6 ms·

I wish I had more adventures like this one, but I've found one of the things that holds me back is the language barrier. I don't speak any of Mandarin, Korean,

by dewitt 12y ago

I wish I had more adventures like this one, but I've found one of the things that holds me back is the language barrier. I don't speak any of Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese (I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is), and I worry that not being able to communicate effectively rules out serendipitous moments like these. For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).

icebraining 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :) http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html
ximeng 12y ago
Chinese will probably take a good couple of thousand hours to learn solid basics. A new programming language probably less than fifty.
w1ntermute 12y ago
Take a look at AJATT: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_... Although it was originally developed for Japanese, the basic concepts are not language-specific.
Frazzydee 12y ago
I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways. You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do. I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there. I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different. In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages. Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.
- omaranto 12y ago
  I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages. Commonsense indicates the difficulty of learning a language doesn't depend solely on the language in question, but on how similar it is to languages you already know. An extreme example is that if you already speak Mandarin, learning Mandarin is a no-op. As a less extreme example, I'm sure that learning Mandarin is easier for a Cantonese speaker than for someone who only knows English and French.
  - lmm 12y ago
    Commonsense does suggest that, but I've heard such a wide variety of people with different linguistic backgrounds say that Mandarin was the hardest language they learnt that I'm inclined to believe there is some real underlying difference.
    - Zarel 12y ago
      Well, considering that Chinese is mostly a linguistic isolate, that doesn't necessarily contradict the thesis. Japanese has a writing system and a lot of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese, and I know less about Korean but I think it also has plenty of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese. Do any of your friends natively speak one of those languages and still consider Mandarin more difficult than, say, English?
      - jon2512chua 12y ago
        I'm a Chinese, and I can easily understand written kanji (one of the 3 Japanese writing systems) as it's essentially traditional Chinese characters, but the pronunciation is a whole different game altogether. From this I'm assuming that it's the same for Japanese speakers to recognise some Chinese characters, thus making it easier for them to learn.
        rangibaby 12y ago
        In Japan, you learn both Japanese and Chinese readings for kanji. Except the Chinese readings in China are different to the ones in Japan. A lot of people thought I was strange when I was pointing things out on a menu, but couldn't say what they were. lol
bemmu 12y ago
Just go. I just went to Shenzen last month. I don't speak a word of Chinese. It really helps that you can go to Hong Kong (where you can get by with English) first and cross the border by train/car. If you change your mind, it's easy to come back. Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.
- gcb0 12y ago
  Years ago some non-Chinese speaking friends come back with lots of cheap pen drives from know brand with the case boasting lots of gigabytes. Upon close inspection they only had 256mb flash chip and a firmware that reported 999Tb... They just created the partition the size the case said. Of course those were the least worse scam they feel to. As in other cases (cellphones, batteries, etc) they got even Less than a 256mb pen drive out in the end.
- gbog 12y ago
  Yes, just go. But you should add that the traveler must be ready to let things go, when traveling in deep China without knowing Chinese. And to be confident. Then serendipity will not be just another trendy word.
  - prawn 12y ago
    And try not to achieve anything on an expected timeframe. Allow for delays; missed trains because you couldn't find a platform or taxis going to the wrong place because your directions were vague, etc.
ddoolin 12y ago
I knew about a few hours worth of Korean before I spent the next 2 years there. Granted, a few hours of Korean can be very useful since there's a limited alphabet, like English, and just knowing how to read the words is hugely helpful, even if you don't know what they mean. This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters. I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.
- krisgee 12y ago
  >This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters. I was practising my Hangul by reading the signs between Seoul and where I was staying out the bus window. The very first sign I read fully was "Noodle House", it was vaguely disappointing.
armada651 12y ago
I just spent a six-month internship in Japan without speaking the language. People there are very polite and helpful. They will take as much time as necessary to understand what you want to say. And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language. If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.
petemc_ 12y ago
I wouldn't let that set you back. All you need is a sense of adventure mixed with equal amounts of common sense and money. I got round SK/Japan with a few basic words that I made sure to learn to at least try to be polite.
jon2512chua 12y ago
Well bunnie is Singaporean, and most if not all Singaporeans can speak Mandarin (not a linguist but Chinese is more of the language, and Mandarin the dialect, albeit the "official" dialect for the language).
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china"). Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect. [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20
  - jon2512chua 12y ago
    I do understand that when people refer to Chinese it means Mandarin. However, if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too? I don't think the way I described it in the grandparent post above is entirely accurate as well, but how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      > if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too? What distinguishes one from the other? > how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul? If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect? If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?
cerberusss 12y ago
With Lonely Planet's Mandarin Phrase Book, you can get by.

by dewitt 12y ago

icebraining 12y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :) http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html

ximeng 12y ago

Chinese will probably take a good couple of thousand hours to learn solid basics. A new programming language probably less than fifty.

w1ntermute 12y ago

Take a look at AJATT: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_Time http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_... Although it was originally developed for Japanese, the basic concepts are not language-specific.

