19 ms·

What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

Tade0 6y ago
That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.
  - Kliment 6y ago
    While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in many western languages too. Here's an example in English. Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not. Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that are specific to one or several. There are many other words like that, and you find things like this in almost every language family.
    - smogcutter 6y ago
      For example, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a valid English sentence.
      - naniwaduni 6y ago
        Syntactically defensible, sure. But what anglophone not seeking to deliberately confuse an interlocutor would call bison from upstate New York "Buffalo buffalo"? What action could such bison perform on other bison that can reasonably be construed as "buffaloing"? Semantics and pragmatics are part of the language, too.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    That's the key difference between ideograms (based on pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based writings (alphabet and the like). Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.
  - jaclaz 6y ago
    Can you explain better? There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages. As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen" is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice double entendre). Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to hilarious translations.
      - howlgarnish 6y ago
        拉麺 is "pulled noodles", which is meaning, not sound. 麺 on its own already means noodles, but in China it has become ambiguous because it was simplified down to 面, which also means "face". (And that's the sole meaning in Japanese for the character, hence the confusion in the video.)
- moogleii 6y ago
  That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  The first question is funny because the pronunciation of the last 2 characters (拉面 - lamian) is why Japanese call Chinese noodles 'ramen'.
  - moogleii 6y ago
    I found their bewilderment a little puzzling as well, but I believe it's due to the simplification of the last character. If you watch the older Canto/Traditional version of the video, the Japanese folk get the ramen part immediately.
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    Japanese uses an alternate simplification (麺) for the sense of noodles, and doesn't merge it with 面. Generally you wouldn't expect Japanese person to have exceptional difficulty recognizing 拉麺, though.
dfalzone 6y ago
Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.
- stanrivers 6y ago
  Thank you for this; I wish we could be friends
  - stanrivers 6y ago
    Ok - this chain is interesting; didn’t have this background; I deserve the downvote. Thanks for context... will go read some more
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother to verify first. I guess at this point similarities between the two languages are assumed to be a result of regional influence?
  - eindiran 6y ago
    Many mainstream linguists have been against the hypothesis since the 1950s, but there are still plenty of linguists who contend that the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian families form a family; a smaller number have arguments in support of the stronger claim that the Koreanic, Ainu and Japanese–Ryukyuan languages are connected as well. See eg: [0] Vovin set out to demonstrate that the latter, stronger claim was true and ended up writing this: [1] Arguably, the biggest blow struck to the hypothesis in the last 15-20 years came when Vovin, previously a supporter of the hypothesis, wrote "The end of the Altaic controversy"[2]. Among the more notable arguments in it is that the non-traditional methods[3] used to argue that Altaic is a family are rejected by traditional comparative linguistics because they overweight lexical comparisons. This was a rather prescient point, as some of the methods that have developed since then that have been used to argue in favor of the Altaic hypothesis suffer from this problem quite badly; this is perhaps especially true of the Bayesian phylogenetic inference, sometimes called Bayesian phylolinguistics when applied to historical linguistics. With this technique, used in eg [0], it is pretty hard to argue that this method wouldn't overweight cognates and loan words gained through contact unless you specifically control for that, which will cause you to end up erroneously marking sprachbunds as true families. See [4] for another usage of the technique, this time to support the Dravidian family, which is already very very well support by traditional comparative methods. All of this ultimately points to what I think is the real answer to the issue; outside of some arguments about archaeology that I don't have enough background to evaluate [5], most of the shared bits (shared pronouns, lexical stuff) between the languages here exist because of contact. The languages here, if they belong grouped at all, should be grouped as a sprachbund, not as a family. The possibility that there is a true family with "micro-Altaic" is small, but I think it is still a much greater possibility than the "strong" hypothesis (w/ Japanese, Korean, etc). This paper [6] has a very cool approach to evaluating the weaker form of the hypothesis that I think most HN readers would find interesting. So to answer your question, yes, I believe your assessment is correct, and mainstream historical linguistics does as well. But I wouldn't go so far as to say there are any nails in the Altaic hypothesis' coffin just yet. [0] https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185 https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185 [1] https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTRABLY_RELATED_TO_ALTAIC_OR_KOREAN_pre_publication_version_ https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTR... [2] https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_controversy https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_contr... [3] "non-traditional" = anything outside the comparative method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics). See eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_the_uralaltaic_hypothesis_largely_rejected/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_... [4] https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/file_2564936/shh973.pdf https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/fil... [5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/tracing-population-movements-in-ancient-east-asia-through-the-linguistics-and-archaeology-of-textile-production/440213710888C5D9488901B27E047D03 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s... [6] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf
stanrivers 6y ago
This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got married after we both moved back to the States. If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner. Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they can’t have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages. Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago. The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  > The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?
  - naniwaduni 6y ago
    Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.
forkLding 6y ago
Just some context on Simplified Chinese, the origin of Simplified Chinese came before the communist years and was mainly aimed at modernizing the Chinese written language and making it easy to learn for the general population as the many strokes to write a character in Traditional Chinese was making it hard to spread knowledge and increase literacy rates among the poorer and rural populations in China.
silicon2401 6y ago
Interesting article, though it feels pretty unpolished, like a step above someone's train of thought. Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish. Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're a Korean speaker and vice versa? Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would feel like.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much easier to guess the meaning versus french or german. I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers. In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.
  - otoburb 6y ago
    >>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.* I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers. My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V" and "Z" sounds.
  - silicon2401 6y ago
    yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is French/German. I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line up with your account as well.
HuShifang 6y ago
One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.
- mrob 6y ago
  Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being commonly used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode displays ㅈ/ㅅ, but they're not written like that. It's a common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect characters to be written like they're displayed on a computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written here. [0] [0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Orders-consonants.jpg https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Or...
    - brenschluss 6y ago
      This is a stylistic/typeface difference between sans-serif and serif text. Some people do write like that, most people don't.
      - andrewzah 6y ago
        I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings. It's always been the handwritten version as depicted. ㅅ almost looks like 人 [0] (인) on computers (looks like 1 stroke to beginners), but when handwriting it is 2 strokes. ㅈ is also 2 strokes (personal handwriting aside) and looks rather different. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9
danso 6y ago
Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
- elboru 6y ago
  That’s amazing, I’m not a native English speaker and that sounds exactly like when you are listening to a song in English but you are not understanding the lyric.
  - bane 6y ago
    Another one that's quite good https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY
microcolonel 6y ago
I agree that 新字体 is preferable to 简体字 for exactly the etymological reason you cite, the thing with 言 only being simplified when it is a radical in 簡體字 really irritates me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me I practice with 正體字 most often despite being more familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes 新字體 > 正體字 > 簡體字. P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.
- bgee 6y ago
  Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0]. I can provide a few examples where characters are more "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: 國 vs 国，黨 vs 党 [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhuanet.com/theory/2008-06/03/content_8304343.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhu...
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed. As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.
    - bgee 6y ago
      玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89 https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89
interestica 6y ago
Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know what you're saying. Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
- em-bee 6y ago
  i learned hangul characters by reading street signs while travelling through south korea. most signs were both in hangul and latin characters. then i found a keyboard typing practice program where i patched the letter images and replaced them with the appropriate hangul character parts, to practice typing. this skill came in handy when i needed to write down some korean words when hearing them.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) is what the King Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal, thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle Korean despite of its failure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun
  - interestica 6y ago
    Thank you for this! The wiki page I linked to definitely doesn't cover this aspect well (specifically, Hunminjeongeum) and I learned something new. Of relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye
ilamont 6y ago
but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional forms. Maybe someone knows the history? Also, regarding this statement: 臺 (Korea/Taiwan) 台 (Japan/China) In Taiwan, the latter form of tai (台) is used 99% of the time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (臺) AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money. Street signs for famous buildings all use 台, i.e. 台北101, 台北松山機場, etc.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  Simplified forms have been common in handwriting for centuries. Korean hanja was also simplified in handwriting when it was in use, even though it never got standardized. The "adoption" thus mostly means the standardization of such established glyphs even in print. (This also partly explains why the second reform in the mainland China [1] wasn't received well and retracted at the end.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
- spongepoc 6y ago
  >Maybe someone knows the history? You'll need to look up shinjitai, which consists of the simplified characters adopted in Japan, which are different to the ones used in China.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  That's a pretty extreme exaggeration. 臺 is on many, many famous buildings: https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/20200229000054.jpg https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/2...
  - ilamont 6y ago
    The example you cited is operated by a central government entity, the Taiwan Railways Administration, and is used in a few places inside and outside the station, just as every other central government building uses the traditional form. On every other map and sign it's 台北車站. The tickets printed by the TRA even use 台北 or 台北車站.
kazinator 6y ago
> Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary present in English This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners brought their language, mixed it with the local language and evolved a new one out of that.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least. The original immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of Chinese writing by Japan’s learned elites. Any introduction to Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    I'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks about any writing system at all, let alone any specific timeline regarding the development of literacy.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Even without attributing the Chinese writing system to the immigrants from China, your post above does not contribute to the discussion. Japanese is genetically unrelated to Chinese and typologically different from it. What the Yayoi immigrants from the mainland originally brought with them bore no resemblance to the Chinese language. That the Japanese were able to use Chinese words and Chinese characters for their own purposes and some similarities between the two languages arose as the OP mentions, has absolutely nothing to do with pre-Proto-Japonic speakers coming from the mainland. All that meaningful Chinese–Japanese interaction happened many centuries later.
chaostheory 6y ago
imo Traditional written Chinese (what the Japanese call Kanji and that's used outside of China) is easier than simplified written Chinese. While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. Consequently, you can guess what the word means. Conversely with simplified, there less sub characters, so there's a lot of lost context. Easier to write by hand is also not so much of an advantage anymore given computers. If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional. It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.
- lifthrasiir 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean: are you claiming that... > While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. ..."traditional" characters (which do not equal to Japanese Shinjitai!) is easier to write but harder to read, or... > It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around. ...it's easier to read but harder to write? There is some truth in your claim: simplification does discard some context and can be harder to read. But that's only the case for irregular cases (notable example being 漢 to 汉). In many cases they are highly systematic and phono-semantic roots are preserved (e.g. 訁 to 讠, so no information is lost), or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway (e.g. 飛 to 飞). Pronunciation-based simplification (e.g. 後 after, behind to 后 empress) is debatable, but it also tends to occur in frequently used characters.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Sorry, I didn't realize that the Japanese simplified kanji. > ...it's easier to read but harder to write? Harder to write because you have more lines and characters to draw. Harder to read because there are less sub-characters due to there being less lines. Judging from what you wrote, you probably understand my point just adding it just in case. Yeah, I've been gone a long time and I've been assimilated i.e. I don't read and write often anymore so you're probably right. > or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway This is why I feel it makes it harder, especially for less common words. It's just more unnecessary work.
maple3142 6y ago
Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese: Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese. After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by ですないか... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English. Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as …も…ない and …也…沒… It is easy to find that 訓読み words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin. IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.
