For other languages, there's a pretty interesting youtube channel called ecolinguist that frequently tries to test mutual intelligibility of language pairs to various extents. It's actually quite fascinting.
What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
141–150 of 187 posts
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#142This 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…
I totally agree with this analogy, though maybe to add some nuance (or pedantry), I'd claim that to start learning Chinese, you need to pick a modern dialect (probably Mandarin), which is like choosing Spanish over Portuguese or Catalan. Then, learning Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese) is like learning a nearby but non-Romance language that was heavily influenced by Latin or Romance languages, like English. Knowing…
Go back to middle Chinese, of which, for example, the Shanghai based Wu dialect, or the Southern Teochew dialect, retain much of the features of, and you will really feel like you're studying the mother language.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#143Interesting 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 recently. Because it looks like bubbles, so it looks somewhat ... cute? No meaning can be inferred beyond that. Also the use of spaces are noticeable.
The Sound:
1. Japanese: Fast. Less variation in the speech itself. Notice the presence of pitch. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese
2. Korean: Not as fast as Japanese, but still faster than Chinese. A lot of unfamiliar sounds that are absent in Chinese pronunciation. Sometimes I would be able to find one word or two that sounds like Chinese and makes sense in the context, but the rest is just foreign.
Question to Korean speakers:
Do you guys recognize each individual Hangul character's meaning (under the context of the word of course) if that word has a Chinese origin? Or the word is recognized as whole. 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?
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#144but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional…
That's a pretty extreme exaggeration. 臺 is on many, many famous buildings: https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/2...
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#145When using the camera feature of the Google translate app, I got the idea for making something similar, but instead of translating, it would just blur out all the words that a certain person couldn't understand. That way people designing accessible spaces could get an idea of how other people experience the information in them.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#146This 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…
My university Japanese class was full of Korean and Chinese international students. It was hard to keep up.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#147Earlier 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…
To be fair these translations slightly exaggerate the difference between Shanghainese and Mandarin. The speaker is speaking in a more formal register in her Mandarin samples than in her Shanghainese samples which causes greater vocabulary and structural differences than if they were at the same register. In fact I'm a little surprised she doesn't use exact analogs when translating between the two, e.g. 搿就是讲 -> 这就是说 instead of her choice of 这意味着, 越来越结棍了 -> 越来越历害了 instead of her choice of 愈演愈烈, and 开始寻被偷脱个物事了 -> 开始找被偷掉的东西了 instead of her choice of 开始找被偷物品了, since it is both a more accurate translation and reflects the structural similarity of the two sentences much better (there is a one-to-one correspondence between each word of both sentences).
Regardless I certainly would not view Shanghainese as mutually intelligible with Mandarin.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#148Earlier 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.
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.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
> When I learned Japanese there were more words where it was easier to confuse them and thus require a distinction, probably preserving length.
I did this to unintentional comedic effect the other day by referring to 「星の王子さま」as「星のおじいさま」.
Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)
#150Earlier 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.
> It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence.
This is an incredibly insightful point.