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Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which

by Jun8 15y ago

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.

idlewords 15y ago
What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.
- anghyflawn 15y ago
  Uh, really? Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories? Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax? That's just off the top of my head But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on. I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.
- tty 15y ago
  I'd say the fact that Japanese is a head-last language is enough to complicate the matter greatly for any non-native speaker of Japanese.
slowpoke 15y ago
Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. This comparison is flawed. The Latin alphabet is phonetic and carries no inherent meaning, while the Chinese Hanzi (which were, historically, adapted in Japan and slightly modified/simplified since then, and are called Kanji there) rely on meaning, and each character can have multiple ways to be pronounced. Actually, Chinese and Japanese people could read (or rather, infer meaning from) texts the respective other has written if they use the subset of characters that both know (Hanzi ∩ Kanji, if you'd like ;) ), even though they could never communicate verbally. It'd be a bit like showing each other drawings of things that both know and understand, yet have completely different names for. Comparing both on a purely grammatical/syntactical level, of course, is pretty meaningless.

by Jun8 15y ago

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. I don't know what exactly the OP means by "vanilla" in this context, these languages are anything but vanilla! One could argue that perhaps English grammar is vanilla because it has developed certain creole-like characteristics due to various pressures during its history: Compared to most other languages in the IE family, its grammar is quite simplified, it's lost most of its complexity.

idlewords 15y ago

What I mean by vanilla is that neither language has grammatical features that are particularly difficult for an English speaker to internalize.

anghyflawn 15y ago
Uh, really? Japanese: topic instead of subject marking, deference forms, completely different morphological categories? Chinese: productive verb serialization, very different syntax? That's just off the top of my head But that's not the point really. Learning any language well is mind-bending for any speaker of another language. It does help if the languages are different (I remember very vividly the click that went in my head in high school when I was taking English, Chinese and Hebrew simultaneously... that's how I ended up in linguistics grad school), but different people have their minds bent by completely different things. I mean, root-and-pattern morphology is really cool when it's that regular, but if you think of it it's not horribly different from Germanic strong verbs (write-wrote-written). Weird agreement patterns? Well, Welsh only uses the 3pl verb forms with a pronominal subject, so "they they-went" but "people he-went" (as, for that matter, do some varieties of English). And so on. I mean, sure, whatever floats your boat, and it's awesome that studying Arabic can be so fulfilling; I've had the same experience with Welsh. But at the end of the day all languages bend your mind, and I don't think there can be an objective metric. They are just hard.
tty 15y ago
I'd say the fact that Japanese is a head-last language is enough to complicate the matter greatly for any non-native speaker of Japanese.

slowpoke 15y ago

Putting Chinese and Japanese (I guess because their writing systems are kind of similar) is similar to, similar to saying the same for English and Basque (which, like Japanese is agglutinative) because they both use the Latin alphabet. This comparison is flawed. The Latin alphabet is phonetic and carries no inherent meaning, while the Chinese Hanzi (which were, historically, adapted in Japan and slightly modified/simplified since then, and are called Kanji there) rely on meaning, and each character can have multiple ways to be pronounced. Actually, Chinese and Japanese people could read (or rather, infer meaning from) texts the respective other has written if they use the subset of characters that both know (Hanzi ∩ Kanji, if you'd like ;) ), even though they could never communicate verbally. It'd be a bit like showing each other drawings of things that both know and understand, yet have completely different names for. Comparing both on a purely grammatical/syntactical level, of course, is pretty meaningless.