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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)

#121

Post by lmm »

z2 wrote: post #75
throwaway66554 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't the order matter only if it's harder to do this the other way around? Anecdotally for me, learning Chinese first with simplified characters was totally fine, and without formal study, I can read traditional characters fine 90% of the time and guess a remaining ~8% of characters I don't immediately recognize for a total ~98% comprehension, kind of like figuring out how to read medieval gothic font. Knowing Chi…

> Anecdotally for me, learning Chinese first with simplified characters was totally fine, and without formal study, I can read traditional characters fine 90% of the time and guess a remaining ~8% of characters I don't immediately recognize for a total ~98% comprehension, kind of like figuring out how to read medieval gothic font.

AIUI that's not a recommended approach; my friend is learning Chinese and his teacher was insistent that he should learn the traditional characters first because it's much easier to pick up the simplified characters from the traditional ones than the other way around.

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

#122

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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 :)

this would be a somewhat representative example of such a tree:

https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languag...

You can find more very easily with a google image search on "human language tree"

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

#124

Post by devonkim »

stanrivers wrote: post #106
philliphaydon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sayin…

Vowel lengthening matters in Korean technically but is more often context-sensitive than length sensitive like it regularly is in Japanese for reasons I don’t know. 눈 can mean snow or eye in Korean depending upon how long you extend the vowel as recently as 1970, for example, but many Koreans (especially younger Koreans) have less sensitivity and don’t use it. When I learned Japanese there were more words where it was easier to confuse them and thus require a distinction, probably preserving length.

Overall Korean historically has had a tendency toward reducing tones and sounds (it used to have f and z sounds like in Chinese, for example). It continues to eliminate vowels where a lot of Koreans are not pronouncing the sound 최 fully and eliminating lip rounding to make it simply 체.

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

#125

Post by brenschluss »

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

ㅈ is three strokes; not sure what you mean by personal handwriting aside, but the 'stroke' is a designation of hand movement, not a count of curves that makes up the character.

> I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings.

Here's[0] someone's history of Korean typography which points out that the ㅅ may come from 훈민정음 Hunminjeongeum [1], which indeed has ㅅ .

Also perhaps you haven't seen middle school kids obsess over handwriting with multicolored pens ;)

[0] https://m.blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=designmage&logN...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye#/media/F...

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

#126

Post by freeopinion »

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…

I think your example highlights one of the amusing things about Japanese. That is the complete omission of the subject. As you said, the 「私は」 might only get thrown on as an afterthought. You can have entire conversations without ever actually voicing the subject. It can come off like a British comedy sketch for somebody to come into the middle of an exchange and try to figure out the topic from the last half of the conversation.

Kind of like using genderless pronouns in English takes away some hint to help you catch on. Only there's no pronoun at all. For English speakers it can get even worse when all that is spoken is a succession of passive verbs. Hilarious.

Edit: I should say that I never noticed a native Japanese person to be confused about the unspoken topic. They seem to be able to intuit it just fine in any context. I'm mostly just laughing at my own inability there.

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

#127

Post by howlgarnish »

free_rms wrote: post #32
jaclaz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain better? There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages. As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.

In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen" is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice double entendre). Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to hilarious translations.

拉麺 is "pulled noodles", which is meaning, not sound. 麺 on its own already means noodles, but in China it has become ambiguous because it was simplified down to 面, which also means "face". (And that's the sole meaning in Japanese for the character, hence the confusion in the video.)

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

#128

Post by dwg »

I live in Japan and work at a Japanese company. I can't understand Chinese at all. Even though the Japanese version of the Chinese pronunciation is somehow vaguely familiar at times, there is no making any sense of it.

I suspect Japanese folks feel the same way so I turned to my right and asked a coworker what Chinese sounds like to him. His answer was ちんぷんかんぷん (gibberish).

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

#129

Post by howlgarnish »

xiaodai wrote: post #113

What abt vietnamese?

Vietnamese adopted the Latin script in the late 19th century, and Chinese characters are effectively obsolete now.

They do still use a lot of Chinese-derived vocabulary, which you can occasionally spot if you squint hard enough. Xã hội chủ nghĩa = 社会主义 she hui zhu yi (socialism).

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

#130

Post by rangibaby »

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…

> Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.

If you don't understand what a word means, can't you ask the other person?

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