- kagevf 6y ago
  音読み is the sound based on the original Chinese pronounciation, and 訓読み is the Japanese pronounciation.
ms1234rth 6y ago
If you know Turkish (or any Central Asian language barring Tajik[not familiar with Persian adjacent languages]), learning Japanese is a breeze because you can translate a Turkish text into Japanese word for word and out comes a perfectly constructed Japanese text. Obviously, it works in the other direction as well. I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having hell of a time untill I came across a Japanese textbook written in Turkish. If you are from Central Asia, you can leverage both of your languages (native Central Asian & Russian) for learning English. It's better to learn English through Russian untill it's time to learn the English tense system at which point you can swith back to your native Central Asian as Russian is not very amenable for learning the English tense system whereas the tenses(rather aspects?) of C.A. languages line up with that of English in almost one to one manner. Thinking about the English tenses through the "Russian mind" was a nightmare untill I realized I already know the tenses through my native Kazakh. Mathematicians never shy away from throwing everything at their disposal at a problem. Acting like them speeds up language acquisition process considerably.
- winter_blue 6y ago
  How close are Turkish and Japanese? I know there is a proposed "Altaic language family"[1], but I'd love to hear the perspective of someone who actually knows two such languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
  - darkhorn 6y ago
    Vowel harmony, no genders, no plurals, agglutinative etc are similar. The only thing you need to learn is new words. The grammatical structure is same. Translation between Indo-European and Altaic is very hard. Translation beween Altaic languages is very easy.
moufestaphio 6y ago
Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did the JLPT as a native English speaker. Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah. As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences: 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China. With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified) I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese. Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite was: 手紙 The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively. In Japanese, it means 'Letter' In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'
- wst_ 6y ago
  > English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers. On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  >In Japanese, it means 'Letter' >In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper' I immediately thought of the toilet hand from Majora's Mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE [You give him a property deed to wipe himself with]
Angeo34 6y ago
The article starts by saying that Japanese and Korean are unrelated to Chinese but two sentences later says that they could be related. Articles like that should literally just be thrown in the bin.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.
- gizmo385 6y ago
  Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)
  - danans 6y ago
    They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic. Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese languages), most languages of Southeast Asia, and all the African languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages Again, it's so broad a grouping, projected so far back in time and based on such weakly detected feature similarities, that it's by no means broadly accepted as a language family in the way that Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, etc are.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Thanks for pointing out the controversy about this.
      - danans 6y ago
        FWIW, I think it's a super interesting hypothesis, but it just doesn't have the same level of data to back it as the accepted language families do.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    this would be a somewhat representative example of such a tree: https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languagetree.gif https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languag... You can find more very easily with a google image search on "human language tree"
xiaodai 6y ago
What abt vietnamese?
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Vietnamese adopted the Latin script in the late 19th century, and Chinese characters are effectively obsolete now. They do still use a lot of Chinese-derived vocabulary, which you can occasionally spot if you squint hard enough. Xã hội chủ nghĩa = 社会主义 she hui zhu yi (socialism).
qlk1123 6y ago
I always consider that the CJKV (Vietnam) or 漢字/Kanji/Hanja (Kanji below) writing system is like CISC, and other alphabet systems are like RISC.
odomojuli 6y ago
To me, the difference almost feels like Chinese is an acoustic instrument that has more flavor in how its played and Japanese feels more like a digital instrument in how its programmed.
dwg 6y ago
I live in Japan and work at a Japanese company. I can't understand Chinese at all. Even though the Japanese version of the Chinese pronunciation is somehow vaguely familiar at times, there is no making any sense of it. I suspect Japanese folks feel the same way so I turned to my right and asked a coworker what Chinese sounds like to him. His answer was ちんぷんかんぷん (gibberish).
- dwg 6y ago
  Just to clarify he did not say this in any sort of derogatory sense, nor do I wish it to be interpreted as such. Just that he can't understand! I think the difference is greater than the author states (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters).
  - Liquid_Fire 6y ago
    > (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters) I understood the article to be talking entirely about the written language. Despite including "and sounds like" in the title, there is barely any discussion of the spoken language.
dboreham 6y ago
Like Dutch to an English speaker?
bane 6y ago
For other languages, there's a pretty interesting youtube channel called ecolinguist that frequently tries to test mutual intelligibility of language pairs to various extents. It's actually quite fascinting. https://youtu.be/m9Dagt3SWoo https://youtu.be/m9Dagt3SWoo
karmasimida 6y ago
Interesting observations. As native Chinese speaker: The Look: 1. Japanese: I like the kanji, it is very recognizable, even the character set is different. Most Chinese will have no problem reading traditional Chinese characters, though somewhat slower. The rest...not so much, kanas are my biggest headache. 2. Korean: First thing I noticed is the presence of circle, which is not part of Chinese radicals until very recently. Because it looks like bubbles, so it looks somewhat ... cute? No meaning can be inferred beyond that. Also the use of spaces are noticeable. The Sound: 1. Japanese: Fast. Less variation in the speech itself. Notice the presence of pitch. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese 2. Korean: Not as fast as Japanese, but still faster than Chinese. A lot of unfamiliar sounds that are absent in Chinese pronunciation. Sometimes I would be able to find one word or two that sounds like Chinese and makes sense in the context, but the rest is just foreign. Question to Korean speakers: Do you guys recognize each individual Hangul character's meaning (under the context of the word of course) if that word has a Chinese origin? Or the word is recognized as whole. For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?
- yongjik 6y ago
  > For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul? It depends. For this particular example, I think most Koreans will treat 부동산 as a single word meaning "real estate", because it's not a very productive combination: the alternative 동산 (moveable properties?) is a legal term which is much less common, and 산(産) as "property" isn't common either. On the other hand, a word like 고밀도화(高密度化 - densification) is transparently decomposable to 고(高 high) + 밀도(密度 density) + 화(化 -ify). Few people can write it down in hanja (I just copy-pasted from dictionary), but most people will immediately recognize its meaning, even if they've never seen the word before.
  - karmasimida 6y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. Appreciated. I think this answers part of my question as how modern Korean create new words/concepts, if not via English loanwords. So those word roots could still be applied in certain cases.
totetsu 6y ago
When using the camera feature of the Google translate app, I got the idea for making something similar, but instead of translating, it would just blur out all the words that a certain person couldn't understand. That way people designing accessible spaces could get an idea of how other people experience the information in them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU

