[HN Gopher] What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you'r...
___________________________________________________________________
What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or
Japan (2009)
Author : krebs_liebhaber
Score : 170 points
Date : 2020-10-13 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pagef30.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pagef30.com)
| interestica wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was
| created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because
| of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the
| Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn
| - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the
| symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know
| what you're saying.
|
| Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The
| letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the
| speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically
| modified to indicate phonetic features"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
| em-bee wrote:
| i learned hangul characters by reading street signs while
| travelling through south korea. most signs were both in hangul
| and latin characters.
|
| then i found a keyboard typing practice program where i patched
| the letter images and replaced them with the appropriate hangul
| character parts, to practice typing.
|
| this skill came in handy when i needed to write down some
| korean words when hearing them.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (hunminjeongeum) is what the King
| Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal,
| thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King
| because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was
| Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the
| "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that
| didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle
| Korean despite of its failure.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun
| Angeo34 wrote:
| The article starts by saying that Japanese and Korean are
| unrelated to Chinese but two sentences later says that they could
| be related.
|
| Articles like that should literally just be thrown in the bin.
| ilamont wrote:
| _but 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 Guo ) as traditional
| forms. Maybe someone knows the history?
|
| Also, regarding this statement:
|
| _Tai (Korea /Taiwan) Tai (Japan/China)_
|
| In Taiwan, the latter form of _tai_ (Tai ) is used 99% of the
| time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (Tai )
| AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations
| (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money.
| Street signs for famous buildings all use Tai , i.e. Tai Bei 101,
| Tai Bei Song Shan Ji Chang , etc.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Simplified forms have been common in handwriting for centuries.
| Korean hanja was also simplified in handwriting when it was in
| use, even though it never got standardized. The "adoption" thus
| mostly means the standardization of such established glyphs
| even in print. (This also partly explains why the second reform
| in the mainland China [1] wasn't received well and retracted at
| the end.)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
| maple3142 wrote:
| 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 understand more things about a
| sentence by desu nai ka... Also, can read some katakana words if
| it is originated from English.
|
| Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words:
| Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence
| structures that are similar. Such as ...mo...nai and ...Ye ...Mei
| ... It is easy to find that Xun Du mi words have similar
| pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more
| similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin.
|
| IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read
| Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other
| people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in
| Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two
| languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary
| present in English_
|
| This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive
| immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese
| descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the
| case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners
| brought their language, mixed it with the local language and
| evolved a new one out of that.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I'm afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The
| development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi
| immigration by several centuries at least. The original
| immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with
| them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of
| Chinese writing by Japan's learned elites. Any introduction to
| Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.
| kazinator wrote:
| I'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which
| are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks
| about any writing system at all, let alone any specific
| timeline regarding the development of literacy.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Even without attributing the Chinese writing system to the
| immigrants from China, your post above does not contribute
| to the discussion. Japanese is genetically unrelated to
| Chinese and typologically different from it. What the Yayoi
| immigrants from the mainland originally brought with them
| bore no resemblance to the Chinese language. That the
| Japanese were able to use Chinese words and Chinese
| characters for their own purposes and some similarities
| between the two languages arose as the OP mentions, has
| absolutely nothing to do with pre-Proto-Japonic speakers
| coming from the mainland. All that meaningful Chinese-
| Japanese interaction happened many centuries later.
| dfalzone wrote:
| Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic
| theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that
| the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not
| at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago
| could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother
| to verify first.
|
| I guess at this point similarities between the two languages
| are assumed to be a result of regional influence?
| eindiran wrote:
| Many mainstream linguists have been against the hypothesis
| since the 1950s, but there are still plenty of linguists who
| contend that the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian families form
| a family; a smaller number have arguments in support of the
| stronger claim that the Koreanic, Ainu and Japanese-Ryukyuan
| languages are connected as well. See eg: [0] Vovin set out to
| demonstrate that the latter, stronger claim was true and
| ended up writing this: [1]
|
| Arguably, the biggest blow struck to the hypothesis in the
| last 15-20 years came when Vovin, previously a supporter of
| the hypothesis, wrote "The end of the Altaic controversy"[2].
| Among the more notable arguments in it is that the non-
| traditional methods[3] used to argue that Altaic is a family
| are rejected by traditional comparative linguistics because
| they overweight lexical comparisons.
|
| This was a rather prescient point, as some of the methods
| that have developed since then that have been used to argue
| in favor of the Altaic hypothesis suffer from this problem
| quite badly; this is perhaps especially true of the Bayesian
| phylogenetic inference, sometimes called Bayesian
| phylolinguistics when applied to historical linguistics. With
| this technique, used in eg [0], it is pretty hard to argue
| that this method wouldn't overweight cognates and loan words
| gained through contact unless you _specifically control for
| that_ , which will cause you to end up erroneously marking
| sprachbunds as true families.
