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The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chines

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.

smallnamespace 9y ago
They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese. Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g. か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.
timr 9y ago
"And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going." Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway. Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns. Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.
- hudibras 9y ago
  Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think. That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class... The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough. https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/ https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...
  - timr 9y ago
    There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them. (Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)
    - dastbe 9y ago
      And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.
      - timr 9y ago
        Wellll...I don't know Chinese and have never studied in China, so I can't speculate in that domain. But I wouldn't be so quick to infer specific techniques from their memorization speed -- they're fluent in a very similar written language, and it's much faster to learn things (in any language) when you're fluent. They also grew up in a...well, let's call it a memorization-intensive learning environment. The only things I can say with confidence are: * focus on words * learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency * learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do That's really my complete set of advice on the subject.
azernik 9y ago
> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the Japanese heard them, and they often have different shades of meaning. Chinese, on the other hand, uses only one writing system in any given body of text, uses the Latin alphabet with tone markings for phonetic spelling for learners, and is much less reliant on garbled loanwords.
- jack1243star 9y ago
  If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. And the Japanese use Latin characters to mark pronunciations also, minus the tone markings. (Let me introduce you to -- bopomofo)
  - azernik 9y ago
    I'm talking about the Chinese loanwords; I agree, the English and generally European loanwords are written phonetically and are pronounced consistently.
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    English loanwords are only a tiny part of either language. The parent was pointing out that in Chinese 生 is always sheng, while in Japanese it can be any of sei, shou, san, nama, ikiru, ikeru, ikasu, umu and 50-odd more readings depending on context. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F
  - rangibaby 9y ago
    > If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni. Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store > Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice". 米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)
jhedwards 9y ago
There are many things about Chinese which are very easy, in particular the grammar and the fact that many words are constructed by logical combinations of smaller semantic units. There's nothing easy about Japanese IMO, it has extremely complex grammar with standard and non-standard inflections, it uses a mix of two different alphabets and Chinese characters, and the Chinese characters often have multiple different readings. Chinese has a big learning curve because of the role of tones and context, but once you get over the hump it's a pretty simple language.
- jack1243star 9y ago
  The Japanese grammar is way more consistent (almost without exceptions) then all western languages. And in Chinese you get multiple pronunciations for the same character all the time!
  - SerLava 9y ago
    Yeah except for counters. Those god forsaken counters. You can't just say five pencils. You have to say 5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil Go hon enpitsu The pattern for which is Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc. They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count apples. Or demigods the same way they count flat objects. Small round objects and military brigades would obviously be counted the same way though. Obviously. There's also a unique counter specifically for armed naval vessels and slices of fish on top of balls of rice. And one just for straw mats. And one for graves, CPUs, wreaths, and dams. And while small animals and arthropods have one counter, and large animals have another counter, you count butterflies using the counter for large animals. Oh and the first 10, 14th, 20th and 24th days of the month essentially have unique names. I knew a native Japanese guy who spent 4 years mostly away from Japan, and he started to have trouble remembering the days of the month.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker. At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more readily snap into place. More useful than memorizing generic masc./feminine/neuter for most Indo-European languages.
rangibaby 9y ago
The "internal sense" is that they are both derived from kanji: Hiragana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana_origin.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana... Katakana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana_origine.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana... Kanji isn't that hard if you are realistic about how large of a task it is. Japanese children spend 10 years learning kanji at school and that is their native language.

smallnamespace 9y ago

They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese. Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g. か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.

timr 9y ago

"And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going." Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway. Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns. Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.

hudibras 9y ago
Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think. That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class... The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough. https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/dp/1568365268/ https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...
- timr 9y ago
  There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them. (Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)
  - dastbe 9y ago
    And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.
    - timr 9y ago
      Wellll...I don't know Chinese and have never studied in China, so I can't speculate in that domain. But I wouldn't be so quick to infer specific techniques from their memorization speed -- they're fluent in a very similar written language, and it's much faster to learn things (in any language) when you're fluent. They also grew up in a...well, let's call it a memorization-intensive learning environment. The only things I can say with confidence are: * focus on words * learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency * learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do That's really my complete set of advice on the subject.

azernik 9y ago

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the Japanese heard them, and they often have different shades of meaning. Chinese, on the other hand, uses only one writing system in any given body of text, uses the Latin alphabet with tone markings for phonetic spelling for learners, and is much less reliant on garbled loanwords.

jack1243star 9y ago
If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. And the Japanese use Latin characters to mark pronunciations also, minus the tone markings. (Let me introduce you to -- bopomofo)
- azernik 9y ago
  I'm talking about the Chinese loanwords; I agree, the English and generally European loanwords are written phonetically and are pronounced consistently.
- jpatokal 9y ago
  English loanwords are only a tiny part of either language. The parent was pointing out that in Chinese 生 is always sheng, while in Japanese it can be any of sei, shou, san, nama, ikiru, ikeru, ikasu, umu and 50-odd more readings depending on context. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F
- rangibaby 9y ago
  > If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni. Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store > Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice". 米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)

jhedwards 9y ago

There are many things about Chinese which are very easy, in particular the grammar and the fact that many words are constructed by logical combinations of smaller semantic units. There's nothing easy about Japanese IMO, it has extremely complex grammar with standard and non-standard inflections, it uses a mix of two different alphabets and Chinese characters, and the Chinese characters often have multiple different readings. Chinese has a big learning curve because of the role of tones and context, but once you get over the hump it's a pretty simple language.

jack1243star 9y ago
The Japanese grammar is way more consistent (almost without exceptions) then all western languages. And in Chinese you get multiple pronunciations for the same character all the time!
- SerLava 9y ago
  Yeah except for counters. Those god forsaken counters. You can't just say five pencils. You have to say 5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil Go hon enpitsu The pattern for which is Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc. They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count apples. Or demigods the same way they count flat objects. Small round objects and military brigades would obviously be counted the same way though. Obviously. There's also a unique counter specifically for armed naval vessels and slices of fish on top of balls of rice. And one just for straw mats. And one for graves, CPUs, wreaths, and dams. And while small animals and arthropods have one counter, and large animals have another counter, you count butterflies using the counter for large animals. Oh and the first 10, 14th, 20th and 24th days of the month essentially have unique names. I knew a native Japanese guy who spent 4 years mostly away from Japan, and he started to have trouble remembering the days of the month.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker. At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more readily snap into place. More useful than memorizing generic masc./feminine/neuter for most Indo-European languages.

rangibaby 9y ago

The "internal sense" is that they are both derived from kanji: Hiragana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana_origin.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana... Katakana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana_origine.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana... Kanji isn't that hard if you are realistic about how large of a task it is. Japanese children spend 10 years learning kanji at school and that is their native language.