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Japanese after Chinese (and vice versa) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 9 of 21 19 August 2012 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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A lot of good materials for learning Japanese are produced in Taiwan. Here are a couple of examples.
例圖例文日漢有聲辭典 (大新書局) a mini picture dictionary 日語讀音速查手冊 (史橋出版社) a kanji pronunciation handbook Both are pocket size, but contain a lot of information. If you visited one of the big bookstores in Taipei like Eslite, you could find a lot more. There’s also something I’d like to recommend for learning Chinese characters. It’s the 中文字譜 or Chinese Character Genealogy by Rick Harbaugh. Instead of being organized by radical like a traditional dictionary, it has these trees that gather together all the characters with identical phonetic elements. For example, 普, 譜 and 鐠 would all be found next to each other, not under the yan radical, jin radical etc. It’s also online at zhongwen.com, if you want to see what I’m talking about. It can complement a good traditional dictionary like the Far East C/E very well, if your aim is learning characters. Edited by viedums on 19 August 2012 at 10:04am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Never Newbie Australia Joined 4482 days ago 5 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Afrikaans | Message 10 of 21 19 August 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I happened to begin learning Chinese after many years of studying Japanese, and I don't
believe knowledge of Japanese helps significantly in the study of Chinese. A friend of mine, who is Chinese, has been studying Japanese for the past six years and the only benefit she enjoys is the ability to write kanji more efficiently and recognise their meaning. This is to be expected when considering she already knows thousands. In a Japanese text, such as a newspaper, article or a book, she can understand the main focus of the sentence or paragraph by deducing the meaning of the kanji. Since there are either no characters or rarely used characters for certain function words in Japanese, she can't describe the exact meaning and she can't pronounce most of the kanji in Japanese. Some of the kanji that are used for Japanese words also may not be paired together in a Chinese word, and extensive knowledge of a character's single meaning is necessary. Chinese and Japanese are very separate and different languages, so I imagine it's pointless learning Japanese in such a way. It would be like learning the words that Dutch and English have in common or those that are similar so that the learner can understand Dutch very generally. It doesn't seem like a very rewarding experience, but to each their own. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4528 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 11 of 21 27 August 2012 at 10:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Is that true? Because my father's friend who majored in Chinese at university learned to read Japanese in 3 months. Actually, about the compounds being different in Chinese and Japanese... This is no problem for me, as when I see a Japanese compound, even if it's not one used in Chinese, it's easy to tell the meaning from the separate characters. And about your friend... She's been studying Japanese for 6 years but can only read Kanji? I doubt that she's actually been studying then... I don't mean to be offensive but I don't think that could be right. Why hasn't she learned the function words? Those are important. Obviously I'd learn all function words. But I'd use my Chinese vocabulary to learn Japanese content words. Thanks for your insight anyways :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4528 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 12 of 21 27 August 2012 at 10:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, I've heard of dictionaries like that. I will definitely pick one up if I get the time. I also checked out zhongwen.com and I like it a lot. Thanks so much for the suggestions ^_^ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 13 of 21 12 September 2012 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Are you referring to textbooks or novels? I don't know of any textbooks for English speakers that start right out with a lot of kanji, but there might be some for Chinese speakers. I don't know. If you mean novels, Harry Potter is actually one of the best I've found. Since it's for children, the content isn't too hard, but unlike most children's books, it uses a surprisingly large number of kanji. And since it is a children's book and children can't be expected to know most of those kanji, the pronunciations are written beside a lot of them. I learned kanji using the Heisig method, which if you go through the whole thing, teaches you about 3000 kanji really fast. However, it doesn't teach you the pronunciations of them at the same time (that would take a lot more time), only the meanings and how to write them. So I was basically in the same place as you are in that I knew kanji, but my actual Japanese vocabulary was still fairly weak. When I started Harry Potter, I think my actual vocabulary was only about 3000 words, which is a bit low for reading, but since it has so many kanji, I was able to figure out most of the words that I didn't know simply by knowing the meanings of the individual kanji (plus a little help from context.) Of course, if you don't like Harry Potter or only want to read native books even from the start, you'll have to find something else. But I don't know what to suggest. Most books for children and young adults don't have a huge amount of kanji, and even many books for adults are rather lacking in that area. It depends a bit on the author though. Some of them like to avoid kanji and only use the most common ones; others love kanji and use them as much as possible. But with novels for adults, only the rarer kanji have pronunciations written beside them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 14 of 21 12 September 2012 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Chinese and Japanese are as distinct as English and Finnish. Knowing one won't help you with the other.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fiveonefive Diglot Groupie Japan Joined 5694 days ago 69 posts - 88 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Swedish | Message 15 of 21 13 September 2012 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry but that's not how it works out. Especially with respect to the written language - knowing either Japanese or Chinese greatly helps in the acquisition of the other. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 16 of 21 13 September 2012 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know how often the words have the same meaning, I doubt it's often enough to be really useful, but yes, knowing the characters probably can help you with writing. But otherwise the languages have nothing in common. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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