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Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdo

by chao- 15y ago

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus: Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice. Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness. Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken. Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.

evincarofautumn 15y ago
Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.
- vorg 15y ago
  > It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".
  - evincarofautumn 15y ago
    That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment. (I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.) “他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatically as a topic. In other words, #1 = subject + prepositional phrase + predicate adjective; #2 = topic(al prepositional phrase) + subject + predicate adjective. I mean, the claim’s not untrue—throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar, because it is simple.
    - vorg 15y ago
      Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of speech. > throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar I'd argue pauses, like tones and stress and other "prosodic features", have just an important place as grammar in natural languages. And... not sure if you're a programmer (this IS Hacker News after all) but... computer languages could also use an equivalent of pauses, stresses, and tones alongside grammar to communicate semantics to the computer and/or other readers. If whitespace and newlines is like pauses then Python uses a combination of pauses (i.e whitespace) and grammar to communicate semantics.
      - evincarofautumn 15y ago
        I’m not a native Chinese speaker. I’ve been studying it at college for about two years, so probably around 300 class hours. I am a programmer, though—that’s probably an understatement. I agree that whitespace is like “silence” in a way. But programming has much more in common with written language than spoken—and as much in common with mathematics as prose—so not everything matches up directly.

by chao- 15y ago

evincarofautumn 15y ago

Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.

vorg 15y ago
> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment. (I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.) “他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatically as a topic. In other words, #1 = subject + prepositional phrase + predicate adjective; #2 = topic(al prepositional phrase) + subject + predicate adjective. I mean, the claim’s not untrue—throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar, because it is simple.
  - vorg 15y ago
    Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of speech. > throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar I'd argue pauses, like tones and stress and other "prosodic features", have just an important place as grammar in natural languages. And... not sure if you're a programmer (this IS Hacker News after all) but... computer languages could also use an equivalent of pauses, stresses, and tones alongside grammar to communicate semantics to the computer and/or other readers. If whitespace and newlines is like pauses then Python uses a combination of pauses (i.e whitespace) and grammar to communicate semantics.
    - evincarofautumn 15y ago
      I’m not a native Chinese speaker. I’ve been studying it at college for about two years, so probably around 300 class hours. I am a programmer, though—that’s probably an understatement. I agree that whitespace is like “silence” in a way. But programming has much more in common with written language than spoken—and as much in common with mathematics as prose—so not everything matches up directly.