When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.
Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.
This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
I'm saying that because China has one single army and navy and at the same time a huge narrative wrapped up in the idea that it's all one China, those "dialects" don't get to be languages because the army and the navy say otherwise.
"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" implies its corollary, which is that "a dialect is a language without an army or a navy".
> The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese.
In the absence of nation states I suspect that we'd mostly talk about dialects and dialect continuums. Discrete languages are only really relevant as a concept because of the non-linguistic ties that bind a nation together.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...
I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is accustomed to.
Or Brazilian /'sedʒi/ is cognate with Spanish <sed> 'thirst'. A Spanish speaker will have to know to effectively ignore the /ʒi/ in order to recognize the word easily!
Maybe more extreme, Brazilian /'hedʒi/ (written <rede>) is cognate with Spanish <red> 'net, network'.
You might also be familiar with a greater variety of Spanish pronunciations as a non-native speaker... if you know Argentine /'ʃubja/ and /'ʃabe/, then you have a better chance to recognize Brazilian /'ʃuvɐ/ and /'ʃavi/ ('rain' and 'key', respectively).
I should have specified in my original post, but I only meant that Portugal Portuguese (and at least a few of the African varieties that are still very close to Portugal's) are mutually intelligible with Spanish. Which actually just further illustrates the complexity of categorizing speech into discrete languages...
they reported that on the first day, portugese was just gibberish. on the second day they realized they could read a solid chunk of a portugese newspaper. on the third day they felt they were beginning to understand what people were saying to them.
obviously, YMMV (and does).
I grew up in a Scandinavian country and visited the others a lot when I was young, and I find I understand most of what I hear in the other languages, but it's quite common for my peers who don't have that experience to understand nothing.
Given that Castillan and Portuguese are even closer (both Western Romance, part of a linguistic continuum, ...) I find it very hard to believe that honestly. I am only familiar with the European variants, thought. Maybe the issues you faced are due to how the Latin American variants have diverged significantly over the years?
(see shoen's post below.)
So, if you learn the accent of the other language, all of a sudden a large portion of the language is unlocked. This happened to me, almost like a light switch.
I don't have a lot of experience with Italian but it seems like the pronunciation is closer to Spanish.
Yeah the phonetics are very close. Castillan has more fricative sounds like [ð], [θ], [x] and [β] and no open vowels, but that's it.
I may be way off here, and happy to be corrected. My experience is Texas-Spanish is difficult to use in Spain, and would guess the inverse is true. Which I would deduce making Portuguese-Spanish a non-starter in the state.
I know a very limited amount from having grown up and played soccer in the "Mexican" rec leagues in Tx. While traveling to Spain, English is perfectly fine in cities. But days trips to smaller towns/villages they had more trouble understanding my attempts to communicate with the basic texas-spanish I had picked up, than they did the hand gestures and single english word here and there. I understood next to nothing in Portugal (it might as well had been Dutch to my ears; I had no idea until now that they are kinda similar in the way Spanish/Italian is). Of course, this could be that I'm simply horrible at Spanish. But have heard Texas-Spanish is even weird for Baja-California-Spanish speakers.
(Well, not quite, because Spain Spanish has loismo and what not that <pick-latam-country> Spanish almost certainly does not, and there's other variations as well, like Argentine Spanish having very different imperatives, Argentine and Colombian voceo vs. tuteo everywhere else, etc.)
(Edit: And here's a spoken example - https://youtu.be/am1MCJsEGYA)
> Noo the nativitie o' Jesus Christ was this gate: whan his mither Mary was mairry't till Joseph, 'or they cam thegither, she was fund wi' bairn o' the Holie Spirit. Than her guidman, Joseph, bein an upricht man, and no desirin her name sud be i' the mooth o' the public, was ettlin to pit her awa' hidlins.
>But as he had thir things in his mind, see! an Angel o' the Lord appear't to him by a dream, sayin, "Joseph, son o' Dauvid, binna feared to tak till ye yere wife, Mary; for that whilk is begotten in her is by the Holie Spirit.
> "And she sall bring forth a son, and ye sal ca' his name Jesus; for he sal save his folk frae their sins."
> Noo, a' this was dune, that it micht come to pass what was said by the Lord throwe the prophet,
>"Tak tent! a maiden sal be wi' bairn, and sal bring forth a son; and they wull ca' his name Emmanuel," whilk is translatit, "God wi' us." Sae Joseph, comin oot o' his sleep, did as the Angel had bidden him, and took till him his wife.
