131–140 of 187 posts
Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
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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.
The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.
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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 c…
Sometimes they will get confused and clarify with a question: 私って？ 誰のこと？ 私とは、どちら様のことでしょうか？
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"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.
It's not absolutely unknown: "With this ring, I thee wed" from the Book of Common Prayer marriage service seems to me to be SOV (with an adverbial bit in advance), though it's definitely archaic. I imagine it features a bit in poetry too.
"With this ring, thee I wed"
"I wed thee, with this ring"
...
"Thee, with this ring, I wed" (???)
When you use "you", suddenly there is only one obvious order.
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>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…
That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.
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'…
>In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'
I immediately thought of the toilet hand from Majora's Mask:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE
[You give him a property deed to wipe himself with]
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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…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology > In 2012, vowel length is reported almost completely neutralized in Korean, except for a very few older speakers of Seoul dialect,[14] for whom the distinctive vowel-length distinction is maintained only in the first syllable of a word.[13] So it does have vowel length change meaning but it’s almost kinda died out like tones?
Similarly, ㅐ/ㅔ ("ae"/"e") distinction was dead before I was born, but schools insisted that they're well and alive. Not sure what they're teaching these days.
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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 .…
Traditionally, one stroke means one movement between the brush touching the paper and lifting off - for example the Chinese character 弓 has three strokes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BC%93#/media/File:%E5%BC%...
Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
That’s amazing, I’m not a native English speaker and that sounds exactly like when you are listening to a song in English but you are not understanding the lyric.
