [0] Vovin set out to demonstrate that the latter, stronger claim was true and ended up writing this: [1]

Arguably, the biggest blow struck to the hypothesis in the last 15-20 years came when Vovin, previously a supporter of the hypothesis, wrote "The end of the Altaic controversy"[2]. Among the more notable arguments in it is that the non-traditional methods[3] used to argue that Altaic is a family are rejected by traditional comparative linguistics because they overweight lexical comparisons.

This was a rather prescient point, as some of the methods that have developed since then that have been used to argue in favor of the Altaic hypothesis suffer from this problem quite badly; this is perhaps especially true of the Bayesian phylogenetic inference, sometimes called Bayesian phylolinguistics when applied to historical linguistics. With this technique, used in eg [0], it is pretty hard to argue that this method wouldn't overweight cognates and loan words gained through contact unless you specifically control for that, which will cause you to end up erroneously marking sprachbunds as true families.

See [4] for another usage of the technique, this time to support the Dravidian family, which is already very very well support by traditional comparative methods.

All of this ultimately points to what I think is the real answer to the issue; outside of some arguments about archaeology that I don't have enough background to evaluate [5], most of the shared bits (shared pronouns, lexical stuff) between the languages here exist because of contact.

The languages here, if they belong grouped at all, should be grouped as a sprachbund, not as a family. The possibility that there is a true family with "micro-Altaic" is small, but I think it is still a much greater possibility than the "strong" hypothesis (w/ Japanese, Korean, etc). This paper [6] has a very cool approach to evaluating the weaker form of the hypothesis that I think most HN readers would find interesting.

So to answer your question, yes, I believe your assessment is correct, and mainstream historical linguistics does as well. But I wouldn't go so far as to say there are any nails in the Altaic hypothesis' coffin just yet.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185

[1] https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTR...

[2] https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_contr...

[3] "non-traditional" = anything outside the comparative method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics). See eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_...

[4] https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/fil...

[5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s...

[6] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf

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

#104

Post by gizmo385 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.

Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)

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

#105

Post by chaostheory »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #74
chaostheory wrote: post #63

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 wr…

I'm not sure what you mean: are you claiming that... > While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. ..."traditional" characters (which do not equal to Japanese Shinjitai!) is easier to write but harder to read, or... > It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around. ...it's easier to read but harder to write? Th…

Sorry, I didn't realize that the Japanese simplified kanji.

> ...it's easier to read but harder to write?

Harder to write because you have more lines and characters to draw. Harder to read because there are less sub-characters due to there being less lines. Judging from what you wrote, you probably understand my point just adding it just in case.

Yeah, I've been gone a long time and I've been assimilated i.e. I don't read and write often anymore so you're probably right.

> or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway

This is why I feel it makes it harder, especially for less common words. It's just more unnecessary work.

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

#106

Post by stanrivers »

philliphaydon wrote: post #15
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…

> The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

Korean does not have vowel length change the meaning, however Japanese does.

Korean used to be tonal, and you are right it now longer is.

Korean is used in combination with other data points to determine pronunciations.

This works for old English plays, for example too. You can use poems that should rhyme, plus commentary from linguists at the time, to guess what certain words would sound like “back then”.

Just saying that Korean is another super rare but fun random fact that I have heard of being used at least once in combination with ancient Chinese poems, to guess at the old Chinese pronunciation.

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

#107

Post by stanrivers »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #35
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. As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and Korean.

Yes - you should learned the language that has meaning to your life. If you don’t have a reason to use the language you will forget it all.

And agreed - once you get into more “college level or technical” Korean for lack of a better word, knowing the hanja/ Chinese characters makes vocab acquisition easier.

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

#108

Post by darkhorn »

winter_blue wrote: post #80
ms1234rth wrote: post #76

If you know Turkish (or any Central Asian language barring Tajik[not familiar with Persian adjacent languages]), learning Japanese is a breeze because you can translate a Turkish text into Japanese word for word and out comes a perfectly constructed Japanese text. Obviously, it works in the other direction as well. I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having hell of a time untill I came across a Ja…

How close are Turkish and Japanese? I know there is a proposed "Altaic language family"[1], but I'd love to hear the perspective of someone who actually knows two such languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

Vowel harmony, no genders, no plurals, agglutinative etc are similar.

The only thing you need to learn is new words. The grammatical structure is same. Translation between Indo-European and Altaic is very hard. Translation beween Altaic languages is very easy.

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

#109

Post by danans »

gizmo385 wrote: post #104
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97

Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.

Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)

They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic.

Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese languages), most languages of Southeast Asia, and all the African languages.

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

Again, it's so broad a grouping, projected so far back in time and based on such weakly detected feature similarities, that it's by no means broadly accepted as a language family in the way that Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, etc are.

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

#110

Post by wst_ »

moufestaphio wrote: post #82

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'…

> English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation

This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers.

On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.

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