SwiftyBug 6y ago
It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.
- Kliment 6y ago
  While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in many western languages too. Here's an example in English. Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not. Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that are specific to one or several. There are many other words like that, and you find things like this in almost every language family.
  - smogcutter 6y ago
    For example, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a valid English sentence.
    - naniwaduni 6y ago
      Syntactically defensible, sure. But what anglophone not seeking to deliberately confuse an interlocutor would call bison from upstate New York "Buffalo buffalo"? What action could such bison perform on other bison that can reasonably be construed as "buffaloing"? Semantics and pragmatics are part of the language, too.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  That's the key difference between ideograms (based on pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based writings (alphabet and the like). Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  Can you explain better? There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages. As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen" is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice double entendre). Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to hilarious translations.
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      拉麺 is "pulled noodles", which is meaning, not sound. 麺 on its own already means noodles, but in China it has become ambiguous because it was simplified down to 面, which also means "face". (And that's the sole meaning in Japanese for the character, hence the confusion in the video.)
moogleii 6y ago
That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw
mytailorisrich 6y ago
The first question is funny because the pronunciation of the last 2 characters (拉面 - lamian) is why Japanese call Chinese noodles 'ramen'.
- moogleii 6y ago
  I found their bewilderment a little puzzling as well, but I believe it's due to the simplification of the last character. If you watch the older Canto/Traditional version of the video, the Japanese folk get the ramen part immediately.
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  Japanese uses an alternate simplification (麺) for the sense of noodles, and doesn't merge it with 面. Generally you wouldn't expect Japanese person to have exceptional difficulty recognizing 拉麺, though.

