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RE: How many languages do you speak??
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[Poll]
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How many languages do you speak??
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Total Votes : 34
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(last vote on : Oct. 2 2016 9:31:43)
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El Frijolito
Posts: 131
Joined: Feb. 27 2016
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 RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Guest)
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quote:
I've actually heard from multilingual Japanese speakers that learning Japanese is not as hard as it looks. It seems the hardest step to really get going is memorizing the couple of thousand kanji characters (and from what I hear Chinese has a lot more).
The very quick and dirty answers are ...
Owing to comparatively limited land, a smaller population, fewer related languages, historical development, and a few other reasons, Japan was able to pursue language reform much more uniformly and successfully than China. One aspect of this was the compilation of the toyo and later the joyo kanji "general use" lists which prescriptively reduced the number of kanji - in the case of the latter, to a little over 2,000. That said, other kanji are certainly found - the Morohashi dictionary (a standard reference work) has over 50,000 character entries, to say nothing of the numerous resulting compounds. Some commonplace Japanese-English dictionaries frequently have in the neighborhood of 7,000 characters - again, with many more "compound" entries. But in general, unless you're reading a lot of pre-WW2 material or literary studies, most of what you'll encounter in kanji is in that general use list.
As implied, more cognitive real estate may be employed in memorizing the numerous (usually two-character) compounds. The characters themselves consist of certain repeating graphical elements that are more limited in number, that may convey information about pronunciation or meaning. There are more of these elements than there are letters in the alphabets of Western European languages, but the difference is on the order of tens, not thousands. Still, the student will learn characters and their compounds, and not their constituent elements.
There are other wrinkles to Japanese that confront the unwary, like certain dialects employing commonly-used expressions that might seem odd or out-of-place to the uninitiated.
The "lack of verb tenses" is a bit of a canard. One way to express future tense, for example, is to contextualize the verb with the time one is talking about (e.g. "tomorrow") and use a verb form expressing probability.
Hope this helps...
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Date Mar. 3 2016 19:45:03
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El Kiko
Posts: 2697
Joined: Jun. 7 2010
From: The South Ireland
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Escribano)
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a lot of euro languges are very similar .. latin based ... its kinda like doing a crossword or something when changing languages ....like ..think of another word for ....whatever
so like with portugues and spanish ...i can have a real real good guess at italian,
i dont speak Italian, and have never been there ... but when my Italian freinds speak to each other ... about 7 or 8 times out of ten i get the gist of what is being said ...
Anyway , moving out of europe creates a lot of problems ...there are little of no cognates ... i lived in the Arab Emirates for about a year ,,, and i totally gave up on arabic in the end ... I really did try .. the people taught me stuff , i wrote things in a note book .. had a little grammar /phrase book ...
but no , in the end , that language is not for me .. well , i could scrape a few questions and things together , but not speak it .
just not meant to be .......
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Date Mar. 3 2016 21:56:00
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estebanana
Posts: 9354
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
To be fair I've never heard of any language being inherently easier or more difficult than any other. It's all relative to the native tongue of the person trying to learn that language. The closer it is to your native tongue, the easier it will be to learn. Anyone who thinks any language is easy is a dumbass or at the very lea
That is true, the languages connected to German -Latin -Greek origins fall into that, but Japanese is not related to other languages or language groups. That makes is difficult. Now to get a few words and phrases together is not too hard, but mastery is a long difficult road.
Japanese is so difficult that not all Japanese people are literate enough in the written language to understand all the kanji, in order to make texts readable the advanced, rare and difficult kanji are also restated above the line or beside it with Hiragana, the more phonetic character system. This can be seen a lot on bulletins posted in the city hall for example, a line of kanji with hiragana to accompany it which sounds out the kanji. The reader may have heard the word before,but not know how to write it in kanji so the phonetic version is given to make it clear.
One thing that happens to me is that most gaigin that come here are college Japanese majors and they have spent 4 or 6 years in classes devoted to Japanese and then get snobby with me because I can't speak fluently. Unless you are in formal program to learn to read a write you really won't be able to. Japanese kids have to spend hours every week jsut writing kanji with a brush and having the writing teacher correct the brushwork until they learn. A Chinese person already knows how to do this, but they still have to learn the new meanings of the kanji in Japanese. not all Kanji mean the same thing in Chinese. A Chinese person would be close in native writing, but the language is still very different because Chinese is an inflected language and using inflection in Japanese would be heard as bad pronunciation. Chinese and Japanese are both very difficult languages at a level past basic survival mode.
