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The Way of Chinese Language

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Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#41

Post by gok »

powerapple wrote: post #29
chao- wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

Pingin "X" is the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative (ɕ in IPA). It's basically just "sh" with your lips spread wider.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#42

Post by chao- »

powerapple wrote: post #29
chao- wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

>'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'.

That is basically what I was trying to relay: That the choices of letters were picked to represent something "different but close enough", borrowed from alternative Anglicizations that were close at hand.

>Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly.

I never had a problem differentiating between the 'q' and 'ch' sounds in Mandarin, and I do not think I am uniquely gifted. Listening to a native speaker pronounce Chongqing for the first time made it immediately obvious. I remember struggling a bit with pronouncing 'zh-' but not because I couldn't hear a difference, it just took a little time. And even despite taking a while to learn the pronunciation, I never struggled in hearing the difference between zhuan and juan.

One doesn't hear letters (or characters for that matter), instead one hears articulations, diphthong, glottal-stops and so forth. I guess you could try to mediate what you hear through an unrelated written language, but that seems like counter-productive extra effort.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#43

Post by intertextuality »

flomble wrote: post #40
intertextuality wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages. Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept does…

Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person". You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書). Sure,…

The difference is in Korean or Chinese you need to do it with all nouns that you're counting, unlike English which only reserves it for measuring mass nouns or clarifying between nouns, etc. They way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#44

Post by yaowenjiaozi »

namelosw wrote: post #23
theli0nheart wrote: post #5

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…

While 'naive' translates to 天真, 天真 doesn't just mean naive. Baidu Baike [1] lists three meanings. Going by the cited references, > is the oldest and my guess is "真者，故受於天也，自然不可易也。故圣人法天贵真，不拘於俗" is the etymology of 天真.

[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%A9%E7%9C%9F/1419

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#45

Post by bayesian_horse »

adrianN wrote: post #38
bayesian_horse wrote: post #31

One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app) The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes. This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI…

In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper di…

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently?

I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding.

I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#46

Post by adrianN »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #45
adrianN wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper di…

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

I can read about 6000 Japanese words. I can read NHK News articles with moderate effort if I have access to a dictionary. I'm not sure how many characters that is and I would be hard pressed to give meanings or complete lists of pronunciations for most characters in the words I recognize. Most sources I've read recommend against the study of characters in isolation. Some recommend ignoring characters completely until you're somewhat fluent, but I prefer reading real texts for self-study over working through textbooks.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#47

Post by chao- »

intertextuality wrote: post #33
chao- wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…

Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages. Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept does…

I agree that they are ultimately separate and differentiable in a grammatic sense. Mostly I was taking issue with the sentiment in the GP's summary: "Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English ... [doesn't] even have constructs for, like ... counting words." rather than the linguistic specifics.

I firmly feel that, despite being distinct from measure words, they are close enough to English concepts that it isn't really hard to relate to and learn. Gendered inflections are far more inaccessible to me as a native English speaker than counters ever were!

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#48

Post by thaumasiotes »

intertextuality wrote: post #43
flomble wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person". You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書). Sure,…

The difference is in Korean or Chinese you need to do it with all nouns that you're counting, unlike English which only reserves it for measuring mass nouns or clarifying between nouns, etc. They way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

> The way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

That would be a good argument, except that the way they function isn't different.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#49

Post by thaumasiotes »

gok wrote: post #41
powerapple wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

Pingin "X" is the voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative (ɕ in IPA). It's basically just "sh" with your lips spread wider.

More accurately, it is the English "sh" if you pronounced it with the middle of your tongue rather than the tip.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#50

Post by bayesian_horse »

adrianN wrote: post #46
bayesian_horse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

I can read about 6000 Japanese words. I can read NHK News articles with moderate effort if I have access to a dictionary. I'm not sure how many characters that is and I would be hard pressed to give meanings or complete lists of pronunciations for most characters in the words I recognize. Most sources I've read recommend against the study of characters in isolation. Some recommend ignoring characters completely until…

For Japanese, I think that is good advice, especially because the characters often have Japanese or japanized pronounciations and are assisted by Hiragana.

In Chinese, writing characters, and knowing their meaning helps a lot more, I guess.

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