dfalzone 6y ago

Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.

stanrivers 6y ago
Thank you for this; I wish we could be friends
- stanrivers 6y ago
  Ok - this chain is interesting; didn’t have this background; I deserve the downvote. Thanks for context... will go read some more
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother to verify first. I guess at this point similarities between the two languages are assumed to be a result of regional influence?
- eindiran 6y ago
  Many mainstream linguists have been against the hypothesis since the 1950s, but there are still plenty of linguists who contend that the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian families form a family; a smaller number have arguments in support of the stronger claim that the Koreanic, Ainu and Japanese–Ryukyuan languages are connected as well. See eg: [0] Vovin set out to demonstrate that the latter, stronger claim was true and ended up writing this: [1] Arguably, the biggest blow struck to the hypothesis in the last 15-20 years came when Vovin, previously a supporter of the hypothesis, wrote "The end of the Altaic controversy"[2]. Among the more notable arguments in it is that the non-traditional methods[3] used to argue that Altaic is a family are rejected by traditional comparative linguistics because they overweight lexical comparisons. This was a rather prescient point, as some of the methods that have developed since then that have been used to argue in favor of the Altaic hypothesis suffer from this problem quite badly; this is perhaps especially true of the Bayesian phylogenetic inference, sometimes called Bayesian phylolinguistics when applied to historical linguistics. With this technique, used in eg [0], it is pretty hard to argue that this method wouldn't overweight cognates and loan words gained through contact unless you specifically control for that, which will cause you to end up erroneously marking sprachbunds as true families. See [4] for another usage of the technique, this time to support the Dravidian family, which is already very very well support by traditional comparative methods. All of this ultimately points to what I think is the real answer to the issue; outside of some arguments about archaeology that I don't have enough background to evaluate [5], most of the shared bits (shared pronouns, lexical stuff) between the languages here exist because of contact. The languages here, if they belong grouped at all, should be grouped as a sprachbund, not as a family. The possibility that there is a true family with "micro-Altaic" is small, but I think it is still a much greater possibility than the "strong" hypothesis (w/ Japanese, Korean, etc). This paper [6] has a very cool approach to evaluating the weaker form of the hypothesis that I think most HN readers would find interesting. So to answer your question, yes, I believe your assessment is correct, and mainstream historical linguistics does as well. But I wouldn't go so far as to say there are any nails in the Altaic hypothesis' coffin just yet. [0] https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185 https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185 [1] https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTRABLY_RELATED_TO_ALTAIC_OR_KOREAN_pre_publication_version_ https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTR... [2] https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_controversy https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_contr... [3] "non-traditional" = anything outside the comparative method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics). See eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_the_uralaltaic_hypothesis_largely_rejected/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_... [4] https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/file_2564936/shh973.pdf https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/fil... [5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/tracing-population-movements-in-ancient-east-asia-through-the-linguistics-and-archaeology-of-textile-production/440213710888C5D9488901B27E047D03 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s... [6] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf

stanrivers 6y ago

This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got married after we both moved back to the States. If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner. Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they can’t have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages. Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago. The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!

