261–270 of 312 posts
I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.
I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a n…
Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differently".
If I don't know a character, the phonetic radicals might let me guess close but not correctly or it might not have anything in common. The semantic radicals are a little better IMO, but not enough to guess more than the category something might be in sometimes. I'm not sure if the rules are just full of exceptions or if it's simply change over the past millennia, but it means rote learning has been the only way for me to learn hanzi.
Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language. And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'. The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always s…
Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.
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As someone who isn't even fluent in Japanese, I find it easier to read text with Kanji (in contexts where I am relatively fluent) than without. Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.
This is because this is how you've trained your brain to process Japanese. Korean includes white space for this reason, and since everyone gets used to reading it with no Hanja, they don't find it awkward. So, it's perfectly possible to ditch Kanji and add spaces and have a way more accessible language.
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But the comparison was to Scots, which is (sometimes, not universally) considered a dialect of English rather than a separate language, but is hard for standard English speakers to understand. It's not just English with a Scottish accent. I have no idea how Portuguese feels to Spanish speakers or vice versa, but here's an example of modern Scots from Wikipedia. I'm curious how it compares. (Edit: And here's a spoken…
As a native speaker of English and having conversational ability in Spanish I would describe both Scots and Portuguese as separate languages. Portuguese feels like it has as much in common with Spanish as Italian or French to me, and I can't remotely carry on a conversation in Portuguese. (Or Scots really, though with the somewhat mutual intelligibility I can speak English or Spanish and maybe that's workable, but I'…
I'm a fluent second-language Spanish speaker and have had a lot of success communicating with native Portuguese speakers, but only Portugal Portuguese and various African Portugueses. I can't understand Brazilian Portuguese at all.
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This is because this is how you've trained your brain to process Japanese. Korean includes white space for this reason, and since everyone gets used to reading it with no Hanja, they don't find it awkward. So, it's perfectly possible to ditch Kanji and add spaces and have a way more accessible language.
That doesn't solve the homophone issue though.
ex) 시간 (時間)
compared to furigana (note that its not even possible to display the phonetic hiragana): 第二巻
younger generation are no longer learning Chinese so more English/European loan words are directly used which ironically fixes the issue.
it is impossible to converse in Korean without using English/European loan words
ex) 아이러니 (irony)
This allows new ideas/concepts to quickly disseminate in the collective Korean psyche. Constantly new words are being invented, slangs used by primary/middle school are unknowable.
Abbreviation/concat combos to create totally new words:
ex) 씹상타치 (way **ing above average) also written as ㅆㅅㅌㅊ (wfaa) literally means
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I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
> What did they do in 950AD? An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China. The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms: 1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun'). 2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó This form approximate…
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> Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults? As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
Sounds like an education problem. Traditional Chinese, which is the defacto language used in Taiwan doesn't even have any comparable phonetic alphabet (beyond a phonetic pronunciation alphabet in the form of bopomofo) such as hiragana and katakana. It's effectively "all kanji" as it were, and yet Taiwan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and I never met any Taiwanese when I lived there (for years) th…
Japanese has onyomi and kunyomi. The onyomi also come from different periods in Chinese so there's multiple onyomi for most Kanji.
Then you get two Kanji words that come in all varieties. Most are onyomi + onyomi, but you get some that are onyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + onyomi.
There's also not really any solid rules to it, and when there are, there are plenty of exceptions.
It's a real nightmare of a system. A fun one though.
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There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of peop…
I can accept ふいんき as an exception, but for 原因 that's just a consequence of the rules for how to pronounce ん, which depends on the surrounding sounds (it's not quite い either). I wouldn't really call it an exception. Consider 一千円, 禁煙 etc all of which are pronounced like that.