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Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a completely different language root than european languages and require one to think diffe

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.

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.