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I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female). However, if

I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female). However, if you heard a word, you could spell it and vice versa. English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules (look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc. I've heard many people say that English is one of the hardest European languages to learn. Supposedly, Japanese and Chinese are a different league altogether.

Mithaldu 11y ago
Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a completely different language root than european languages and require one to think differently. For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji, which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures, or combinations of less complex pictures. For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" => "new". ( http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji ) This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.
- meric 11y ago
  Chinese was my first language, and although I can make out those relationships between parts of characters, sometimes, I think usually in my mind the mapping between characters and their meanings is just a giant hash table. I find the relationships between each part of each character un-systematic. Perhaps subconsciously I make use of those relationships but conciously it's all 'I just know what that character means'.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Kanji writing is learnt by heart and repetition by japanese folks, certainly not the way you describe. I live in Japan.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Well, i'm not saying that is how it is read in practice, because obviously that would be much too slow to be practical. Nevertheless the structure and meaning is there, and for beginners it helps a lot to memorize complex kanji as combinations of radicals instead of a giant blob of context-free lines, until subconscious pattern recognition has a big enough body of data to work and start matching with. Obviously there is also a difference in how japanese children and foreigners learn the language, since children in japan are, since birth, surrounded by kanji and very often see them in context with their meaning, while for foreigners they're completely new and some kind of mental context needs to be established in the first place.
hasenj 11y ago
Two things happen when you learn another language 1) You face "weird" everywhere 2) You come to realize some absurdities in your own native language For example, in Japanese, one of the super weird things is counting. You can't just say "five apples". You have to use a counter phrase, which is a concept that I've never seen in any other language (they say Korean and Chinese have the same concept). Essentially a counter is a word you must use. In the apples example, the closest thing to English would be "five pieces of apples". If you were counting books, you would use a totally different "counter". On the other hand, learning Japanese has made me realize how absurdly complicated Arabic grammar can be. Every verb/adjective/noun has to be modified to signify gender, singularity-vs-plurality, first-vs-second-vs-third-person, etc. Every verb tense has about 8 to 12 different conjugations, depending on the (implicit) pronoun. Japanese on the other hand, is deceptively simple (and has more ambiguity) in that regard. The concepts of singular and plural forms pretty much don't exist. There's no definite or indefinite article. The subject is often not mentioned. It's as if you refer to all people in third person. The past tense of a verb does not change to signify anything about the subject(s). On the other hand, it can change for a completely different reason: to indicate politeness level.

Mithaldu 11y ago

Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a completely different language root than european languages and require one to think differently. For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji, which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures, or combinations of less complex pictures. For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" => "new". ( http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji ) This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.

meric 11y ago
Chinese was my first language, and although I can make out those relationships between parts of characters, sometimes, I think usually in my mind the mapping between characters and their meanings is just a giant hash table. I find the relationships between each part of each character un-systematic. Perhaps subconsciously I make use of those relationships but conciously it's all 'I just know what that character means'.
ekianjo 11y ago
Kanji writing is learnt by heart and repetition by japanese folks, certainly not the way you describe. I live in Japan.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Well, i'm not saying that is how it is read in practice, because obviously that would be much too slow to be practical. Nevertheless the structure and meaning is there, and for beginners it helps a lot to memorize complex kanji as combinations of radicals instead of a giant blob of context-free lines, until subconscious pattern recognition has a big enough body of data to work and start matching with. Obviously there is also a difference in how japanese children and foreigners learn the language, since children in japan are, since birth, surrounded by kanji and very often see them in context with their meaning, while for foreigners they're completely new and some kind of mental context needs to be established in the first place.

hasenj 11y ago

Two things happen when you learn another language 1) You face "weird" everywhere 2) You come to realize some absurdities in your own native language For example, in Japanese, one of the super weird things is counting. You can't just say "five apples". You have to use a counter phrase, which is a concept that I've never seen in any other language (they say Korean and Chinese have the same concept). Essentially a counter is a word you must use. In the apples example, the closest thing to English would be "five pieces of apples". If you were counting books, you would use a totally different "counter". On the other hand, learning Japanese has made me realize how absurdly complicated Arabic grammar can be. Every verb/adjective/noun has to be modified to signify gender, singularity-vs-plurality, first-vs-second-vs-third-person, etc. Every verb tense has about 8 to 12 different conjugations, depending on the (implicit) pronoun. Japanese on the other hand, is deceptively simple (and has more ambiguity) in that regard. The concepts of singular and plural forms pretty much don't exist. There's no definite or indefinite article. The subject is often not mentioned. It's as if you refer to all people in third person. The past tense of a verb does not change to signify anything about the subject(s). On the other hand, it can change for a completely different reason: to indicate politeness level.