> And leev'd in continence wi' her till she had brocht forth her firstborn son; and ca'd his name Jesus.
I'm a fluent second-language Spanish speaker and have had a lot of success communicating with native Portuguese speakers, but only Portugal Portuguese and various African Portugueses. I can't understand Brazilian Portuguese at all.
After all, Spanish & Brazilian speakers in the new world have their own dialects (not languages).
But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow.
My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.
> My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.
Even if you tried to use a method like this to draw lines, it requires you to pick a "center" dialect that you compare all other prospective dialects/languages to. Which dialect you pick as your "center" dialect will determine which dialects end up under your umbrella language, and picking a different center would yield very different results. Which language you pick as your center is inherently a political question, one which would be settled by a sovereign state.
And aside from that problem, lexical similarity is not used to define languages. All it measures is how similar word sets are, and language variations are way more complicated than just vocabulary. No serious linguist would ever try to use a single metric like that to draw lines between languages (and again, most serious linguists aren't actually interested in drawing general-purpose lines because they understand that the lines are not real).
Creole is a weird case IMHO because English itself is pretty much a creole between Old English, Norman French, Norse, and some Gaelic and Pictish languages.
If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons?
edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.
This is especially apparent when speaking to less educated people with less exposure to the standardised, official Chinese language, which is what people do actually write down when intending for a broader audience, of course. Diglossia is real.
And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.
China had an imperial bureaucracy for over 2000 years, which sent officials from one end of the country to the next. In fact, a predecessor of Standard Chinese (a.k.a. "Mandarin") was called "the language of officials" (官話).
Others have already corrected your other misunderstandings, but this is also false. Spanish has at least as much variance in pronunciation as English and has an orthography that is extremely regular. Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese likewise have the same, highly regular orthography and are barely mutually intelligible.
To the best of my knowledge you actually have the causality mostly reversed: English's orthography is useless largely because the pronunciation changed but the spelling didn't, and English has a variety of pronunciations because the pronunciations changed differently in different regions. English has a messier orthography than other languages because of our complicated history of borrowing words, but the evidence shows that even people who start with a highly consistent orthography don't use it to keep their pronunciation static and shared.
I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics.
Edit: I realized that my joke was closer to reality than parent's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
Western linguists generally view the concept of a "language" as being a political one more than a linguistic one, and so rather than quibble about definitions they just use whichever word the people who speak the language/dialect would use. For example, from a book about Chinese dialects [0]:
> The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese.
The Chinese language varieties are dialects because it is politically expedient for them to be so. The Western Romance languages are languages because it is politically expedient for them to be. Linguists shrug and move on to more interesting (to them) questions.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...
Also, Slavic languages are very difficult for non-Slavs to learn, but very easy for other Slavs. And many are mutually intelligible.
However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.
Also helps you appreciate that Japan is not completely insane for having seemingly completely unrelated number words for different contexts, even though they write them with the same numeral. Turns out, so do many western languages (although generally only for ordinal/cardinal, not for the endless range of counters Japanese has)
The fact that as a native English speaker this seems like not how you actually read or write numerals at all - no, of course 3 doesn’t ’read’ as ‘thi(r)’ - also suggests that there is a less mechanistic way to understand the relationships between hanzi and words than learners often try to apply (we want to find the ‘rules’ that must underpin these things), and that the way native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese think of the relationship between these symbols and the words they are writing is much more organic - and that’s okay.
I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.
This is what they are comparing to the difference between "first" and "one" in English, which are obviously two different origin words for the number 1 (unlike sixth and six, where sixth is clearly just derived from six).
We also have a LOT of these for plurals and take great pride in knowing all the stupid ones - "a gaggle of geese", "a murder of crows", "a herd of cows", "a fleet of ships". These are all really just the same as the measure words in Chinese with many specialisations for large groups of specific things.
We also have plenty of measure words in English when we take something from the realm of uncountable to countable, as I showed in the examples above, and in many ways Chinese tends to have less weird single-use ones like "gaggle of geese", just a larger variety of the common ones. So there's a special word for "long thin things", "vertical long thing things", "flat things on a (mathematical) plane", "a lump", "a slice", "a vehicle", "a machine" as well as the fallback 个/個 when none of the more specific ones are appropriate. I think it's only because we generally don't use any measure word for small groups of countable nouns in English that we think it's somehow strange that other languages do.
