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Writing systems by number of users | ||
Tags: Writing System | Writing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5191 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 17 of 22 08 June 2011 at 8:18am | IP Logged | |||||
Oh, yes you could. I remember in engineering graduate school one of my professors from Japan had absolutely no trouble puzzling out the meaning of stuff that his students wrote in Chinese. Furthermore, I would add that a good number of Koreans are well versed in the Chinese character writing system due to proximity to China, scholarly studies of Buddhism, etc. I remember being very surprised when I showed an extremely obscure Chinese character to a Korean graduate student, and he correctly guessed its meaning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 18 of 22 08 June 2011 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nice pic but why is Hokkaido katakana only!?? Edited by unzum on 08 June 2011 at 5:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kappa Groupie Japan Joined 5520 days ago 99 posts - 172 votes | Message 19 of 22 08 June 2011 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Could be Ainu? :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 20 of 22 08 June 2011 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, thanks, that makes sense. Although I think the artist is sadly mistaken on how many Hokkaido-jin speak Ainu. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 21 of 22 08 June 2011 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes it's true that Japanese speakers could recognise some Chinese words and get a general sense of the meaning of the Chinese text, but I don't think you could say that this means they use the same writing system. Japanese speakers still have a lot to learn before they can read and fully understand Chinese. Also, I've heard that knowledge of Chinese characters among Koreans varies widely, depending on what generation they are from. Don't most young Koreans use hanguel almost exclusively? I know that the three Koreans who were in my Japanese class struggled with Kanji. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 22 09 June 2011 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||
When I started out learning Spanish I first learnt the pronunciation rules. That meant that I was able to "read" a Spanish text in a way that a native speaker would have understood it with some effort - even if I myself couldn't understand most of the text. If you argue like that, no language uses the same writing system as any other language. When I try to read Korean or Russian, and to some extent Japanese, I still have to recognize the sound value of the symbols I see and puzzle into something that I can recognize as a word. In my European languages I didn't have to learn many new symbols, I just had to assign an additional sound value to a symbol I knew. I can't explain it any better than that, but the process is different from reading in a script I didn't read millions of pages in yet. In my experience, saying that Japanese half uses Chinese characters and half doesn't is as good as one can describe it. When I try to read Chinese - which I initially only picked up because I noticed I could understand the meaning of some words, but had no idea how they were pronounced - I use the same system of symbols as in Japanese, even though they are pronounced differently, form different words and often have a different meaning. Edited by Bao on 10 June 2011 at 9:28pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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