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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)

#161

Post by lordnacho »

SeanLuke wrote: post #66
baobrain wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take Cantonese (or heck, Teochew or Hakka). You really think this language is reasonably mutually intelligible with Mandarin? Or Shanghainese? I'm a (non-native, formerly fluent but now pretty poor) Cantonese speaker and I'd describe the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin as roughly the difference between Portuguese and Romanian. Sure, they're both romance languages, and maybe with a lot of work and hand-wavin…

Heh, this is the perfect place for me to jump in with some movie trivia.

Have you ever watched either Ip Man or "The Bridge" (Danish/Swedish cop show)?

In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversation across the languages.

A similar thing happens in The Bridge. There's two cops solving a crime on the bridge connecting Denmark with Sweden, and they just talk to each other in their own languages. My guess is most people who didn't study the other language would not know all the slang, as importantly the simple expressions. Though I guess it could be learned easily; I can read a Swedish newspaper, just not process it fast enough to have a fast conversation with a colleague.

Similarly with German and Swiss German. Something about the way the sounds are different makes processing the other one a bit slow if you're not used to it.

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

#162

Post by ngokevin »

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…

If you're learning Chinese from her, you might be interested in my project for couples learning each other's languages! https://learncoupling.com

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

#163

Post by gwd »

lordnacho wrote: post #161
SeanLuke wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take Cantonese (or heck, Teochew or Hakka). You really think this language is reasonably mutually intelligible with Mandarin? Or Shanghainese? I'm a (non-native, formerly fluent but now pretty poor) Cantonese speaker and I'd describe the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin as roughly the difference between Portuguese and Romanian. Sure, they're both romance languages, and maybe with a lot of work and hand-wavin…

Heh, this is the perfect place for me to jump in with some movie trivia. Have you ever watched either Ip Man or "The Bridge" (Danish/Swedish cop show)? In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversa…

> In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversation across the languages.

So the mixed Mandarin / Cantonese conversations actually do happen. My wife's family are all native Cantonese speakers, but her uncle married into the family from another part of China. He understands Cantonese perfectly but is more comfortable speaking Mandarin; and everyone else understands Mandarin to various degrees but prefer to speak in Cantonese. So he just speaks Mandarin while everyone else sticks to Cantonese; and it's quite a fluid back-and-forth.

That said, for that to happen so naturally the way it does in the Ip Man movies is really unrealistic. First of all, Mandarin wasn't as well-known in Guangdong in the 1930's as it is now; and there's no way someone from another part of China could just show up and magically understand Cantonese: It would take at least a few months of immersion to be able to "listen" fluidly enough to have that sort of a mixed conversation.

Even more unrealistic is Ip Man 4, where he shows up in San Fransisco, and starts talking in Cantonese to people who have immigrated from Beijing -- including one of the character's 12-year-old daughter who grew up in San Fransisco. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

[Minor grammar edits.]

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

#164

Post by yomly »

yorwba wrote: post #86
baobrain wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a super high quality post - thank you!

I think you've also answered my questions in this space before, what kind of work do you do? You seem very familiar with asian languages deeper than just a native speaker/hobbyist might be.

I thought recording 6 was vaguely mandarin sounding, if you squinted you could more or less guess what was being said. Agreed that the rest are hard to understand but I don't think it takes native mandarin speakers much effort to get to a point where they can get proficient in another dialect. IMO learning Shanghainese from Mandarin will be easier than learning Portuguese if you speak Spanish

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

#165

Post by lordnacho »

gwd wrote: post #163
lordnacho wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, this is the perfect place for me to jump in with some movie trivia. Have you ever watched either Ip Man or "The Bridge" (Danish/Swedish cop show)? In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversa…

> In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversation across the languages. So the mixed Mandarin / Cantonese conversations actually do happen. My wife's family are all native Cantonese speakers, but…

That's kinda interesting that he can do that. With a bit of recent Mandarin schooling I can see the langauges are quite similar, but as a kid whenever we had a Mandarin speaker visiting I was baffled. Same thing happened when I learned German, as soon as I learned the initial things like the pronouns everything clicked.

It's probably the case that all the often used words that you use in everyday life have changed, but once you get over the barrier there's a pretty smooth learning zone.

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

#166

Post by majewsky »

imtringued wrote: post #156
adrianN wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. People usually learn around a thousand words per year. Someone in their 20s is expected to have a 20k vocabulary but much of that is academic or professional vocabulary. i.e. the overlap between a mechanical and a software engineer might only be 15k words.

Is that number for active or passive vocabulary? For active, it seems reasonable, but GP is talking about reading comprehension, i.e. passive vocabulary.

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

#167

Post by tokyoseb »

yongjik wrote: post #152
karmasimida wrote: post #143

Interesting observations. As native Chinese speaker: The Look: 1. Japanese: I like the kanji, it is very recognizable, even the character set is different. Most Chinese will have no problem reading traditional Chinese characters, though somewhat slower. The rest...not so much, kanas are my biggest headache. 2. Korean: First thing I noticed is the presence of circle, which is not part of Chinese radicals until very re…

> For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul? It depends. For this particular example, I think most Koreans will treat 부동산 as a single word meaning "real estate", because it's not a very productive combination: the alternative 동산 (moveable prope…

That example is interesting. The Japanese word for real estate, 不動産, actually came from French [1], 'immobilier' (real estate, by opposition to what is movable or 'mobile' such as 'meubles' or 'mobilier', i.e. furniture). And of course the French word comes from Latin...

[1] https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%8B%95%E7%94%A3

The Japanese would treat the whole combination as a single word (in my experience) and wouldn't analyse the components either (although 'they make sense'). The etymology is often more apparent in Japanese and Chinese thanks to the characters, whereas it's not always easy to see it in other language (unless you speak Latin or Greek..). But this is a borrowed word and in this particular case it's very intuitive to French speakers as immobilier / mobilier / mobile are all common words.

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

#168

Post by gwd »

lordnacho wrote: post #165
gwd wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Ip Man, there's a gang of Mandarin speakers who show up in Ip Man's Cantonese world. They somehow are able to speak to each other, and I find it unlikely. Perhaps it's because my Cantonese is mediocre. But it just doesn't sound like you could have a casual conversation across the languages. So the mixed Mandarin / Cantonese conversations actually do happen. My wife's family are all native Cantonese speakers, but…

That's kinda interesting that he can do that. With a bit of recent Mandarin schooling I can see the langauges are quite similar, but as a kid whenever we had a Mandarin speaker visiting I was baffled. Same thing happened when I learned German, as soon as I learned the initial things like the pronouns everything clicked. It's probably the case that all the often used words that you use in everyday life have changed, b…

Just to be clear, her uncle has now lived in HK for several decades; I'm sure there was a several-month learning curve being able to understand Cantonese. It's not like Hindi and Urdu, where (I'm told) people with no previous exposure to the other language can communicate pretty readily.

But there are a huge number of words which are simply pronounced a bit differently; and the differences in pronunciation have a lot of predictable patterns. So once you're familiar with these patterns, suddenly a Mandarin speaker can understand a huge amount of Cantonese when spoken in context.

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

#169

Post by Liquid_Fire »

dwg wrote: post #153
dwg wrote: post #128

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).

Just to clarify he did not say this in any sort of derogatory sense, nor do I wish it to be interpreted as such. Just that he can't understand! I think the difference is greater than the author states (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters).

> (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters)

I understood the article to be talking entirely about the written language. Despite including "and sounds like" in the title, there is barely any discussion of the spoken language.

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

#170

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

rangibaby wrote: post #130
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…

> 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…

Not in every situation & not if you're not good enough to understand the explanation.
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