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Chinese characters in jpns and chns | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 41 of 70 13 July 2010 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I must be in the minority of people who learned Japanese to a high level first but thinks that the Chinese languages and Korean are more difficult.
Korean these days may not use very many Chinese characters, but according to Prof Arguelles, learners should be studying them anyway in order to aid vocabulary acquisition. He said he was hitting a brick wall with Korean vocabulary until he started to learn the hanja, from which point on his vocabulary 'snowballed'. From my experiences with Japanese and Mandarin, I can imagine this to be the case. Even if I could live in a theoretical China that uses only pinyin/bopomofo or a theoretical Japan that uses only kana, I think I would still need to learn the characters in order to see the building blocks that make up the vocabulary. Seeing that 成功（せいこう, to be successful) and 成長（せいちょう, to grow) and many other words share this element 成, meaning achieve, is helpful to me, and although learning Kanji is a pain, in some ways learners might be handicapped without it. So assuming that learners of Korean will be studying Chinese characters to some extent anyway, and keeping in mind the fact that they haven't fallen into complete disuse in Korea, I don't think we can use Chinese characters as a basis to preclude Korean from being more difficult than Japanese. In fact, I think it's harder because the grammar and pronunciation are both more complicated than Japanese (which I actually don't consider to be a very difficult language). Maybe you can say they even out in the end because of kanji, but my opinion is still that Korean is more difficult. As for Mandarin vs. Japanese... there are many bases for comparison (grammar, pronunciation, number of loanwords from English - actually, I would argue that Mandarin is more difficult on all these counts!) but the thread here is about the hanzi/kanji. I guess this debate ultimately centers around whether the number of kanji or multiple readings for fewer kanji is more difficult. One point I'd like to make is that it's quite an oversimplification to characterize Japanese kanji as having several readings per character, and Chinese hanzi to have one per character. I'd venture there are as many Japanese kanji with only a single 音読み as there are Chinese hanzi with multiple readings (that is to say, a lot). The other point I'd like to make is regarding the difficulty of multiple readings per kanji. My thought process tends to go something like this: 1. I've learned the kanji 行く、 meaning 'go'. 2. I start to notice compounds that include this kanji. For example, I find that りょこう (trip) is written 旅行 (journey + go). Rather than think, 'OMG, another way to read the same character?! How am I gonna keep these straight?' I rather think, 'thank God they used a character I already know instead of assigning a whole new character for this pronunciation. I now have to associate a new reading for the old character, but I'm saved the work of memorizing a new character and associating a meaning with it.' 3. I later learn that this same kanji is used to write 行う, a fancy way of saying 'do' (maybe something like 'perform' or 'conduct' in English). If I stretch my imagination, I can see how this concept is related to 'go' - they both involve carrying out an action. Cool, another new word/reading without having to learn a new character. 4. I learn that words like 行政（ぎょうせい、administration) and 実行 (じっこう、enforce), which have different pronunciations, use the same kanji and meaning. My work has been further decreased. I think most people tend to see it the other way - the same kanji having multiple pronunciations (which more accurately reflects the historical reality, of course), rather than multiple pronunciations being simplified by the use of a single kanji (which must be the way it looks to native children, who learned speaking first and probably had little idea that these different words were bound by a common root). When it comes to multiple kanji readings, let's pretend the readings came first, and be glad that we have kanji to show us the unity underlying hundreds of seemingly unrelated words like いく・りょこう・おこなう・ぎょうせい・じ っこう！ Edited by Lucky Charms on 13 July 2010 at 5:14pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| lanni Senior Member China Joined 6264 days ago 102 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Mandarin* Studies: English | Message 44 of 70 14 July 2010 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Are you sure? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 45 of 70 14 July 2010 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is folk etymology and is categorically wrong. Mandarin comes ultimately from Sanskrit mantri meaning something like councilor and came into English via Malay, Dutch, then Portuguese. Hell, it's from a PIE root and is cognate with mind, mensa and all that jazz. It is just a translation of 官話.
Given that the phonology of Sinitic languages is vastly different from Japanese (way more consonants, way more vowels, and the existence of tones are the obvious ones, but also words ending in consonants, aspiration instead of voicing distinction (for the most part), etc.), I suspect it may simply be that Japanese is one of the foreign languages that Chinese speakers are more familiar with. To counter anecdotal evidence with the same: My family is full of Min speakers, many of whom also know Japanese, one knows Wu as well, and I've lived with native Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, some of who were learning Japanese. Never once, have I heard that Japanese was particularly easy to learn for them, or that they sound similar. Sure, as you have nicely laid out, they share lexical similarities—but that's like saying English sounds like French because they both have Latinate words. This isn't to disparage your main point, that many varieties of Chinese have elements which are more archaic than Mandarin, and are worth looking into. However, to say that all these sound changes are due for the most part to Manchurian influence seems to assert to much. Edited by egill on 14 July 2010 at 2:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 48 of 70 15 July 2010 at 12:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Easy. The word went through a couple different languages: Malay mantri > Du. mandorijn > Port. mandarim > Engl. mandarin. More importantly, the first attestation of the word appears to be in the 1580's, predating the Qing Dynasty, i.e. Manchu rule. Sound changes and borrowing often creates many coincidences in sound, that's why resemblance alone is not enough to establish ancestral or even cognate status.
I fully agree with you here. People are interested in the philology and history of characters in Japanese should not restrict themselves to Mandarin. However, for most language learners, Mandarin is simply what is most accessible and useful (for example if they were planning to learn it anyway). I don't know enough about the extent of Manchu/Mongolian influence in Mandarin to comment on it. But to hold up a dubious etymology as evidence of this is not enough. However, I will happily defer to those more knowledgeable on the matter. I hope I haven't sounded too combative in my responses, it's not my intention at all to be unpleasant. You have provided a lot of useful information and topics for discussion, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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