There's also not so many counter words to be a problem. Sure, the absolute number is high (some say very precise numbers like 214, 232, etc, some people low ball it at 100, some say over 900 words if you count all the old obscure words), but in practice, about a dozen of them will cover almost all the cases you think are hard for English speakers. So, 个，条，只，支，本，件，张, 家，座，部，辆，头 are probably the most common ones that don't usually have an English translation, almost every other measure word would also require a measure word in English, e.g. 条=strip, 张=sheet, 些=few, 双=pair, 样=kind, 种=type, 头=head, 片=slice, 分/份=piece, 点=bit, 块=lump, etc.
As with most things about learning a new language, it's also important to embrace the differences - they give you a new insight into how other people think about things, and seeing when someone else's internal model for something differs to yours can help you better understand your own model as well as the new one you're learning.
[1] You'll understand this if you ever read The Famous Five!
Regardless, my point was that Chinese spelling is not as universal as it is made out to be, that different Chinese dialects/languages just use the Standard Chinese spelling, even when it doesn't match their own spoken language, just like a French person using "2nd" to spell "deuxieme".
We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.
Alphabets are often linked to sound, and it would be a tremendous challenge to create an "alphabet" analogue that links to a set of fundamental concepts that you can somehow rearrange to form higher level concepts and can still be universally understood without it linking to sound.
For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese.
For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it.
The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
To add some detail to this point:
> my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones.
A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.
Here is a picture of a fish under water:
M
D
Good luck with any other language. Japanese is tougher since you have to memorize thousands of what are basically hieroglyphics and learn two separate alphabets (one for native Japanese, another for foreign).
With Korean you can express many sounds phonetically (with some abstractions for non-korean sounds)
I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps:
たまねぎ 玉ねぎ
いつつ 五つ
In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying to convey imo)
I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does.
With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think you know how to read it correctly, can never quite be sure, look it up every time as a consequence and are surprised often enough at the reading that you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.
In contrast I was able to score 50% on the reading section of TOPIK II after only 4 months of study.
So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.
I've never seen "仲人" before but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of person.
https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%B2%E4%BA%BA
仲 go-between (which I never saw before but I knew the radicals as "person middle" but didn't know what they were combined, but this one made great logical sense)
人 person
So while I can't "read" it (in Japanese) I can know what it means pretty confidently as kanji very regularly mean the same thing in compound words.
If I saw "なこうど" I'd have no idea because those hiragana don't mean anything to me until I learn the meaning.
Am I making sense? Like the first time I saw 花火 I knew "flower fire" and was able to guess firework.
same with 大人 being adult.
I'm not saying you are wrong that Korean is easier -- I'm saying, learning kanji can make it easier to understand a lot of meaning with never actually being able to "read" the words. and the reading is absolutely hard because of kunyomi and onyomi etc etc.
In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially what it means, but if not, then I could simply opt to move on having collected an instance of seeing the word. I might then later hear it elsewhere, or perhaps see it again and if I encounter it enough times I can get curious and look it up.
I could do the same thing with Kanji except I'd have to look it up anyway to be confident I was reading it correctly. Else I just don't know what the word is, so its harder to mentally file it anywhere in my brain. I found this lead to a very long-tail of pain when reading Japanese that didn't abate even when I got up to around 17k vocab in Anki after which I just said bugger it.
So, on balance I prefer the set of problems that no Kanji poses over the set of problems that Kanji poses.
As an ESL CELTA certified teacher for years, their rubric also seems to back this up in order of relative importance: it's meaning, then form, then finally pronunciation.
You're just trading one set of problems for another. Those aren't even problems English has.
Me too! Nice to talk with someone with a similar background :)
> you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.
Native speakers don't magically gain the ability to read correctly every new word. So it is fine to hit the dictionary every now and then!
In the case of 仲人, I can guessimate 仲 (naka) and 人 (hito), but recall that 素人 and 玄人 are pronouced <long vowel>~uto. I would try to pronounce it as nakouto (the correct spelling is nakoudo). So people do gain a heuristic for reading.
Also Kanji provides a mnemonic device after learning the meaning of the word. (One who makes/improves 仲).
>So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.
Yes, unless you're Chinese or Japanese speaker ;)
E.g. 効果, 硬化, 降下.. are hard to learn, but they're clear. こうか is much easier to learn, but it could mean any of 10-15 unrelated things.
The homophones in Japanese and Korean pretty much all come from the vocabulary they share with Chinese which makes up the bulk of the vocabulary for both those languages.
One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?
Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read. Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.
Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it.
> Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read.
