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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#271

Post by cryptonector »

1659447091 wrote: post #171
arcticfox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…

> Here in Texas ... I may be way off here, and happy to be corrected. My experience is Texas-Spanish is difficult to use in Spain, and would guess the inverse is true. Which I would deduce making Portuguese-Spanish a non-starter in the state. I know a very limited amount from having grown up and played soccer in the "Mexican" rec leagues in Tx. While traveling to Spain, English is perfectly fine in cities. But days t…

Spain Spanish and Spanish are the same language with very different vocabulary.

(Well, not quite, because Spain Spanish has loismo and what not that Spanish almost certainly does not, and there's other variations as well, like Argentine Spanish having very different imperatives, Argentine and Colombian voceo vs. tuteo everywhere else, etc.)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#272

Post by mixmastamyk »

qalmakka wrote: post #168
arcticfox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…

I am Italian and whenever I go to Spain I usually don't really need to speak English because the languages are close enough that you can go by by just knowing a handful of basic words (and the Spaniards I meet usually prefer it that way). This is both a blessing and a curse; all Italians I met living in Spain (and viceversa, all Spanish-speakers I met in Italy) tend to have a hard time learning the other language "pr…

The big difference between ES and PT is the accent/pronunciation of letters and matching words. Secondarily, is the differing vocabulary. But a lot of these are still understood as archaic/uncommon alternative words.

(see shoen's post below.)

So, if you learn the accent of the other language, all of a sudden a large portion of the language is unlocked. This happened to me, almost like a light switch.

I don't have a lot of experience with Italian but it seems like the pronunciation is closer to Spanish.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#273

Post by XajniN »

ii41 wrote: post #172
gpvos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite. I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. A…

Serbo-Croatian is a special case. We all know that we speak the same language, but ‘the others’ are naming it wrongly.

Also, Slavic languages are very difficult for non-Slavs to learn, but very easy for other Slavs. And many are mutually intelligible.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#274

Post by XajniN »

simiones wrote: post #214
jameshart wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)

The use of 2nd is a better example of the limitations of this system. The reality of written Standard Chinese is that you'd use "2nd" to write both "second", but also "deuxieme", instead of writing "2eme".

Those are language-specific, the common way to write an ordinal (outside of English) is with a dot - 2. = 2nd.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#275

Post by latentsea »

fenomas wrote: post #228
latentsea wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of which native speakers have no trouble distinguishing between in conversation when there are no Kanji anywhere. It's the same with homophones in any language, usually the context makes it clear because the alternatives don't fit. The homophones in Japanese and Korean pretty much all come from the vocabulary they share with Chinese which makes up the bulk of the vocabulary for both those languages. One doesn't u…

> It's the same with homophones in any language, It really isn't. In conversation fluent JP speakers tend to avoid compounds that would be ambiguous, or add distinguishers like "学校の校歌". Honestly, try converting a paragraph of text from a newspaper to all kana, and having a native speaker read it.

Try have them be educated in a kana only system and then have them try read it. They'd probably do just fine. You'd expect anything you've spend a decade doing to be easier than the thing you've spent much less time doing.

かんちょうが かんちょうで かんちょうに かんちょう された。 Is probably a sentence that definitely requires Kanji to understand the precise meaning given how many homophones かんちょう has, but it's a toy example.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#276

Post by latentsea »

fenomas wrote: post #247
latentsea wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes furigana can be used artistically,sure, but that's the exception to the rule and it's by and large a reading aide in the vast majority of cases, and the inclusion of it in novels aimed at adults indicates that without it the author expects a certain percentage of readers may struggle with how to read the Kanji otherwise. Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji ma…

> Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji This just isn't true. Even most native JP speakers agree that kanji are oppressively hard to learn and remember, so if it were feasible to get by with kana alone, then at least some native speakers would do it in some contexts. But outside of language l…

So how are homophones in Japanese understood when expressed verbally?

How much trouble do you actually have with them?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#277

Post by latentsea »

vunderba wrote: post #260
latentsea wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to guess the meaning of new words was neat earlier on in the Japanese journey, but in the end the problem of "gah but the how hell do you actually read this?" was a greater detriment than that was a benefit. In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially wh…

I vastly prefer the ability to potentially infer the rough meaning of an unrecognized word, then the ability to pronounce it. As an ESL CELTA certified teacher for years, their rubric also seems to back this up in order of relative importance: it's meaning, then form, then finally pronunciation.

I don't know if a rubric for English is as applicable to Japanese.

You're just trading one set of problems for another. Those aren't even problems English has.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#278

Post by cynicalpeace »

gs17 wrote: post #262
cynicalpeace wrote: post #45

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…

> Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly. 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 differentl…

Pinyin

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#279

Post by luyu_wu »

MrDresden wrote: post #217

I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english. Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.

To some degree yes, but mostly because Cixin Liu is just an incredibly unique writer in style!

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#280

Post by jhanschoo »

gpvos wrote: post #53
noirdujour wrote: post #42

The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

They are different languages in the sense that they are not mutually intelligible, but the prestige of Mandarin is not a CCP one. Mandarin as it evolved has always been the language of government and of the plains. Other Sinitic languages routinely borrow readings and terms from Mandarin. There's more that I want to say about the topic, but it's less relevant.
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