|
| See [4] for another usage of the technique, this time to
| support the Dravidian family, which is already very very well
| support by traditional comparative methods.
|
| All of this ultimately points to what I think is the real
| answer to the issue; outside of some arguments about
| archaeology that I don't have enough background to evaluate
| [5], most of the shared bits (shared pronouns, lexical stuff)
| between the languages here exist because of contact.
|
| The languages here, if they belong grouped at all, should be
| grouped as a sprachbund, not as a family. The possibility
| that there is a true family with "micro-Altaic" is small, but
| I think it is still a much greater possibility than the
| "strong" hypothesis (w/ Japanese, Korean, etc). This paper
| [6] has a very cool approach to evaluating the weaker form of
| the hypothesis that I think most HN readers would find
| interesting.
|
| So to answer your question, yes, I believe your assessment is
| correct, and mainstream historical linguistics does as well.
| But I wouldn't go so far as to say there are any nails in the
| Altaic hypothesis' coffin just yet.
|
| [0] https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185
|
| [1] https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMON
| STR...
|
| [2] https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_co
| ntr...
|
| [3] "non-traditional" = anything outside the comparative
| method
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics). See
| eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_
| is_...
|
| [4] https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/
| fil...
|
| [5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-
| human-s...
|
| [6] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf
| garmaine wrote:
| The Altaic theory isn't necessary to postulate a connection
| between Japanese and Korean. It's known that genetically the
| Japanese population was seeded by Korean settlers which largely
| displaced the native Ainu populations. Japanese is likely a
| descendent of the language spoken by these colonists from the
| Korean peninsula.
|
| The two languages are very divergent, and the usual mechanisms
| for classifying languages are difficult to apply because the
| dominant Chinese influence came to each separately after they
| diverged.
| danans wrote:
| > It's known that genetically the Japanese population was
| seeded by Korean settlers which largely displaced the native
| Ainu populations
|
| It's even more complicated than that. In addition to the Ainu
| there were the Jomon people, a non-agricultural but
| nonetheless settled society who are believed to be the first
| people in the world to use pottery - which is surprising for
| a non-agricultural people.
|
| They might in turn have been an offshoot of the first
| migration of modern humans out of Africa along the south
| coast of Asia, whose haplotypes [1] occur today at some of
| the highest frequences in Japan and as far north as Mongolia
| and as far south as Australia. Some sub-branches spread west
| all the way to the edge of Europe.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M_(mtDNA)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I thought the latest thinking was that the modern day Ainu
| are descendants of the Jomon population.
| danans wrote:
| I think the latest thinking is that all people of Japan
| to varying degrees are descended from the Jomon people
| along with other populations migrating from mainland Asia
| over millennia.
|
| This pattern - early hunter gatherer populations forming
| the substratum that later mixed with larger migrations of
| agricultural populations - is not unique to Japan.
|
| It's quite similar to what you find in the paleogenetics
| and history of most regions of the world, including
| Europe and South Asia.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My understanding of more recent European population
| studies is that the genetic signature of the pre-agrarian
| hunter gatherers is actually quite low. In general they
| were displaced rather than merged. Or their numbers were
| so low and diffuse that their contribution was little.
| Which makes sense when you consider population densities
| possible/typical in a hunter gatherer vs agrarian
| lifestyles.
|
| We're back to population migration / replacement theories
| being ascendant rather than the situation 30 years ago
| when cultural diffusion theories were preferred.
| danans wrote:
| 10% of the average Briton's ancestry (for those without
| recently migrated ancestors) is attributable to West
| European Mesolithic hunter gathers. That's a pretty
| significant chunk, suggesting both migration and mixture
| happened, and not diffusion or replacement.
|
| From https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/origins-
| evolution...
|
| "When we look at genetic variation in modern British
| people today, we find that - for those who do not have a
| recent history of migration - around 10% of their
| ancestry can be attributed to the ancient European
| population to which Cheddar Man belonged. This group is
| referred to as the western European Mesolithic hunter-
| gatherers. However, this ancestry does not relate
| specifically to Cheddar Man or the Mesolithic population
| of Britain. Well after Cheddar Man's death, two large-
| scale prehistoric migrations into Britain produced
| significant population turnovers13. Both of these
| migrations into Britain represented westward extensions
| of population movements across Europe10-12. In both
| cases, these migrating populations intermixed with local
| people who carried western European Mesolithic hunter-
| gatherer ancestry, as they moved across Europe. When
| these populations arrived in Britain they already had
| some hunter-gatherer ancestry derived from this mixing
| with local populations. Therefore the majority of western
| European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers ancestry that we see
| in modern British people probably originates from
| populations who lived all over Europe during the
| Mesolithic, which was carried into Britain by these later
| migrations."