It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often.
> Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.
I'd agree that manga use of furigana helps (perhaps school-aged readers) reading, but furigana in novels are standard tools in the language that authors can use to achieve some effects that is hard to describe to non-speakers.
Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji you at times otherwise wouldn't be able to.
If you come across a word you don't know as either a native speaker of English or Korean, you can at least sound it out, which ups the probability you can connect it with a word you've heard before, otherwise since you know how to type it out it's trivial to look it up in a dictionary. If you come across a word you don't know in Japanese as a native speaker and there's no furigana it's a guessing game. The meaning is slightly more obvious to you, so you might be able to guess, but if you can't guess and you care to know and the word is in print then looking it up becomes a bit more of a pain.
Korean didn't completely lose the mutual intelligibility aspect entirely since the underlying pronunciation of the words still remains and can be used to correctly guess the word in a lot of cases. Like 시간 and 時間 as an example, but there's many, many words I've been able to guess in Korean based off knowing Japanese. I was able to score 50% on TOPIK II reading exam after only having studied Korean for 4 months in large part because of this.
This just isn't true. Even most native JP speakers agree that kanji are oppressively hard to learn and remember, so if it were feasible to get by with kana alone, then at least some native speakers would do it in some contexts. But outside of language learning it's virtually never done, and there's a reason for that.
Also, I think you're overlooking that Chinese and Korean have a lot more vowels/tones to work with than Japanese. There are a lot of Chinese-derived compound words that are homophones in Japanese but not elsewhere.
How much trouble do you actually have with them?
There are numerous other examples. Those are all unnatural sounding, mostly industry/field specific, and not replacing the main homophone readings.
1: https://dailyportalz.jp/application/files/thumbnails/width64...
I personally find the most difficult part of reading kana-only text to be detecting word boundaries. It's much easier when kanji is used, and I'm not even a native speaker.
An English analogy isthatyoucouldwritewithoutspacesandbeunderstood but it's more difficult to read and unnatural.
Young gen-z types on Japanese Twitter abbreviate everything, but even they don't drop kanji.
So.. I would say even that ambiguity isn't something people would actually have much a problem with.
It really isn't. In conversation fluent JP speakers tend to avoid compounds that would be ambiguous, or add distinguishers like "学校の校歌". Honestly, try converting a paragraph of text from a newspaper to all kana, and having a native speaker read it.
かんちょうが かんちょうで かんちょうに かんちょう された。 Is probably a sentence that definitely requires Kanji to understand the precise meaning given how many homophones かんちょう has, but it's a toy example.
I can't, because there are no native speakers who learned that way, as I'm sure you know :D
But there are many learners like that, and my experience in Japan is that anyone who doesn't learn kanji has a very low ceiling on their vocabulary, even if they use the language daily for decades.
Because the reality is that it's hard to memorize 1K kanji, but if you do it then it's relatively easy to learn 10K+ compound words. Without kanji, to reach fluency somebody would have to memorize 5-10 completely unrelated meanings for "kouka", then 5 more for kakou, and so on for every combination of common single-kanji readings.
I mean - if you're in Japan, you surely know people who try to get by without kanji. Do you know any who've reached fluency? Like who could use and understand 5-6 different "kouka"s without any idea of the kanji they use? If your premise here is true then people like that should be the norm, since learning would be so much easier for them compared to those wasting their time on kanji?
You have to imagine the entire education system and everyone in it got changed to Kana only and Kanji was subsequently removed from modern literature from that point onward. That's the thought experiment. It was even tried successfully in places...
For thought experiments, you're assuming your consequent - obviously a society raised without kanji would get by without kanji, though I think the language would have to change somewhat. But for non-hypothetical people that exist now, I think the things you've been saying about kanji not making it easier to read Japanese just aren't true.
In Korean, it works similarly as well though, most people nowadays are quite used to not incorporating Hanja in sentences over multiple decades, to the point where it would be impractical to mingle Hanja in Korean.
Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago.
The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese. It is already a problem in Chinese, but even worse in Japanese due to the smaller phonetic repertoire.
Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English while afflicted with a strangely selective amnesia hole for entire words. Such that reading a word like 'shoe' would not instantly evoke an association with a piece of footwear but would have to be (admittedly very rapidly) sounded out letter for letter each time, instead of scanning the entire unit as a whole.
That's what reading a word normally represented by a familiar kanji character but "expanded" into hiragana feels like, and slightly more pronounced if it's, for some hipster reason, written in katakana.