Frazzydee 12y ago

I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways. You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do. I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there. I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different. In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages. Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.

omaranto 12y ago
I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages. Commonsense indicates the difficulty of learning a language doesn't depend solely on the language in question, but on how similar it is to languages you already know. An extreme example is that if you already speak Mandarin, learning Mandarin is a no-op. As a less extreme example, I'm sure that learning Mandarin is easier for a Cantonese speaker than for someone who only knows English and French.
- lmm 12y ago
  Commonsense does suggest that, but I've heard such a wide variety of people with different linguistic backgrounds say that Mandarin was the hardest language they learnt that I'm inclined to believe there is some real underlying difference.
  - Zarel 12y ago
    Well, considering that Chinese is mostly a linguistic isolate, that doesn't necessarily contradict the thesis. Japanese has a writing system and a lot of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese, and I know less about Korean but I think it also has plenty of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese. Do any of your friends natively speak one of those languages and still consider Mandarin more difficult than, say, English?
    - jon2512chua 12y ago
      I'm a Chinese, and I can easily understand written kanji (one of the 3 Japanese writing systems) as it's essentially traditional Chinese characters, but the pronunciation is a whole different game altogether. From this I'm assuming that it's the same for Japanese speakers to recognise some Chinese characters, thus making it easier for them to learn.
      - rangibaby 12y ago
        In Japan, you learn both Japanese and Chinese readings for kanji. Except the Chinese readings in China are different to the ones in Japan. A lot of people thought I was strange when I was pointing things out on a menu, but couldn't say what they were. lol

bemmu 12y ago

Just go. I just went to Shenzen last month. I don't speak a word of Chinese. It really helps that you can go to Hong Kong (where you can get by with English) first and cross the border by train/car. If you change your mind, it's easy to come back. Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.

gcb0 12y ago
Years ago some non-Chinese speaking friends come back with lots of cheap pen drives from know brand with the case boasting lots of gigabytes. Upon close inspection they only had 256mb flash chip and a firmware that reported 999Tb... They just created the partition the size the case said. Of course those were the least worse scam they feel to. As in other cases (cellphones, batteries, etc) they got even Less than a 256mb pen drive out in the end.
gbog 12y ago
Yes, just go. But you should add that the traveler must be ready to let things go, when traveling in deep China without knowing Chinese. And to be confident. Then serendipity will not be just another trendy word.
- prawn 12y ago
  And try not to achieve anything on an expected timeframe. Allow for delays; missed trains because you couldn't find a platform or taxis going to the wrong place because your directions were vague, etc.

ddoolin 12y ago

I knew about a few hours worth of Korean before I spent the next 2 years there. Granted, a few hours of Korean can be very useful since there's a limited alphabet, like English, and just knowing how to read the words is hugely helpful, even if you don't know what they mean. This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters. I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.

krisgee 12y ago
>This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters. I was practising my Hangul by reading the signs between Seoul and where I was staying out the bus window. The very first sign I read fully was "Noodle House", it was vaguely disappointing.

armada651 12y ago

I just spent a six-month internship in Japan without speaking the language. People there are very polite and helpful. They will take as much time as necessary to understand what you want to say. And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language. If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.

petemc_ 12y ago

I wouldn't let that set you back. All you need is a sense of adventure mixed with equal amounts of common sense and money. I got round SK/Japan with a few basic words that I made sure to learn to at least try to be polite.

jon2512chua 12y ago

Well bunnie is Singaporean, and most if not all Singaporeans can speak Mandarin (not a linguist but Chinese is more of the language, and Mandarin the dialect, albeit the "official" dialect for the language).

thaumasiotes 12y ago
If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china"). Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect. [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20
- jon2512chua 12y ago
  I do understand that when people refer to Chinese it means Mandarin. However, if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too? I don't think the way I described it in the grandparent post above is entirely accurate as well, but how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too? What distinguishes one from the other? > how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul? If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect? If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?

cerberusss 12y ago

With Lonely Planet's Mandarin Phrase Book, you can get by.