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| While a relationship between Japan and certain lost languages
| of the Korean peninsula is agreed upon by nearly all
| scholars, that still doesn't necessarily mean that Japanese
| and Korean are related. One recent school of thought, for
| example, is that pre-Proto-Japanese entered the Korean
| peninsula from mainland China (Shandong province) while
| Korean came down from the north, so they would not be
| genetically related in spite of being neighbours.
| garmaine wrote:
| I was referring to human genetics.
| stanrivers wrote:
| Thank you for this; I wish we could be friends
| stanrivers wrote:
| Ok - this chain is interesting; didn't have this background;
| I deserve the downvote. Thanks for context... will go read
| some more
| naniwaduni wrote:
| For an amateur's blog post in 2009 to call Altaic theory utter
| horseshit would been rather hubristic to begin with, and
| moreover, not even the point. The Altaic hypotheses were
| higher-profile proposals that happened to include common origin
| for Japanese and Korean. Even dismissing the former, the latter
| is not exactly out of consideration.
|
| And, as the post points out, the whole line of argument is a
| curiosity that has little concrete bearing on the fact that the
| two are _very similar_ from a learner 's perspective.
| ms1234rth wrote:
| If you know Turkish (or any Central Asian language barring
| Tajik[not familiar with Persian adjacent languages]), learning
| Japanese is a breeze because you can translate a Turkish text
| into Japanese word for word and out comes a perfectly constructed
| Japanese text. Obviously, it works in the other direction as
| well.
|
| I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having
| hell of a time untill I came across a Japanese textbook written
| in Turkish.
|
| If you are from Central Asia, you can leverage both of your
| languages (native Central Asian & Russian) for learning English.
| It's better to learn English through Russian untill it's time to
| learn the English tense system at which point you can swith back
| to your native Central Asian as Russian is not very amenable for
| learning the English tense system whereas the tenses(rather
| aspects?) of C.A. languages line up with that of English in
| almost one to one manner. Thinking about the English tenses
| through the "Russian mind" was a nightmare untill I realized I
| already know the tenses through my native Kazakh.
|
| Mathematicians never shy away from throwing everything at their
| disposal at a problem. Acting like them speeds up language
| acquisition process considerably.
| winter_blue wrote:
| How close are Turkish and Japanese? I know there is a proposed
| "Altaic language family"[1], but I'd love to hear the
| perspective of someone who actually knows two such languages.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
| darkhorn wrote:
| Vowel harmony, no genders, no plurals, agglutinative etc are
| similar.
|
| The only thing you need to learn is new words. The
| grammatical structure is same. Translation between Indo-
| European and Altaic is very hard. Translation beween Altaic
| languages is very easy.
| stanrivers wrote:
| 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 the Chinese
| students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and
| Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb )
| whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)
|
| Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance
| language.
|
| The added benefit is that Chinese isn't a dead language.
|
| Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful
| languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical
| language), but China has been an influence in the region for so
| long they can't have help absorbing and using pieces of the
| Chinese languages.
|
| Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese
| words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese
| thousands of years ago.
|
| The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have
| been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help
| triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like
| (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect
| etc)!
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese
| students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and
| Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb )
| whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)
|
| I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language
| is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while
| vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and
| refined consistently over many years. All of these become
| harder the further the target language is from the ones you
| already know. Would French really be significantly harder to
| learn if they said ' _Je le ballon frappe_ '?.
|
| I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of
| languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms).
| Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence
| makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to
| structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know
| what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you
| need to listen and read for.
|
| Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is
| annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a
| sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context
| you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are
| but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most
| important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the
| least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the
| highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the
| same meaning but was more common, the author would be more
| likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the
| words, you need the niche words too.
| laurieg wrote:
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| 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.
| bernulli wrote:
| 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 overhead.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| So learn it. You'll get to practice it with every sentence
| you ever use.
|
| Conversely, you'll only use ' _ballon_ ' when you take
| about un ballon. I hope that's frequently enough for you to
| remember the word & its gender. At least it looks like the
| word ' _ball_ ', something you don't get with Vietnamese's
| ' _bong_ ' or Chinese's 'Qiu [1]'
|
| And you'll still get funny looks if you say you're getting
| ready to go to the New Year's ballon, because substitutions
| fail with homonyms in both directions. And you'll have to
| learn and relearn about ten thousand of these
| substitutions.
|
| [1]maybe?
| numpad0 wrote:
| More like building a completely different persona for each
| family of languages. "Learn a bunch of substitutions"
| approach only goes so far, your language specific part of
| identity must be separated at where thought processes for
| languages diverge and necessary new parts must be built.
|
| Philosophers deny linguistic determinism(a notion that
| language sets the ceiling for thoughts) but that's just
| talking Turing Completeness.
| kwillets wrote:
| Just learning the words sounds great until you find out that
| Korean is agglutinative, and Koreans don't even agree on
| where the word boundaries are.
