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Twenty Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 49 of 117 17 November 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Figuring out these numbers in Japanese is about as complicated as declining them in Russian. Edited by Juаn on 17 November 2010 at 8:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeeb Groupie Joined 5161 days ago 49 posts - 80 votes | Message 50 of 117 17 November 2010 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
Japanese counting comes from Chinese languages. Chinese counting is extremely easy. Way easier than many European languages. Like French, their 80 is 20 x 4.... All you need to learn is 14 Chinese characters and you'll be good to go. 
四 = 4 四十 = 4 x 10 = 40 四百= 4 x 100 = 400 四千 = 4 x 1000 = 4000 四萬 (万) = 4 x 10000 = 40000 四百萬 = 4 x 1000000 = 4000000 四億 = 4 x 100000000 = 400000000 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeeb Groupie Joined 5161 days ago 49 posts - 80 votes | Message 51 of 117 18 November 2010 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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Southern Chinese language, ie. Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, worth your time if you are
interested in East Asian and Southeast Asian languages. In the previous picture I posted, you can see Hakka is similar to the to-on in Japanese. Japanese call Japan 日本 "Nippon". In Mandarin, 日 is pronounced as "ri" but in Hakka, 日 is pronunced as "ngit" (ngi = nyi). (I know 日 has many pronunciations in Japanese. I just want to discuss about 日本 Nippon). Chinese loanwords in Tibetan 
No. 12 is "sun" and no 13 is "twenty praises". In Hakka, you know 日 is "ngit" (same as nyit" and from the previous picture I posted, you know 二 in Hakka is "ngi" (same as nyi). "Nyi" even appears in Tibetan so you know Hakka preserves many features in ancient Chinese languages. Also, Hakka shares more similarity with Cantonese and Wu. Cantonese person can understand a Hakka person who speaks with slow pace. Shanghaiese (Just a dialect of Wu) speakers think Hakka sounds like their language too. Take personal pronoun "He, She. It" as example Mandarin: tā Hakka: ki 渠 Wu: gei (in wenzhou) 渠 Cantonese: keoi 佢 (Since 渠 can also mean "ditch" so Cantonese people create a new word with 人 human radical) Thai : kao Tibetan: kho Another example, "boiled water/to boill" 
In Tibetan, "boiled water" is 
Tibetan is like Tai-Kradai languages, which is noun precedes adjectives, so the dictionary reads "water boiled". In Chinese languages, normally, it is adjectives precedes noun. In Hakka, "boiled water" is 滾水 (kun sui) In Cantonese, "boiled water" is 滾水 (kwan seoi) Cantonese shares many similarity with Tai-Kradai language. (Cantonese grammar is different from Tai-Kradai grammar but pronunciation, tones and lexical share similarity) . Not sure if I could call it a sinicised Tai-Kradai. 
English: He is taller than you Mandarin: tā bǐ nǐ gāo 他比你高 Cantonese: keoi5 gou1 gwo3 nei5 佢高過你 Thai: kao soong gwaa kun Edited by jeeb on 18 November 2010 at 12:52am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| michau Tetraglot Groupie Norway lang-8.com/member/49 Joined 6227 days ago 86 posts - 135 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish, Sign Language Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic | Message 52 of 117 18 November 2010 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Mind you, Norwegian and Swedish are tonal. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 117 18 November 2010 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To Michau: Norwegian and Swedish are tonal on the word/sentence level, not at each phoneme. That makes them easier to comprehend for a Danish flatlander. To my ears Swedish sound like aa-hååår da-håååår ha-håååår (and when they want to say "four churches" in Swedish they have to turn their tongue backwards and stick it down their throat). Norwegian sounds like eeda-da-da- YEEEEPP eeda- YEEEEEP. I can deal with that kind of simple tones. In contrast speakers of Asian tone language skip up and down so fast that I can't illustrate it without drawing something like an earthquake curve.
Jeeb's first message above could be taken to lure me into learning Chinese by pointing out that Chinese numbers are built on the number 20 as the French ones - and by implication: as the Danish ones, because our ancestors also learned to count while barefoot. Luckily his next message cured me of that temptation. Juan mentions that "Figuring out these numbers in Japanese is about as complicated as declining them in Russian." Well, then I'm fully occupied just with mastering the Russian system, where you can have several different cases and different (grammatical) numbers after a certain number (to each number its own set of rules), sometimes even with clashes within the same nominal phrase. Somebody once said that Russian is like a great machine with lots of moving parts ... OK, it may be presumptuous to expect them all to moving in the same direction and at the same speed. But a transmission box that behaved in the same way would explode. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 54 of 117 18 November 2010 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually Chinese numbers follow the Esperanto system until we get to 10,000:
tri 三 tridek 三十 tridek ses 三十六 tricent 三百 tricent sesdek naŭ 三百六十九 trimil 三千 trimil sescent naŭdek unu 三千六百九十一 tridek mil 三万 (3 "wan" rather than 30 thousand. This still throws me off, but fortunately you don't often need such high numbers.) Māori would be the same, except for connecting the parts with "and". Greek, Arabic, Indonesian, Swahili, Mandinka etc. are all different. Chinese goes one step further by numbering the days of the week (almost consistently, except for Sunday) and by numbering the months of the Western year (completely consistently), i. e. 一月，二月，三月 ... Edited by Sprachprofi on 18 November 2010 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| michau Tetraglot Groupie Norway lang-8.com/member/49 Joined 6227 days ago 86 posts - 135 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish, Sign Language Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic | Message 55 of 117 18 November 2010 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I love reading Scandinavians describing sounds of other Scandinavian languages. :D We Poles and Czechs also often say such things about each other.
Funnily enough, I've got much more problems with Norwegian tones than with Mandarin tones, even though my Norwegian is on a higher level. The reason is that I haven't read a good explanation of Norwegian tone curves until recently. So I believe that having good learning materials is already half of the success. FSI Chinese worked very well in that respect. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 56 of 117 18 November 2010 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would love to learn 20 languages.
The ones I have a fair knowledge of 1. Norwegian (mother tongue) 2. English 3. Spanish 4. French 5. Italian 6. German The one I am currently trying to learn 7. Russian The ones I have dabbled in and would like to learn 8, Arabic (preferably at least two spoken variants) 9. Hebrew (coolest language I know) 10. Polish 11. Dutch The ones I dream about for the future 12. Ukranian 13. Greek 14. Mongolian (for when I take my father in law on the Trans-Siberian and make a stop over in Ulan Bator) 15. Mandarin (for the final destination of the train ride) 16. Portuguese 17. Croat 18. Hindi 19. Turkish 20. Thai 1 person has voted this message useful |
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