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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)

#171

Post by AlchemistCamp »

lmm wrote: post #121
z2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

It's definitely true that it's easier for readers of traditional to learn simplified than visa-versa. After all, the simplified script was created by people who were already using traditional and were attempting to make logical and consistent simplifications!

On the other hand, your friend might find some very common traditional characters brutal to learn as a beginner. 醫生 (doctor) often comes up within the first few lessons and 鬱悶 (depressed) within the first couple of semesters. In contrast, someone starting with simplified won't be so daunted learning the simplified equivalents 医生 and 郁闷. Later, as an advanced student, the traditional forms aren't so daunting as they would have been to start with.

It's still more work for someone who knows 医 to learn the rest of 醫 than it is for someone who knows 醫 to learn that they just need to write the first 8 strokes that make up its upper left corner to make the simplified version, of course.

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

#173

Post by kagevf »

maple3142 wrote: post #69

Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese: Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese. After learning kana: Could und…

音読み is the sound based on the original Chinese pronounciation, and 訓読み is the Japanese pronounciation.

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

#174

Post by z2 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #171
lmm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

It's definitely true that it's easier for readers of traditional to learn simplified than visa-versa. After all, the simplified script was created by people who were already using traditional and were attempting to make logical and consistent simplifications! On the other hand, your friend might find some very common traditional characters brutal to learn as a beginner. 醫生 (doctor) often comes up within the first few…

It's an interesting point--I underestimated the difficulty of learning to handwrite characters. Knowing simplified I can read traditional pretty effortlessly and even communicate with a relative in HK typing in traditional, but cannot write it by hand from memory. I liken it to being able to read but not draw the Gothic "T" in the New York Times.

Still, I'd claim that regardless of the direction, learning the simplification map (and some patternless exceptions) is a small incremental task compared with the thousands of hours learning the broader language. What's a few hundred mapping rules + exceptions, after learning 3000+ characters? If someone asked me which character set to start with, barring real issues with availability of education material, I'd say to learn whatever you want if you're committed to it! Just be ready to spend a few hundred more hours at least due to the increased amount of information to memorize in traditional.

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

#175

Post by brenschluss »

yongjik wrote: post #139
brenschluss wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .…

Hmm? I don't think anyone considers ㅈ as three strokes, unless they're writing ㅈ like printed font. When handwritten, the whole フ-like shape is one stroke, and the small attachment is the second stroke. 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%..…

Looks like it’s both 2 and 3 획 when handwritten. I know people who write with 3 strokes; I do with 2.

https://ko.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ㅈ https://namu.wiki/w/ㅈ

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

#176

Post by solarmist »

adrianN wrote: post #148
rangibaby wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a master of the grammar, I think it's possible to start figuring things out from context once you've learned a critical mass of words

Yes, but "critical mass" is much larger than you'd commonly think. It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence.

Thank you. That's a very succinct way of putting it. I wonder if there's a term or concept for this in linguistics.

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

#177

Post by solarmist »

bernulli wrote: post #64
laurieg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a lot more to learning a different language than learning substitutions. For starters, there is hardly any bijective mapping between words. Translating 'run' to German could mean any of 'rennen, renne, rennst, rennt, renn, laufen, laeuft' and I am sure I am missing quite a bit. And that only scratches the surface, let's not get started about Grammar or idioms, etc. The word order really only adds negligible o…

You get closer to something bijective when you only consider lemmas, but then you'll probably have around 1/3 that are bijective, 1/3 that 1->2 or 3 and 1/3 that are 2 or 3->1.

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

#178

Post by solarmist »

throwaway66554 wrote: post #41
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. 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…

Speaking sure, because both Korean and Japanese were fully formed languages that borrowed a writing system. I've come to view Kanji/Hanja as an information layering on top of the language used to increase the information density/clarity of the written languages.

If you look at written Japanese/Korean (with Hanja) and you get a much higher transfer. Esp. Someone who knows Chinese trying to get by in Japan.

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

#179

Post by kazinator »

krebs_liebhaber wrote: post #134
pmyteh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The word order in that sentence is less important, because it uses old pronoun "thee" as opposed to "thou" (analogous to German "dich" vs "du"), thus indicating the subject and object. "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.

You, with your attitude, I cannot accept!

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

#180

Post by kagevf »

jimmydef wrote: post #157
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…

> 1. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese This is because you are probably speaking in mandarin which has deviated a great deal from Middle Chinese ever since the Jurchen Jin conquered northern China. But if you were to compare it to a more conservative Chinese language like min-nan or some other southern chinese language, the similarities are unmistakable. examples of p…

any source on the mapping for the sound changes? That's very interesting and I would like to learn more ...
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