| chillacy wrote:
| I think you're hinting at the fact that all language
| acquisition ultimately boils down to vocab acquisition for
| the long tail to mastery.
|
| As for why people complain about vocab, it's probably because
| the dropout rate for language learning is huge (look at the
| completion rates on duolingo or popularity of beginner
| resources vs intermmediate vs advanced). By the numbers I
| suspect most learners are struggling with grammar, and most
| will drop out before "finishing" with grammar and being left
| with the long tail of vocab.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| > The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers
| have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help
| triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like
| (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect
| etc)!
|
| Modern Korean isn't a tonal language tho, the length of the
| vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Modern Korean alone definitely isn't _sufficient_ to
| reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add
| some information that isn 't preserved in other branches.
| stanrivers wrote:
| 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 saying that Korean is another super rare but fun random
| fact that I have heard of being used at least once in
| combination with ancient Chinese poems, to guess at the old
| Chinese pronunciation.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Chinese itself wasn't much of a tonal language until a little
| more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones
| emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid
| homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old
| final consonants were lost.
| throwaway66554 wrote:
| >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 same Chinese letters, and have
| very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent.
|
| I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then
| Chinese (what I did).
|
| Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean,
| then Chinese (what I did).
|
| Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I
| find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when
| visiting Japan in recent years.
|
| What's your rationale for this ordering?
| throwaway66554 wrote:
| Because when you learn Japanese, you have to learn kanji,
| the more traditional strokes (non-simplified), both
| Japanese and Chinese sounds, and the grammar is closer to
| Korean (and closer pronunciation for a lot of words).
|
| So, it's better to learn Japanese, quickly pick up Korean,
| then learn Chinese.
|
| Chinese last since you have to learn simplified characters,
| the grammar is different, tonality is quite different, etc.
| z2 wrote:
| 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 Chinese, learning Japanese and its own simplified
| characters (shinjitai) was a breeze compared with my
| classmates who struggled especially with kanji, and also
| pronunciation. Until I compare hours with a native
| Japanese speaker learning Chinese, it's hard to tell if
| learning Japanese, then Chinese would have been easier or
| not.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > kanji, the traditional strokes (non-simplified)
|
| Uh, both Japan and Chinese use _different_ simplified
| glyphs. And they overlap a lot because they are different
| standardizations of handwritten glyphs in the bigger
| Sinosphere. I would be surprised if you indeed learned
| the traditional characters while learning Japanese.
| throwaway66554 wrote:
| >Uh, both Japan and Chinese use different simplified
| glyphs.
|
| Wrong. Though there are divergences, Chinese in mainland
| China use _simplified Chinese characters_ (https://en.m.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_character...).
|
| Kanji is more closely related to the traditional Chinese
| characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Local_dev
| elopments_and_d...) than the mainland simplification.
|
| >I would be surprised if you indeed learned the
| traditional characters while learning Japanese.
|
| Kanji is closer related, or exactly the same as
| traditional Chinese characters (used in HK, Taiwan, etc.)
| than simplified.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| My understanding of Chinese (the language) is limited,
| but having learned Hanja (essentially traditional one)
| first then learned Japanese later the divergence was
| already significant. Or, more quantitatively, the Joyo
| Kanji has 364 simplified characters out of 2,136 (~17%)
| [1] while the mainland China simplified probably about
| 2,000 out of 7,000 common characters (~28%) [2]. This
| divergence is not the biggest deal, but still big enough
| to refute the claim that Japanese is easier to learn
| because it's "non-simplified" (there may be other valid
| reasons though).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai#Simplificatio
| ns_in_J...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_char
| acters#...
| throwaway66554 wrote:
| >Or, more quantitatively, the Joyo Kanji has 364
| simplified characters out of 2,136 (~17%) [1] while the
| mainland China simplified probably about 2,000 out of
| 7,000 common characters (~28%) [2].
|
| It's 17% and 28%, but much, much higher for the most
| commonly used characters, which is where the divergence
| between simplified and traditional grows even more.
|
| >This divergence is not the biggest deal, but still big
| enough to refute the claim that Japanese is easier to
| learn because it's "non-simplified" (there may be other
| valid reasons though).
|
| I didn't make that claim. Maybe your talking about
| another thread?
|
| It's not that it's easier to learn, it's that the path of
| going Japanese -> Korean -> Chinese is the easier, most
| logical path. The diverging simplified Chinese standard
| characters being a large reason behind that.
| lhorie wrote:
| You can definitely get a deeper appreciation of a language
| and get extra decoding tools for learning related languages
| when you learn about the history and etymology of words.
|
| As a romance language speaker, knowing about greek and latin
| particles helped me greatly in learning english of all
| languages, just because of the sheer amount of appropriations
| english does.