philliphaydon 6y ago
> The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.

forkLding 6y ago

Just some context on Simplified Chinese, the origin of Simplified Chinese came before the communist years and was mainly aimed at modernizing the Chinese written language and making it easy to learn for the general population as the many strokes to write a character in Traditional Chinese was making it hard to spread knowledge and increase literacy rates among the poorer and rural populations in China.

silicon2401 6y ago

Interesting article, though it feels pretty unpolished, like a step above someone's train of thought. Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish. Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're a Korean speaker and vice versa? Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would feel like.

andrewzah 6y ago
Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much easier to guess the meaning versus french or german. I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers. In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.
- otoburb 6y ago
  >>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.* I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers. My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V" and "Z" sounds.
- silicon2401 6y ago
  yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is French/German. I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line up with your account as well.

HuShifang 6y ago

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.

mrob 6y ago
Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being commonly used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji
- andrewzah 6y ago
  Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode displays ㅈ/ㅅ, but they're not written like that. It's a common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect characters to be written like they're displayed on a computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written here. [0] [0]: https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Orders-consonants.jpg https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Or...
  - brenschluss 6y ago
    This is a stylistic/typeface difference between sans-serif and serif text. Some people do write like that, most people don't.
    - andrewzah 6y ago
      I have never seen a native korean write ㅈ/ㅅ as displayed by most fonts, at least in non-formal settings. It's always been the handwritten version as depicted. ㅅ almost looks like 人 [0] (인) on computers (looks like 1 stroke to beginners), but when handwriting it is 2 strokes. ㅈ is also 2 strokes (personal handwriting aside) and looks rather different. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_9

danso 6y ago

Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

elboru 6y ago
That’s amazing, I’m not a native English speaker and that sounds exactly like when you are listening to a song in English but you are not understanding the lyric.
- bane 6y ago
  Another one that's quite good https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY

microcolonel 6y ago

I agree that 新字体 is preferable to 简体字 for exactly the etymological reason you cite, the thing with 言 only being simplified when it is a radical in 簡體字 really irritates me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me I practice with 正體字 most often despite being more familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes 新字體 > 正體字 > 簡體字. P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.

bgee 6y ago
Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0]. I can provide a few examples where characters are more "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: 國 vs 国，黨 vs 党 [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhuanet.com/theory/2008-06/03/content_8304343.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhu...
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed. As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.
  - bgee 6y ago
    玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89 https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

interestica 6y ago

Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know what you're saying. Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

em-bee 6y ago
i learned hangul characters by reading street signs while travelling through south korea. most signs were both in hangul and latin characters. then i found a keyboard typing practice program where i patched the letter images and replaced them with the appropriate hangul character parts, to practice typing. this skill came in handy when i needed to write down some korean words when hearing them.
lifthrasiir 6y ago
To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) is what the King Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal, thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle Korean despite of its failure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun
- interestica 6y ago
  Thank you for this! The wiki page I linked to definitely doesn't cover this aspect well (specifically, Hunminjeongeum) and I learned something new. Of relevance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye

ilamont 6y ago

but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional forms. Maybe someone knows the history? Also, regarding this statement: 臺 (Korea/Taiwan) 台 (Japan/China) In Taiwan, the latter form of tai (台) is used 99% of the time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (臺) AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money. Street signs for famous buildings all use 台, i.e. 台北101, 台北松山機場, etc.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
Simplified forms have been common in handwriting for centuries. Korean hanja was also simplified in handwriting when it was in use, even though it never got standardized. The "adoption" thus mostly means the standardization of such established glyphs even in print. (This also partly explains why the second reform in the mainland China [1] wasn't received well and retracted at the end.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...
spongepoc 6y ago
>Maybe someone knows the history? You'll need to look up shinjitai, which consists of the simplified characters adopted in Japan, which are different to the ones used in China.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
That's a pretty extreme exaggeration. 臺 is on many, many famous buildings: https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/20200229000054.jpg https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/2...
- ilamont 6y ago
  The example you cited is operated by a central government entity, the Taiwan Railways Administration, and is used in a few places inside and outside the station, just as every other central government building uses the traditional form. On every other map and sign it's 台北車站. The tickets printed by the TRA even use 台北 or 台北車站.