And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults?
As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
This stupid phenomenon is due to the fact that Japanese Gov decided to teach only arbitrarily 1000 kanji to school kids and this number decrease every 10 years.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E6%BC%A2%E5...
You can see how stupid it is.
> People complain that kanji being used in the prefecture are not include in the list (no included so no obligation to teach in school) e.g.阪鹿奈岡熊梨阜埼茨栃媛, so the gov finally add those to the next revision.
While at the same time Chinese people are learning 3X more. No one ever complain about the difficulty of Chinese character after all.
It's effectively "all kanji" as it were, and yet Taiwan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and I never met any Taiwanese when I lived there (for years) that complained that Chinese was too difficult.
Japanese has onyomi and kunyomi. The onyomi also come from different periods in Chinese so there's multiple onyomi for most Kanji.
Then you get two Kanji words that come in all varieties. Most are onyomi + onyomi, but you get some that are onyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + onyomi.
There's also not really any solid rules to it, and when there are, there are plenty of exceptions.
It's a real nightmare of a system. A fun one though.
So you're saying that verbal communication doesn't work in Japan and everyone just texts each other? "I'm sorry Mr Honda Kawasaki but due to how Japanese language works it's impossible for me to tell whether you want to buy three oranges or cook prostate cancer, please send me a letter" "Okay I will fight the sky colander"
Most countries at some point had to simplify their languages in order to promote literacy. Korea didn't ditch hanja just for shits and giggles, it did so in order to make it easier for schools. Japan never really had to face this problem at a scale that required complete removal of kanji because by the time people got such ideas Japan was already quite literate, so kanji stuck around. Plus, Japan is an extremely conservative society, they only ever change anything once all other options have been exhausted.
Same reason why English spelling is so ridiculous. It's not that English is such a unique language that it absolutely requires a spelling system that doesn't make sense and effectively forces everyone to memorize each word's spelling aside from it's pronounciation (wow just like kanji), it's just that English spelling has never been a problem to a degree that required a systematic solution, so now we're stuck with what we have. If we suddenly decided to make a giant reform of English spelling to have it reflect actual pronounciation, the resistance would be equally giant.
I actually live in Japan, I am trying to learn the language, and it is royal PITA. Heck, every single Japanese person I have asked has complained about their language being so ridiculously difficult. They wish their language was easier, but as you say it is also such a conservative society that it will never change.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with a highly phonemic spelling. My girlfriend is trying to learn it, and she always commends how once you learn a few basic rules, you can read anything.
Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.
I think it is beneficial to have both in Japanese writing.
Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.
Korean includes white space for this reason, and since everyone gets used to reading it with no Hanja, they don't find it awkward.
So, it's perfectly possible to ditch Kanji and add spaces and have a way more accessible language.
ex) 시간 (時間)
compared to furigana (note that its not even possible to display the phonetic hiragana): 第二巻
younger generation are no longer learning Chinese so more English/European loan words are directly used which ironically fixes the issue.
it is impossible to converse in Korean without using English/European loan words
ex) 아이러니 (irony)
This allows new ideas/concepts to quickly disseminate in the collective Korean psyche. Constantly new words are being invented, slangs used by primary/middle school are unknowable.
Abbreviation/concat combos to create totally new words:
ex) 씹상타치 (way **ing above average) also written as ㅆㅅㅌㅊ (wfaa) literally means
Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
English? Do you mean the UK? US?
My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
Similarly to Chinese, Germans see themselves as mostly the same culture. Standarddeutsch is pretty much a fusion between the different varieties and has evolved along with them for a long time; differently from 普通話, which is much younger and the standardized form of a northern variety of Chinese. Germans also really cling to their dialects, and Switzerland and Austria both use slightly different versions of Standarddeutsch.
The opposite example are the varieties of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, which are quite inter-intelligible, but which are considered as different languages by their speakers.
Standard German is not that old. It was largely developed in the 19th Century, and it was not until the 20th Century that most people in Germany were able to speak it. Standard German is also heavily based on a regional dialect of German (in particular, central German dialects).
Standard Chinese is a product of the early-to-mid 20th Century, so about 50-100 years younger than Standard German. This just reflects the fact that German unification was in the mid-1800s, while China's modernization occurred in the early 20th Century.
The German dialect it used was a colonial dialect that already contained mixed features from multiple dialect area and was thus suitable for a wide audience.
Of course the emerging standard underwent development since then, and low literacy rates meant that few people actually spoke and wrote it.