|
| Something that sticks with me from my early japanese learning
| after all these years is that, for example, "a" (japanese
| "a") is a stylization of "An " (pronounced "an"). This helps
| make an association similar to how some kids books overlay
| hiragana over pictures of things that start with that letter,
| e.g. overlaying "i" (i) around a strawberry (ichigo). There
| are tons of similar examples in both japanese and chinese
| (pronunciation prefixes being a common tool used by chinese
| learners)
| 49531 wrote:
| That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few
| words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser,
| but knowing one gives little insight into the other.
| kazinator wrote:
| Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're
| learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's
| just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda
| speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust".
|
| Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by
| the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the
| end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending
| particle like yo. E.g. "bakadayoSi ha". Sometimes that can be
| because the speaker realizes mid-sentence that it requires a
| topic to be clear, and you can tell when this is the case when
| the topic is preceded by a pause. But it has a nuance of its
| own, so it is used deliberately, even in writing.
| jcranmer wrote:
| "Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-
| object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV
| order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English
| even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.
| z2 wrote:
| 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 Spanish will
| let you appreciate the similarities with English, but you'd
| still need to delve into historical Spanish (or French) to
| really see the connections.
|
| Chinese is a pretty old and continuous language, so at the
| advanced level, learners could delve into Classical Chinese,
| which is truly analogous to Latin, and was also a dominant
| lingua franca in written form across East Asia. Pieces of
| Classical Chinese are 'alive' in everyday use, kind of like how
| Latin is 'alive' in the Romance languages through general and
| obvious similarities, or specific vocabulary, (e.g. "quid pro
| quo", "ad hominem"). But Classical Chinese is radically
| different from any dialect of today's vernacular Chinese.
|
| In any case, the similarities and overlap definitely make
| learning between CJK(V) easier!
| stanrivers wrote:
| 100% agree with this post, which I tried to get at saying
| that Korean and Japanese are distinct. Apologies for not
| making that clear. Your post is great to clarify this all
| more specifically.
|
| The cultural side of things definitely requires a lot of
| time. And that's fun.
|
| What also takes time is learned how ideas are shared. Not
| just grammar, but which version of the multiple correct
| grammar options that is more common. How are paragraphs
| constructed? What is usually shared first in an idea or
| argument versus the end?
|
| You can have someone with completely correct grammar and
| pronunciation that sounds odd to a native speak because the
| cultural / idea organization is not "native".
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations
| of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters
| would sound like
|
| That is rather an exaggeration. Korean and Japanese can be used
| as guides for Middle Chinese pronunciation, but they aren't all
| that useful compared to using China's own rhyme tables and
| running the comparative method on the Chinese dialects. For
| stages of Chinese before Middle Chinese, neither Korean nor
| Japanese are useful at all.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a
| Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn't a
| dead language.
|
| As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so
| because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once
| you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a
| valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and
| Korean.
| stanrivers wrote:
| Yes - you should learned the language that has meaning to
| your life. If you don't have a reason to use the language you
| will forget it all.
|
| And agreed - once you get into more "college level or
| technical" Korean for lack of a better word, knowing the
| hanja/ Chinese characters makes vocab acquisition easier.
| tabtab wrote:
| My spouse is Chinese and I tried to learn Chinese for obvious
| reasons. However, they speak multiple dialects in practice such
| that it's hard to focus, and there are limited training
| materials for some of the dialects. Generally there is
| Cantonese, Mandarin, and their local dialect, which is what
| they use most often.
| moogleii wrote:
| I came across this quote from the Mandarin wiki:
|
| > The Chinese have different languages in different
| provinces, to such an extent that they cannot understand each
| other.... [They] also have another language which is like a
| universal and common language; this is the official language
| of the mandarins and of the court; it is among them like
| Latin among ourselves.... Two of our fathers [Michele
| Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci] have been learning this mandarin
| language... -- Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y
| progresso de la Compania de Jesus en las Indias Orientales,
| I:28 (1542-1564)
| bllguo wrote:
| it's true but also largely moot. mandarin is enough, nearly
| everyone speaks it.
| baobrain wrote:
| 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.
| dumb1224 wrote:
| > Someone from Shanghai will be able to speak to someone
| in Chengdu with their own dialect, just slower.
|
| This is definitely not true (if they were to use their
| own dialect).
|
| I'm from the same region surrounding Shanghai and
| although there are some intelligibility between dialects,
| it is hard if not completely impossible to have a
| conversation even between people from adjacent towns. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Chinese
|
| I'm a bit surprised about your claim. Anyone from China
| with a sense of the dialects of the south would know
| this.
| foysavas wrote:
| Mandarin speakers ability to understand slowed down
| Shanghainese is likely a recent development. This is
| because much of traditional Shanghainese diction,
| grammar, and even pronunciation has been reduced or
| morphed to better suit the newer generations of speakers
| whose principal language is Mandarin.
| ginko wrote:
| The claim may be misguided or wrong perhaps, but how is
| it Western-centric?