kazinator 6y ago

> Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary present in English This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners brought their language, mixed it with the local language and evolved a new one out of that.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least. The original immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of Chinese writing by Japan’s learned elites. Any introduction to Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.
- kazinator 6y ago
  I'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks about any writing system at all, let alone any specific timeline regarding the development of literacy.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Even without attributing the Chinese writing system to the immigrants from China, your post above does not contribute to the discussion. Japanese is genetically unrelated to Chinese and typologically different from it. What the Yayoi immigrants from the mainland originally brought with them bore no resemblance to the Chinese language. That the Japanese were able to use Chinese words and Chinese characters for their own purposes and some similarities between the two languages arose as the OP mentions, has absolutely nothing to do with pre-Proto-Japonic speakers coming from the mainland. All that meaningful Chinese–Japanese interaction happened many centuries later.

chaostheory 6y ago

imo Traditional written Chinese (what the Japanese call Kanji and that's used outside of China) is easier than simplified written Chinese. While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. Consequently, you can guess what the word means. Conversely with simplified, there less sub characters, so there's a lot of lost context. Easier to write by hand is also not so much of an advantage anymore given computers. If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional. It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.

lifthrasiir 6y ago
I'm not sure what you mean: are you claiming that... > While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. ..."traditional" characters (which do not equal to Japanese Shinjitai!) is easier to write but harder to read, or... > It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around. ...it's easier to read but harder to write? There is some truth in your claim: simplification does discard some context and can be harder to read. But that's only the case for irregular cases (notable example being 漢 to 汉). In many cases they are highly systematic and phono-semantic roots are preserved (e.g. 訁 to 讠, so no information is lost), or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway (e.g. 飛 to 飞). Pronunciation-based simplification (e.g. 後 after, behind to 后 empress) is debatable, but it also tends to occur in frequently used characters.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Sorry, I didn't realize that the Japanese simplified kanji. > ...it's easier to read but harder to write? Harder to write because you have more lines and characters to draw. Harder to read because there are less sub-characters due to there being less lines. Judging from what you wrote, you probably understand my point just adding it just in case. Yeah, I've been gone a long time and I've been assimilated i.e. I don't read and write often anymore so you're probably right. > or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway This is why I feel it makes it harder, especially for less common words. It's just more unnecessary work.

maple3142 6y ago

Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese: Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese. After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by ですないか... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English. Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as …も…ない and …也…沒… It is easy to find that 訓読み words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin. IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.

kagevf 6y ago
音読み is the sound based on the original Chinese pronounciation, and 訓読み is the Japanese pronounciation.

ms1234rth 6y ago

If you know Turkish (or any Central Asian language barring Tajik[not familiar with Persian adjacent languages]), learning Japanese is a breeze because you can translate a Turkish text into Japanese word for word and out comes a perfectly constructed Japanese text. Obviously, it works in the other direction as well. I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having hell of a time untill I came across a Japanese textbook written in Turkish. If you are from Central Asia, you can leverage both of your languages (native Central Asian & Russian) for learning English. It's better to learn English through Russian untill it's time to learn the English tense system at which point you can swith back to your native Central Asian as Russian is not very amenable for learning the English tense system whereas the tenses(rather aspects?) of C.A. languages line up with that of English in almost one to one manner. Thinking about the English tenses through the "Russian mind" was a nightmare untill I realized I already know the tenses through my native Kazakh. Mathematicians never shy away from throwing everything at their disposal at a problem. Acting like them speeds up language acquisition process considerably.

winter_blue 6y ago
How close are Turkish and Japanese? I know there is a proposed "Altaic language family"[1], but I'd love to hear the perspective of someone who actually knows two such languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
- darkhorn 6y ago
  Vowel harmony, no genders, no plurals, agglutinative etc are similar. The only thing you need to learn is new words. The grammatical structure is same. Translation between Indo-European and Altaic is very hard. Translation beween Altaic languages is very easy.

moufestaphio 6y ago

Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did the JLPT as a native English speaker. Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah. As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences: 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China. With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified) I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese. Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite was: 手紙 The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively. In Japanese, it means 'Letter' In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'

wst_ 6y ago
> English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers. On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.
krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
>In Japanese, it means 'Letter' >In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper' I immediately thought of the toilet hand from Majora's Mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE [You give him a property deed to wipe himself with]

Angeo34 6y ago

The article starts by saying that Japanese and Korean are unrelated to Chinese but two sentences later says that they could be related. Articles like that should literally just be thrown in the bin.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.

