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Chinese or Japanese: which is easier?

  Tags: Easiness | Mandarin | Japanese
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
73 messages over 10 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 9 10 Next >>
Duke100782
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Philippines
https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name
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 Message 65 of 73
07 July 2013 at 5:05pm | IP Logged 
COF wrote:
Any Chinese person who uses a computer will understand Pinyin as that is pretty much the
only imput method for Chinese.

Bopomofo was the first ever "alphabet" created for Chinese in 1910, but with the invention of Pinyin,
Bopomofo has become pretty much obsolete.

So on the whole, I think the most common "alphabet" for Chinese is Pinyin, because any Chinese person
who doesn't understand Pinyin probably wouldn't understand Bopomofo either.


There are actually other input systems aside from the one which uses pinyin, and bopomofo is still actually
used in some education systems and text books.
1 person has voted this message useful



anime
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Sweden
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 Message 66 of 73
11 July 2013 at 11:08am | IP Logged 
If Japanese was written with only Romaji wouldn't it be considered a fairly easy language, especially
compared to other Asian languages?

I mean from the little exposure I had to the language pronunciation seems dead easy, verbs, nouns and
adjectives aren't conjugated? No genders and word order is consistent unlike German or Russian for
example.The particles seem fairly straight forward to recognize and use, atleast at a basic level? There
seems to be a wealth of good learning material with Romaji transcriptions, unlike languages like Arabic and
Persian where you have to rely on the broken Arabic script and tedious learning materials.

I'm sure it gets worse once you're past the basic stages, but even reaching some sort of functional
conversational level seems to require a lot more in Arabic for example.

Edited by anime on 11 July 2013 at 11:19am

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Camundonguinho
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 Message 67 of 73
11 July 2013 at 12:39pm | IP Logged 
If Japanese were written in Romaji, it would still be difficult: its grammar is much more difficult than the Mandarin one, and compared to a relatively easy Asian language (like Indonesian), Japanese pronunciation is somewhat complex, native-like accent is difficult to obtain (because of the pitch accent, nasals like the one in ARIGATO, and other things...).

Edited by Camundonguinho on 11 July 2013 at 12:40pm

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vonPeterhof
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Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
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 Message 68 of 73
11 July 2013 at 12:48pm | IP Logged 
anime wrote:
If Japanese was written with only Romaji wouldn't it be considered a fairly easy language, especially
compared to other Asian languages?

I mean from the little exposure I had to the language pronunciation seems dead easy, verbs, nouns and
adjectives aren't conjugated? Word order is consistent unlike German or Russian for example.

The particles seem fairly straight forward to recognize and use, atleast at a basic level?
Verbs and at least one of the two categories of adjectives are definitely conjugated, though not in ways that are typical of conjugation-heavy Indo-European languages: instead of forms changing on the basis of person, number, gender and a staggering number of tenses you get forms denoting passivity, causality, volition and other aspects. And I believe it is possible to interpret the particles as a form of conjugation for nouns and the other category of adjectives (to me the way at least some of the particles work seems very reminiscent of the case-marking endings in the also agglutinative Turkic languages), but that doesn't seem to be the mainstream view in Japanese linguistics.

Also, I wouldn't exactly call the word order consistent, at least not to the extent of English. It's usually analysed as SOV, but OSV isn't exactly out of the question. The fact that Japanese is a topic-prominent language kinda makes the whole subject-object dichotomy secondary in determining word order. It's even possible to make the verb the topic, or to have the verb as a comment, but with the topic coming after it (although the latter is sometimes interpreted as two sentences/clauses, with the second one clarifying the first one). The fact that information that is clear from the context can be left out entirely adds another layer to the complication.

As for the pronunciation, it might actually be deceptively easy, in that it lulls the learner into a false sense of security. Sure, sounding "close enough" is easier than sounding "exactly native-like" for any language, but many learners seem to severely underestimate the gap between the two in the case of Japanese. It's often said that Romanized Japanese is supposed to be read with clear Italian/Spanish vowels and English consonants, so it's easy to overlook the fact that the Japanese "sh" is different from the English "sh", or that the "h" in "ha" and the "h" in "hi" are pronounced differently from each other (the fact that the "h" in "hu" is different does get reflected in its Hepburn transliteration as "fu", but the "f" in the Japanese "fu" is still different from the "f" of most European languages), or the fact that the i's and u's are devoiced between voiceless consonants (or, for that matter, that the Japanese "u" is actually a pretty uncommon sound). And that's not even getting into the pitch accent can of worms. Many visitors to Japan tell stories of how they addressed a local in Japanese only to get panicked responses in broken English. Many interpret this failure to recognize the foreigner's speech as Japanese as a result of a combination of panic and deep-seated stereotyping ("Oh crap, a foreigner! He's gonna talk to me in English, and I already forgot everything I learned in high school! Huh, was that Japanese just now? Nah, it can't be, not with a face like that! La-la-la, I can't hear you, la-la-la..."), but I wonder how often it's simply down to the foreigner's phonology being really off combined with the native speaker's lack of exposure to foreign-accented Japanese.

All that I wrote above is not meant to dispute that the need to learn Chinese characters is a major, if not the major reason why Japanese is considered such a difficult language. But still, there are other obstacles to overcome. In the FSI ratings the agglutinative languages written in the Latin alphabet (Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, etc.) are in one category below Japanese and the other top-difficulty languages, but the top category does include Korean, a language written in an alphabetic script with a grammar very similar to Japanese.
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anime
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Sweden
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 Message 69 of 73
11 July 2013 at 4:51pm | IP Logged 
Yeah I definitely noticed they drop some sounds here and there, still didn't seem like anything major to me.
The u sounded somewhat like french y? But yeah pitch accent and all that seems like a lot of busy work.
Probably wouldn't attempt this language without having access to native speakers.
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vonPeterhof
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Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
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 Message 70 of 73
11 July 2013 at 5:18pm | IP Logged 
anime wrote:
The u sounded somewhat like french y?
No, nothing like that. It's something in between the widespread [ u ] sound and the completely unrounded [ɯ] sound (the Korean "eu" or the "i" in the Mandarin pronunciation of 字). In fact in Korean transliterations the Japanese sound sometimes gets transliterated as "u" and other times as "eu". According to the Wikipedia entry I linked to above, that sound is also the pronunciation of the letter "o" in words like "oro" in some Swedish dialects, but it doesn't specify which dialects.

Edited by vonPeterhof on 11 July 2013 at 5:19pm

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anime
Triglot
Senior Member
Sweden
Joined 6341 days ago

161 posts - 207 votes 
Speaks: Spanish, Swedish*, English
Studies: German, Portuguese, French, Russian

 
 Message 71 of 73
12 July 2013 at 1:53am | IP Logged 
Yeah okey well that's good news, I guess I could imitate it then if it exists in Swedish, but really you guys
have convinced me not to attempt this hellish language. Well the good news is I still kinda like some parts of
Japanese culture (like Nintendo) and think it can sound pretty cool sometimes, unlike Korean ugh
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freakyaye
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Australia
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107 posts - 152 votes 

 
 Message 72 of 73
29 July 2013 at 1:16pm | IP Logged 
I wouldn't worry about pitch accent that much, if you imitate what you hear then you are using it correctly 😃. Plus, people like the accent mixes non natives have.


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