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.org/sentences/wuu/492871.mp3
|
| 8. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/496402.mp3
|
| 9. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/485676.mp3
|
| 10. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/wuu/488252.mp3
|
| They're not especially slow, but you can replay them as
| often as you want or even slow them down, so I think it
| should be easier than for someone in Chengdu trying to
| understand a Shanghainese speaker in person.
|
| For comparison, here are the Mandarin equivalents of
| those sentences, pronounced by the same speaker:
|
| 1. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332870.mp3
|
| 2. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332436.mp3
|
| 3. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332568.mp3
|
| 4. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333012.mp3
|
| 5. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333070.mp3
|
| 6. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333151.mp3
|
| 7. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333392.mp3
|
| 8. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/333584.mp3
|
| 9. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332549.mp3
|
| 10. https://audio.tatoeba.org/sentences/cmn/332788.mp3
|
| And here they're written down, together with translations
| into various other languages:
|
| 1. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488406
|
| 2. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485590
|
| 3. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485698
|
| 4. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488621
|
| 5. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/489046
|
| 6. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/489736
|
| 7. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/492871
|
| 8. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/496402
|
| 9. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/485676
|
| 10. https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/show/488252
|
| If you want some more examples, this search returns a few
| hundred: https://tatoeba.org/cmn/sentences/search?query=&
| from=wuu&to=...
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Take Cantonese (or heck, Teochew or Hakka). You really
| think this language is reasonably mutually intelligible
| with Mandarin? Or Shanghainese?
|
| I'm a (non-native, formerly fluent but now pretty poor)
| Cantonese speaker and I'd describe the difference between
| Cantonese and Mandarin as roughly the difference between
| Portuguese and Romanian. Sure, they're both romance
| languages, and maybe with a lot of work and hand-waving
| and drawing characters on your hands with your fingers
| you can get your point across to someone who speaks the
| other language, but in no way would I call them mutually
| intelligible, even by talking "slower".
|
| Cantonese and Mandarin have very different pronunciation,
| vocabulary, and even grammar for common cases. In fact
| there are extremely common words in Cantonese for which
| there is _no modern chinese character_ : instead roman
| words or even single letters (like "D") are substituted
| in comic strips etc. So you can't even write them down in
| Chinese for a Mandarin speaker to puzzle through with a
| dictionary.
|
| I'd say that your perception of these things as "western
| centric" -- they are not at all -- strikes me as very
| "northern Chinese centric" view of China. :-)
| andi999 wrote:
| Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if
| you found a solution.
| yorwba wrote:
| The English and Chinese Wikipedia articles about the
| dialect will usually have at least some useful information
| e.g. about the phonology and maybe links to other
| resources.
|
| You can also try Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki
| /Wiktionary:About_Chinese#Abou...
|
| https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ has IPA
| pronunciations for single characters across many different
| dialects.
|
| https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ may have some recorded
| vocabulary.
|
| https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime has input
| methods for many dialects that can also be abused as a
| dictionary (associating romanization with Chinese
| characters you can look up).
|
| https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-
| k... may have flashcards if you're lucky.
|
| You'll probably also want to make your own flashcards.
| https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump is helpful for
| getting voice messages out of WeChat.
|
| If you want to practice by passive listening, you can try
| http://phonemica.net/ , searching on https://youku.com/ or
| check whether there's a local TV station that has programs
| in dialect.
|
| Reading material will be almost impossible to find, but
| maybe there's a bible translation from the 19th century or
| something.
|
| Also check whether there's a local language preservation
| group.
|
| Finally, https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ is supposed make a lot
| of material available to the public soonish (right now I
| get a certificate error in Firefox, but you can see the
| landing page in a less strict browser).
| yomly wrote:
| Your spouse must be fairly old school to be using a dialect
| that isn't mando/canto...
|
| Most millennials I know from mainland china and even
| Malaysia/Singapore will speak putonghua with their
| parents/family now. Ofc people from Sichuan and Shanghai love
| to preserve their dialect. Plus you got the cantos and
| hokkien/teochew/hakka and even changsharen.
|
| In any case, my recommendation would be to stay with Mandarin
| and go deep on it. Learning a dialect afterwards is quite
| straightforward and you can be 80-90% proficient esp with
| understanding by just developing a sound mapping of each
| character from dialect->mandarin.
|
| The common idioms you'll pick up with enough exposure.
|
| You'll never regret learning Mandarin first - you'll be able
| to read/listen to the news and your relatives will understand
| you. Whereas if you try to learn dialect first you'll find it
| harder due to the less set of materials AND less people to
| talk to.