gizmo385 6y ago
Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)
- danans 6y ago
  They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic. Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese languages), most languages of Southeast Asia, and all the African languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages Again, it's so broad a grouping, projected so far back in time and based on such weakly detected feature similarities, that it's by no means broadly accepted as a language family in the way that Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, etc are.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Thanks for pointing out the controversy about this.
    - danans 6y ago
      FWIW, I think it's a super interesting hypothesis, but it just doesn't have the same level of data to back it as the accepted language families do.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  this would be a somewhat representative example of such a tree: https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languagetree.gif https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languag... You can find more very easily with a google image search on "human language tree"

xiaodai 6y ago

What abt vietnamese?

howlgarnish 6y ago
Vietnamese adopted the Latin script in the late 19th century, and Chinese characters are effectively obsolete now. They do still use a lot of Chinese-derived vocabulary, which you can occasionally spot if you squint hard enough. Xã hội chủ nghĩa = 社会主义 she hui zhu yi (socialism).

qlk1123 6y ago

I always consider that the CJKV (Vietnam) or 漢字/Kanji/Hanja (Kanji below) writing system is like CISC, and other alphabet systems are like RISC.

odomojuli 6y ago

To me, the difference almost feels like Chinese is an acoustic instrument that has more flavor in how its played and Japanese feels more like a digital instrument in how its programmed.

dwg 6y ago

I live in Japan and work at a Japanese company. I can't understand Chinese at all. Even though the Japanese version of the Chinese pronunciation is somehow vaguely familiar at times, there is no making any sense of it. I suspect Japanese folks feel the same way so I turned to my right and asked a coworker what Chinese sounds like to him. His answer was ちんぷんかんぷん (gibberish).

dwg 6y ago
Just to clarify he did not say this in any sort of derogatory sense, nor do I wish it to be interpreted as such. Just that he can't understand! I think the difference is greater than the author states (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters).
- Liquid_Fire 6y ago
  > (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters) I understood the article to be talking entirely about the written language. Despite including "and sounds like" in the title, there is barely any discussion of the spoken language.

dboreham 6y ago

Like Dutch to an English speaker?

bane 6y ago

For other languages, there's a pretty interesting youtube channel called ecolinguist that frequently tries to test mutual intelligibility of language pairs to various extents. It's actually quite fascinting. https://youtu.be/m9Dagt3SWoo https://youtu.be/m9Dagt3SWoo

karmasimida 6y ago

Interesting observations. As native Chinese speaker: The Look: 1. Japanese: I like the kanji, it is very recognizable, even the character set is different. Most Chinese will have no problem reading traditional Chinese characters, though somewhat slower. The rest...not so much, kanas are my biggest headache. 2. Korean: First thing I noticed is the presence of circle, which is not part of Chinese radicals until very recently. Because it looks like bubbles, so it looks somewhat ... cute? No meaning can be inferred beyond that. Also the use of spaces are noticeable. The Sound: 1. Japanese: Fast. Less variation in the speech itself. Notice the presence of pitch. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese 2. Korean: Not as fast as Japanese, but still faster than Chinese. A lot of unfamiliar sounds that are absent in Chinese pronunciation. Sometimes I would be able to find one word or two that sounds like Chinese and makes sense in the context, but the rest is just foreign. Question to Korean speakers: Do you guys recognize each individual Hangul character's meaning (under the context of the word of course) if that word has a Chinese origin? Or the word is recognized as whole. For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?

yongjik 6y ago
> For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul? It depends. For this particular example, I think most Koreans will treat 부동산 as a single word meaning "real estate", because it's not a very productive combination: the alternative 동산 (moveable properties?) is a legal term which is much less common, and 산(産) as "property" isn't common either. On the other hand, a word like 고밀도화(高密度化 - densification) is transparently decomposable to 고(高 high) + 밀도(密度 density) + 화(化 -ify). Few people can write it down in hanja (I just copy-pasted from dictionary), but most people will immediately recognize its meaning, even if they've never seen the word before.
- karmasimida 6y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. Appreciated. I think this answers part of my question as how modern Korean create new words/concepts, if not via English loanwords. So those word roots could still be applied in certain cases.

totetsu 6y ago

When using the camera feature of the Google translate app, I got the idea for making something similar, but instead of translating, it would just blur out all the words that a certain person couldn't understand. That way people designing accessible spaces could get an idea of how other people experience the information in them.

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