If you want to go this route, then you could also say that the origins of Standard Chinese date back hundreds of years, to the language spoken by the imperial bureaucracy, or to massively popular works written in vernacular Chinese, like the Dream of the Red Chamber (late 1700s). There are always ancient antecedents that you can trace, but they become less and less directly related to the development of the modern language.
Yes, the Luther Bible was an important influence on the development of a standard literary German, but if you want to trace the development of a standardized spoken dialect of German, you have to go to the 19th Century and the development of Bühnendeutsch ("stage German"), which because of its use in theater had to have a standard pronunciation.
intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages
expert take: there is one Chinese language
There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
That's because Tibet is not, and never has been, China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation
Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.
They use their own unique set of units that are different to both Imperial and Metric.
You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.
I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.
For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".
I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.
Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.
In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net.
It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts.
The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two.
English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies.
Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent.
Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.
Chinese has relatively few possible syllable sounds compared to Western languages. There are about 400 possible initial-final combinations in Mandarin, and 4 tones they can be said in (5 if you include the neutral tone that can only appear at the end of a word), but not all combinations exist, and most estimates place it at about 1200 for Mandarin Chinese. This compares to about 15,000 odd for English, as a syllable has more flexibility in terms of initials, vowels and finals, and English does in fact have tones - even though we don't think of the tone as being syntactically significant, it is very hard to interpret someone if they deliberately change the pitch in unusual ways. But anyway, Chinese therefore has about 10% of the syllable range of English, but each syllable is in fact a "meaning unit" in its own right, whereas English will frequently use multiple syllables to express one concept, which makes it more redundant / less ambiguous. BTW, I say "meaning unit" because in older dialects of Chinese, each syllable was exactly a word and this was possible because there was more information in a syllable and so it was easier to disambiguate, but at some point things became confusing and Chinese began using pairs of "meaning units" to represent concepts - for instance "speech" in Mandarin is 说话 "shuo"+"hua" where the first word was an older verb for speaking and the second was an older noun for speech. Modern Chinese will still tend to revert back to the simpler forms if it's unambiguous and various grammar forms show that they still think of the words as being separate even if they are usually used together, e.g. in the positive+negative question form, 你喜不喜欢 were 喜欢 is normally considered a single word.
As a learner with a vocabulary of maybe 5000 words (compared to a native with maybe 10k+), I've already encountered a lot of homonyms and sometimes when you're watching a drama it's easier to look at the Chinese subtitles than trying to guess which word they meant. If you were having an actual conversation with someone, you could figure it out from context or ask for clarification, but that doesn't really work for one-way communication. One example: 这个合同是gong1zheng3的 "This contract is 'gongzheng'". Does this gongzheng mean 公正 (fair or equitable) or 公证 (notarised)? Just from speech alone, it's impossible to tell without further clarification or rewording, as both would be perfectly plausible.
In mainland China, there are a lot of people for whom Mandarin isn't their first language. Most people will speak it to varying levels of ability, sure, but regional dialects often have completely different words, pronunciations or even just different tones to Mandarin. In all those cases, being able to read along while listening helps comprehension. I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who primarily speak Hokkien and only use Mandarin when they have to interact with people outside their community / town.
Finally, you also assume it's a choice... In most cases the subtitles are baked into the original broadcast (for TV). Back in the days of analogue TV when closed captions came along fairly late and required an expensive box, and so were only purchased by deaf people, subtitling on the broadcast was an easy way to ensure that everybody could get them, much as foreign TV shown in the West almost always has hard-coded subtitles. So for many people, it might not actually be an active choice - they might just only have sources that have hard-coded subtitles. I find it interesting that platforms where the content is intended for consumption by native Chinese speakers, e.g. TV dramas on youtube, the Chinese subs are usually hard-coded, but when they are sold to foreign platforms they usually don't have them. Personally, I find it quite frustrating that e.g. Viki doesn't often have Chinese subtitles and I want to know what exact phrase was just said, as then I usually have to find the show elsewhere e.g.on youtube.
There might also be the cases where the subtitles could be turned off, but they just don't bother. This might seem strange, I know I hate English subtitles on English shows, but many Chinese will watch TV shows with so many scrolling comments on top of the screen (often called "bullet text") that it's almost impossible to see what's underneath. Some of my Chinese friends actually watch most shows twice - once for the show, and once for all the comments. They probably aren't in the slightest bit concerned about the single line of subtitles at the bottom, especially if it makes watching a little bit easier.
Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".
The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...