|
| A lot of chinese people joke that they learned their
| 2nd/3rd... dialect by doing KTV and there's definitely some
| truth in that
| moufestaphio wrote:
| Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did
| the JLPT as a native English speaker.
|
| Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar,
| struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with
| reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers..
| struggled with everything but pronunciation hah.
|
| As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences:
| 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was
| done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China.
| With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan
|
| For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai
|
| But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional
| (closer to traditional than simplified)
|
| I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are
| the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese.
|
| Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite
| was:
|
| Shou Zhi The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively.
|
| In Japanese, it means 'Letter'
|
| In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'
| wst_ wrote:
| > English speakers.. struggled with everything but
| pronunciation
|
| This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with
| mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really
| bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like
| shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when
| you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be
| pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji
| should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this
| quite common among native English speakers.
|
| On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the
| most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the
| most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some
| subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close
| enough.
| forkLding wrote:
| Just some context on Simplified Chinese, the origin of Simplified
| Chinese came before the communist years and was mainly aimed at
| modernizing the Chinese written language and making it easy to
| learn for the general population as the many strokes to write a
| character in Traditional Chinese was making it hard to spread
| knowledge and increase literacy rates among the poorer and rural
| populations in China.
| danso wrote:
| Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese
| _sounds_ to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like
| Prisencolinensinainciusol 's supposed American-English-to-
| Italians:
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and
| English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look
| at some of these :)
| danans wrote:
| They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial
| Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a
| language superfamily that includes all the large language
| families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian,
| Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also
| controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic.
|
| Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese
| languages), most languages of Southeast Asia, and all the
| African languages.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages
|
| Again, it's so broad a grouping, projected so far back in
| time and based on such weakly detected feature similarities,
| that it's by no means broadly accepted as a language family
| in the way that Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, etc are.
| chaostheory wrote:
| imo Traditional written Chinese (what the Japanese call Kanji and
| that's used outside of China) is easier than simplified written
| Chinese. While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more
| complicated characters are made of other characters with a
| related meaning. Consequently, you can guess what the word means.
| Conversely with simplified, there less sub characters, so there's
| a lot of lost context. Easier to write by hand is also not so
| much of an advantage anymore given computers.
|
| If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional.
| It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way
| around.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean: are you claiming that...
|
| > While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more
| complicated characters are made of other characters with a
| related meaning.
|
| ..."traditional" characters (which do not equal to Japanese
| Shinjitai!) is easier to write but harder to read, or...
|
| > It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way
| around.
|
| ...it's easier to read but harder to write?
|
| There is some truth in your claim: simplification does discard
| some context and can be harder to _read_. But that 's only the
| case for irregular cases (notable example being Han to Yi ).
| In many cases they are highly systematic and phono-semantic
| roots are preserved (e.g. Yan to Yan , so no information is
| lost), or characters are so frequently used that you will have
| to memorize anyway (e.g. Fei to Fei ). Pronunciation-based
| simplification (e.g. Hou _after, behind_ to Hou _empress_ )
| is debatable, but it also tends to occur in frequently used
| characters.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't realize that the Japanese simplified kanji.
|
| > ...it's easier to read but harder to write?
|
| Harder to write because you have more lines and characters to
| draw. Harder to read because there are less sub-characters
| due to there being less lines. Judging from what you wrote,
| you probably understand my point just adding it just in case.
|
| Yeah, I've been gone a long time and I've been assimilated
| i.e. I don't read and write often anymore so you're probably
| right.
|
| > or characters are so frequently used that you will have to
| memorize anyway
|
| This is why I feel it makes it harder, especially for less
| common words. It's just more unnecessary work.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Interesting article, though it feels pretty unpolished, like a
| step above someone's train of thought.
|
| Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than
| french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more
| direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish.
|
| Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really
| supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that
| Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English
| speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're
| a Korean speaker and vice versa?
|
| Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to
| expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would
| feel like.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much
| easier to guess the meaning versus french or german.
|
| I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn
| if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively
| difficult for native C/J/K speakers.
|
| In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a
| lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is
| still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I
| can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up
| Japanese than English.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't
| trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J
| speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads
| like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major
| influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X
| is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is
| French/German.
|
| I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some
| Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who
| speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's
| almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line
| up with your account as well.
| otoburb wrote:
| >>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier
| time picking up Japanese than English.*
|
| I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share
| similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are
| difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers.
| My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V"
| and "Z" sounds.
| HuShifang wrote:
| One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters
| actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th
| centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the
| woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing
| simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's
| before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy,
| shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even _more_
| complicated than this, historically speaking.
| mrob wrote:
| Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in
| handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being
| commonly used:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji
| andrewzah wrote:
| Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode
| displays j/s, but they're not written like that. It's a
| common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect
| characters to be written like they're displayed on a
| computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written
| here. [0]
|
| [0]:
| https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-
| Or...
