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Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6382 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 9 of 39 12 September 2011 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Pick the countries you would be most interested or willing to spend time in, then pick the language.
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6550 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 39 12 September 2011 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
You can pick your friends, and you can pick your languages, but you can't pick your friends' languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5231 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 11 of 39 12 September 2011 at 5:55am | IP Logged | |||||
I meant to say that of all the characters that Japanese uses, there is a portion which comes from Chinese. The number of which are common, I believe is around 1000. I cannot read Japanese but can recognize a number of the words as coming from Chinese. Sometimes, I can even glean enough to understand the topic. And to answer the OP's question, these languages are going to be hard for anybody. Perhaps moreso for us English speakers, but still hard all around. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6382 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 12 of 39 12 September 2011 at 7:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was told that it is easier to go from kanji to Simp. hanzi than the other way around due to kanji being
mostly trad. Chars. It is a little easier to see the patterns when learning simpl. Chinese in that order. If you buy the heisig books to learn chars like I did, you will see that there is a lot of overlap, but you need to learn slight variances in meaning with identical characters in some cases. I.e, if you learn the Heisig method book for kanji called " remember the kanji," you only have to learn around 500 new chars to cover his Simp. Hanzi book (but that is only 1500 chars), many of those are only logical simplification of radicals and can be easily learnt. There is the issue of multiple meanings/keywords though on many chars. Mandarin seems like the logicL choice given chinas rise, but do you want to live in china? Edited by aquablue on 12 September 2011 at 7:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ziloh Newbie China Joined 4948 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 39 12 September 2011 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been debating with myself for quite a bit over these three languages actually. I don't really consider economic benefits or job opportunities when it comes to languages. I just like filling my free time, and I get a multitude of 5-10 minute breaks throughout my day. I've been studying Afrikaans due to my parents being able to have conversations with me in the native language.
I just had neighbors move in about 3 days ago, and when I greeted them, the two phrases that they knew were "Sorry, no English" and "We're from China". This has made me quite excited, and I will soon be coming up with reasons to get to know them better. One of the main reasons I'm leaning towards Mandarin. On another note, does anyone know how to politely ask or determine if my neighbors speak Mandarin or if it is Cantonese or even a third option? Any help would be appreciated, as I don't want to assume anything. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5415 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 14 of 39 12 September 2011 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, you could try asking them in English...
Otherwise, if you for some reason are able to overhear their conversations, you could just expose yourself to enough Mandarin and Cantonese (e.g., via YouTube) to be able to distinguish whether it may be one of the two. Asking what part of China they're from may not do the trick, due to all the migration going on there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ziloh Newbie China Joined 4948 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 39 12 September 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Nway, I like the idea of trying to distinguish the two languages, and a good reason to start studying. I tried asking the mother her name, but I couldn't get it across, so I have doubts about asking which language they speak. I'll try to catch her husband when I next see him and hopefully he can speak English.
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| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5940 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 16 of 39 12 September 2011 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's a simplified comparison of their difficulties (with 1 being the hardest and 3 being the easiest) for a native English speaker:
Grammar: 1. Korean 2. Japanese 3. Chinese Pronunciation: 1. Chinese 2. Korean 3. Japanese Reading/writing: 1. Japanese 2. Chinese 3. Korean Now some people will say that Chinese orthography is more difficult than Japanese orthography because you have to learn more characters, but I think the real difficulty exists in mastering the myriad readings for each kanji and how Japanese combines kanji with 2 syllabaries. Learning more characters is just a process of rote memorization. However, it is important to note that nothing is easy. Chinese grammar is easy at first, but will get progressively harder as you keep going. Japanese pronunciation appears to be easy for an English speaker, but you have to master pitch accent if you want to sound like a native speaker and clearly distinguish between homophones in speech. Similarly, a lot of people will say that hangul is super easy to learn because it's got just 24 letters, but just like any alphabet that wasn't created recently, it has plenty of spelling exceptions, so it'll be like English all over again (though obviously not that bad).
Actually, the shinjitai (simplified kanji) are much more conservative than jiǎntizì (simplified hanzi). For example, this post says jiǎntizì changed ~50% of the characters, whereas this one says that shinjitai is only made up of 10% simplified characters. Also remember that there were many characters that were simplified differently in jiǎntizì and shinjitai, and that although jiǎntizì systematically applies simplification to all characters across the board, shinjitai only applies to a fixed set of characters that are required to be taught by the end of middle school (known as the jōyō kanji). Characters outside of this list (known as either hyōgaiji or jinmeiyō kanji) are not normally simplified even if they have radicals/subcharacters that are in the jōyō kanji list.
You could always surreptitiously record one of their conversations and post it on here for an HTLAL member familiar with those languages to judge ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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