4 ms·

Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) w

by sshine 5y ago

Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation. As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-for-a-native-Chinese-speaker?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...) Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one. Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
- nicolas_t 5y ago
  > Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead. Here's the opening of a Latin poem: Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato Pyrrha sub antro? Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved: What many slender you boy in rose soak liquid press odor pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave? Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])
    - DFHippie 5y ago
      Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other. Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what: > [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis. > [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”) Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
- mkl 5y ago
  Japanese has a huge number of words derived from Chinese: "Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as kango (漢語), meaning 'Chinese words'. Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are kango, with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
- mchaver 5y ago
  They are not genetically related, but they have been in contact with each other for a long time. Japanese has borrowed lots of vocabulary that have been borrowed under regular sound patterns (depends when they borrowed it). Same goes for Korean and Vietnamese. Even if you are an illiterate Chinese speaker, you can make up Japanese vocabulary by converting Chinese words under these patterns, it may be hit or miss, but shared vocabulary makes it easier to learn. Add some basic grammar and you can start communicating pretty quickly. I know plenty of Chinese speakers that learned Japanese very quickly, but failed to learn English well. Other factors that make language learning quicker: access to materials (lots of Chinese speakers consume Japanese content, many classes available, there are a lot more books to learn Japanese for Chinese speakers), access to native speakers (close to Japanese, many exchanges students), friends and relatives that learned the language (if they can do it I can do it too), economic incentives, etc. Korean speakers also have an easy time with Japanese vs other languages even though they are not related. Shared Chinese vocabulary, simple phonology and similar grammar patterns.
- unhammer 5y ago
  There's (linguistic) genetic relatedness, and then there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund . Similarly, although Northern Saami and Norwegian are not genetically related, there is so much borrowing of terms (also same alphabet) due to shared geography/history that it's easier for a speaker of Norwegian to learn Northern Saami than it is to learn Kildin Saami (more borrowings from Russian, also different alphabet, while very related to Northern Saami) or Korean/Nahuatl/… (just as genetically unrelated, completely different Sprachbund)
- sshine 5y ago
  > Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. This is old-school trolling.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat. The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!

by sshine 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.

nicolas_t 5y ago
> Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. That's not true, reading Chinese gives a huge leg up when reading Japanese because of the kanjis (especially if you come from a place that use the traditional characters instead of the stupidly simplified ones). Additionally quite a few words come from Chinese, granted, the pronunciation is very different, it's often closer to Cantonese pronunciation rather than Mandarin pronunciation but it helps with learning new vocabulary.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  So? Reading isn't even a part of knowing a language. Vocabulary is the part of learning a language that causes by far the least problems. Knowing that δένδρον means "tree" is easy, but it won't help you use it in a sentence. That problem doesn't go away if the word that means "tree" is 木 instead. Here's the opening of a Latin poem: Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato Pyrrha sub antro? Here's what it looks like if you have perfect knowledge of the vocabulary involved: What many slender you boy in rose soak liquid press odor pleasant Pyrrha[a name] under cave? Does that help you to read it? (Bear in mind that Latin and English are, unlike Chinese and Japanese, related to each other. You even got three words that are more or less identical in Latin and English! [In all three cases, as in the case of Sino-Japanese vocabulary, that's due to borrowing rather than a relationship between the languages. But you can also see a true cognate - Latin quis is in a real sense the same word as English what.])
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. I'm guessing quod is the closer cognate of what, though quid is the better translation in most (or maybe just more canonical) cases.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Nice example, but quis is cognate with who. This is not an easy claim to make; at the level where they coincide, it's hard to distinguish the words. In the same sense that quis and who are identical with each other, who and what are also identical with each other. Compare wiktionary's entries on the etymology of who and what: > [who: ] From Middle English who, hwo, huo, wha, hwoa, hwa, from Old English hwā [], from Proto-West Germanic *hwaʀ, from Proto-Germanic *hwaz, from Proto-Indo-European *kʷos, *kʷis. > [what: ] From Middle English what, from Old English hwæt (“what”), from Proto-Germanic *hwat (“what”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷód (“what”), neuter form of *kʷós (“who”) Wiktionary does elaborate, on the page for kʷís, that Indo-European proper had two unrelated stems *kʷi- [giving us interrogative pronouns] and *kʷo- [giving us relative pronouns], but that these tended to be combined in later languages. If you want to distinguish them, you can say that quis is not cognate with what. But you couldn't then go on to say that it is cognate with who; both who and what would be cognate with quod.
mkl 5y ago
Japanese has a huge number of words derived from Chinese: "Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as kango (漢語), meaning 'Chinese words'. Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are kango, with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary
mchaver 5y ago
They are not genetically related, but they have been in contact with each other for a long time. Japanese has borrowed lots of vocabulary that have been borrowed under regular sound patterns (depends when they borrowed it). Same goes for Korean and Vietnamese. Even if you are an illiterate Chinese speaker, you can make up Japanese vocabulary by converting Chinese words under these patterns, it may be hit or miss, but shared vocabulary makes it easier to learn. Add some basic grammar and you can start communicating pretty quickly. I know plenty of Chinese speakers that learned Japanese very quickly, but failed to learn English well. Other factors that make language learning quicker: access to materials (lots of Chinese speakers consume Japanese content, many classes available, there are a lot more books to learn Japanese for Chinese speakers), access to native speakers (close to Japanese, many exchanges students), friends and relatives that learned the language (if they can do it I can do it too), economic incentives, etc. Korean speakers also have an easy time with Japanese vs other languages even though they are not related. Shared Chinese vocabulary, simple phonology and similar grammar patterns.
unhammer 5y ago
There's (linguistic) genetic relatedness, and then there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund . Similarly, although Northern Saami and Norwegian are not genetically related, there is so much borrowing of terms (also same alphabet) due to shared geography/history that it's easier for a speaker of Norwegian to learn Northern Saami than it is to learn Kildin Saami (more borrowings from Russian, also different alphabet, while very related to Northern Saami) or Korean/Nahuatl/… (just as genetically unrelated, completely different Sprachbund)
sshine 5y ago
> Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish. This is old-school trolling.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat. The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!