| brenschluss wrote:
| This is a stylistic/typeface difference between sans-serif
| and serif text. Some people do write like that, most people
| don't.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I have never seen a native korean write j/s as displayed
| by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings. It's
| always been the handwritten version as depicted.
|
| s almost looks like Ren [0] (in) on computers (looks
| like 1 stroke to beginners), but when handwriting it is 2
| strokes. j is also 2 strokes (personal handwriting aside)
| and looks rather different.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9
| numpad0 wrote:
| Ren is 2 strokes tho
| andrewzah wrote:
| Sorry, I meant that it looks like 1 stroke to beginners.
| Visually s looks similar to Ren on computers but in
| handwriting it's different.
| Tade0 wrote:
| That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how
| much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand:
|
| https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The first question is funny because the pronunciation of the
| last 2 characters (La Mian - lamian) is why Japanese call
| Chinese noodles 'ramen'.
| moogleii wrote:
| I found their bewilderment a little puzzling as well, but I
| believe it's due to the simplification of the last character.
| If you watch the older Canto/Traditional version of the
| video, the Japanese folk get the ramen part immediately.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Japanese uses an alternate simplification (Mian ) for the
| sense of noodles, and doesn't merge it with Mian . Generally
| you wouldn't expect Japanese person to have exceptional
| difficulty recognizing La Mian , though.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| It's so amazing how those languages are completely different
| from western languages. You can see the people in this video
| inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from
| the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western
| languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or
| you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning
| of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.
| Kliment wrote:
| While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and
| power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect
| you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in
| many western languages too. Here's an example in English.
| Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a
| plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can
| be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things
| can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off
| the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on
| context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not.
| Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are
| shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that
| are specific to one or several. There are many other words
| like that, and you find things like this in almost every
| language family.
| smogcutter wrote:
| For example, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo
| buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a valid English sentence.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Syntactically defensible, sure. But what anglophone not
| seeking to deliberately confuse an interlocutor would
| call bison from upstate New York "Buffalo buffalo"? What
| action could such bison perform on other bison that can
| reasonably be construed as "buffaloing"?
|
| Semantics and pragmatics are part of the language, too.
| ekianjo wrote:
| That's the key difference between ideograms (based on
| pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based
| writings (alphabet and the like).
|
| Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most
| of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Can you explain better?
|
| There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance
| languages.
|
| As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get
| "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in
| Spanish.
| free_rms wrote:
| In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen"
| is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being
| used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often
| used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice
| double entendre).
|
| Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the
| characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to
| hilarious translations.
| moogleii wrote:
| That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for
| the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since
| it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is
| a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw
| microcolonel wrote:
| I agree that Xin Zi Ti is preferable to Jian Ti Zi for exactly
| the etymological reason you cite, the thing with Yan only being
| simplified when it is a radical in Jian Ti Zi really irritates
| me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to
| write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me
| I practice with Zheng Ti Zi most often despite being more
| familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes Xin Zi Ti > Zheng
| Ti Zi > Jian Ti Zi .
|
| P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare
| versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you
| have to choose just _one_ of several, when a character is
| _nearly_ identical in two or more countries. In my browser it
| also fixes an issue where despite _serif_ being in your CSS font
| stack, it will select a sans-serif /gothic font by default if no
| lang attribute is set.
| bgee wrote:
| Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of
| etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-
| picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0].
|
| I can provide a few examples where characters are more
| "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: Guo vs
| Guo ,Dang vs Dang
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhu...
| microcolonel wrote:
| I don't see how Yu has more etymological significance to Guo
| than Yu /Huo . What analogy are you drawing on where the
| previous most common character for land/country is a worse
| etymological root than a character that apparently has meant
| only _jade_ (or direct analogies to the material preciousness
| of jade) for longer than Guo has existed.
|
| As for Dang , it is a direct analogy to Dang as in Dang Tian
| . There is a little bit lost in the conversion of Tian to
| Hei but at least they are related.
| bgee wrote:
| Yu was a variant of Wang (king)[0] thus king in walls
| (Guo ), it's definitely NOT "only jade".
|
| [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89
| microcolonel wrote:
| Then why not just put Wang in the box rather than Yu ?
| As far as I can tell the Wang glyph predates the
| invention of Yu , and the purpose of this new glyph was
| to distinguish Yu from Wang .
|
| Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy
| for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a
| king seems more like a palace.
| bgee wrote:
| >Then why not just put Wang in the box rather than Yu ?
|
| I think we have done exactly that[0], it's just not part
| of the 1986 proposal in PRC.
|
| [0]: https://zh.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%AF
| dheera wrote:
| Unfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not
| derived.
|
| Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are?
|
| Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and
| "sandboarding"?
|
| (As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all
| for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to
| want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical
| definitions.)
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