i can guess the meaning of a passage written in japanese because of the similar Chinese words. i cannot for the life of me guess a passage written in Korean. not even a single Korean word. none of them can be read by a Chinese speaker.[/quote]
Of course Chinese speakers can’t read Korean! No-one is suggesting that! But many of the words sound similar because they have the same root. Same with Vietnamese.
Also, Korean can be written in Chinese characters instead of Hanggul; educated Koreans can usually read and write their own language like this (less so these days). So they have an obvious advantage learning Chinese or Japanese.
[quote=“smithsgj”][quote=“blueeee11”] are you for real?
I am fluent in both english and Chinese.
i can guess the meaning of a passage written in japanese because of the similar Chinese words. i cannot for the life of me guess a passage written in Korean. not even a single Korean word. none of them can be read by a Chinese speaker.[/quote]
Of course Chinese speakers can’t read Korean! No-one is suggesting that! But many of the words sound similar because they have the same root. Same with Vietnamese.
Also, Korean can be written in Chinese characters instead of Hanggul; educated Koreans can usually read and write their own language like this (less so these days). So they have an obvious advantage learning Chinese or Japanese.[/quote]
Very interesting. I didn’t know that at all. Thank you for that information
I don’t think it will hurt but Korean and Japanese are pretty different language roots from Chinese, Korean uses characters to a very small degree today, and I think its pretty much out of tradition, like City/District names or some high value concept like Confucian readings.
Korean is non tonal and Hangul is pretty fast to pick up. Koreans love to tell everyone their Hangul alphabet is the most logical in the world and blah,blah blah.I think most foreigners can pick up enough to speak at a basic level within a few months. There are quite a few foreigners at Korean universities that started from zero and now are taking maybe 1 Korean course, 2 English, 2/2, etc within 1-2 years.
I have no idea about Japanese other then it has Kanji but Koreans have told me(I live in Korea now)for them, its much easier to learn then English or Chinese.
I dunno about German, but very tiny differences in the construction of a sentence can change the nuance of a sentence and therefore the whole meaning. It’s like intonation in English.
??? Japanese has tones. They differ from prefecture to prefecture, actually. Read the following allowed: 雲 and 蜘蛛 … they should sound different if you read them correctly.
The only time Japanese ever sounds monotonous is when somebody’s giving a speech or reading an official announcement (when, apparently, all emotion and expression is bad). I wouldn’t advise learning off a speech, you’ll fall asleep by the third line. Public-speaking is becoming quite a highly-prized skill in the education system now, though.
[quote]Of course Chinese speakers can’t read Korean! No-one is suggesting that! But many of the words sound similar because they have the same root. Same with Vietnamese.
[/quote]
I begs to differ. Chinese speakers can read classical Korean texts just fine Vietnamese, too. (Vietnamese is easier, because the grammar is similar.)
I begs to differ. Chinese speakers can read classical Korean texts just fine Vietnamese, too. (Vietnamese is easier, because the grammar is similar.)
Modern Korean and Vietnamese… not so much.[/quote]
Japanese is not a tone language (where all or nearly all syllable like units can be assigned to one of a small set of tone levels or contours, and the tone system is needed to distinguish meaning).
I meant that people who read Chinese cannot, by that, read the modern Korean and Vietnamese scripts. I think that the fact that Korean can be written in Chinese characters, and that Chinese readers can read that, was dealt with earlier in the thread.
I’ll agree that Japanese is not a tonal language, but Japanese does have high, low and median pitches, and the meaning of a word can differ (and be misunderstood) if pronounced incorrectly. Most texts/dictionaries aimed at English speakers assume we’ll pick them up automatically; if you look at one aimed at Chinese speakers, however, you’ll see them marked out in 90% of texts.
Maybe I should’ve said 'Japanese has ‘pitches’ '. To be honest with you, I was already pretty fluent in Japanese by the time I learnt this - I mispronounced a word and a friend corrected me, telling me that Japanese ‘has tones too’. Much later I saw it in a dictionary and realised what she’d meant, but by that time I already used them without realising it.
If somebody has the pitches all entirely wrong it’s actually quite hard to understand, but I’ve never met anybody who speaks that badly (guess they’re easy to pick up!)
[quote]
2. I meant that people who read Chinese cannot, by that, read the modern Korean and Vietnamese scripts. I think that the fact that Korean can be written in Chinese characters, and that Chinese readers can read that, was dealt with earlier in the thread.[/quote]
On the other thing. Turns out that Japanese (and Scandinavian languages) are sometimes described as “pitch accent languages”. [wikipedia]Says so in wikipedia[/wikipedia]
On the other thing. Turns out that Japanese (and Scandinavian languages) are sometimes described as “pitch accent languages”. [wikipedia]Says so in wikipedia[/wikipedia][/quote]
ooooh. That was interesting, thanks!
Interesting that Africa has a tonal language. I always thought the only tonal languages were around South-East/East Asia.
Vietnamese, too. (Vietnamese is easier, because the grammar is similar.)