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Date Mar. 4 2016 23:26:27
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Piwin
Posts: 3562
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
but Japanese is not related to other languages or language groups.
Sounds like Basque here in Europe. It bears no relationship to any other language in Europe and nobody really knows how it got there.
Fascinating stuff about Japanese though. I hadn't realized you lived there. I've read that Japanese writing was difficult, but on the other hand there are other aspects of the language where I've been told that Japanese is fairly easy compared to European languages. For instance, I've been told that pronunciation is easier than say French, because the language has less phonèmes (Though I suppose being able to pronounce something doesn't help all that much if you don't know what to say!!). Is that true?
In any event, Japan is high up on my list for my next travel destinations, though it's not in the cards right at this moment (money money...). Over the years, I've spent so much time in Spain that I feel comfortable here, and I know this may sound weird but I actually miss the feeling on not understanding what the hell is going on around me  . But I can promise you this, if I ever manage to go, I won't be snobby to anyone, quite simply because I'll most likely know 2 words at the very most (probably train and bathroom, or train and hotel)  .
Reminds me of my first time in Germany, looking for the train station... "Vo east dare baaaanhoaf beate?" So very embarassing with hindsight, but so much fun at the time!
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Date Mar. 5 2016 0:02:49
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estebanana
Posts: 9354
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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The reason they don't abandon the kanji is because the written language for the Chinese and the Japanese is basically the most important part of cultural identity. The Chinese language is exactly the Chinese culture. The Japanese are much the same and when there is an ancient culture in place that can also exist in a modern world, why change for no reason? Especially if changing erases your main connect to what a gives you a cohesive culture. If they abandoned the kanji they would be an unrooted culture. Like if Americans gave up tacos. I mean WHY! ?
The Japanese language has made room for foreign words, they invented a system, called Katakana which is used to integrate for example German or English words and terms into Japanese. This system exists in writing in the same sentence as Kanji and Hiragana. A label on a package or a scientific paper written in Japanese can and almost always has Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji, the romanized version of Japanese, all on the same page. Often in the same sentence. For a Japanese person this makes perfect sense and is not a problem. For a non Japanese educated person you have to learn to see each type of character. Romaji of course is our system and we recognize it right away, but it is perplexing when it is sandwiched between the three other types of character.
And then the scourge of language, the damned Emoji, the new cartoon pictographic language of social media. I hate emoji.
Anyway, for example the reason Japanese culture and language are inseparable is because Japanese literary forms can only exist Japanese language. The Haiku does nto work in English, even though we try to write them in English they are not true Haiku, so if Japanese were compressed into only Romaji then the culture would cease to exist.
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Date Mar. 5 2016 1:07:06
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Leñador
Posts: 5237
Joined: Jun. 8 2012
From: Los Angeles
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
The reason they don't abandon the kanji is because the written language for the Chinese and the Japanese is basically the most important part of cultural identity. The Chinese language is exactly the Chinese culture. The Japanese are much the same and when there is an ancient culture in place that can also exist in a modern world, why change for no reason? Especially if changing erases your main connect to what a gives you a cohesive culture. If they abandoned the kanji they would be an unrooted culture. Like if Americans gave up tacos. I mean WHY! ?
Tacos are practical and delicious! lol This kanji business sounds unnecesarily complicated. I get that their just holding on to it to keep their culture but I think it's kind of ridiculous. The Japanese have TONS of things that make them Japanese, food is HUGE, language, architecture, martial arts, Japanese Buddhism, it goes on and on. I suppose all cultures hold on to dumb irrational things that aren't practical, that one just seems like huge pain in the A for the daily life of a Japanese person.
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I think it's because in general the Japanese don't trust pirates. Get it? Piratical? Ba dum tss.
Total rim shot lolol
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Sounds like Basque here in Europe.
Yeah that is pretty interesting, I worked with a guy from Basque who knew Basque, French, Spanish, Italian and English and spoke English really really well and said it was the language he was worst at. We had we had french and italina coworkers that agreed.
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Date Mar. 5 2016 1:34:37
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estebanana
Posts: 9354
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: How many languages do you speak?? (in reply to Piwin)
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Ah but all the stuff you mentioned has a literary component and that literary part is what makes it Japanese.
For example when a Sumo wrestler wins a professional match his sponsors give his cash in the ring right after he throws the other sumo. The winner goes to his side of the ring, crouches down a writes the kanji for "heart" in the air in front of him. he has to do that before he takes the money. It is part of sumo culture.
Zen Buddhism, Shinto religion, fishing, baseball, martial arts in particular, shodo- the art of writing all have linguistic ties to culture. Food big ties to writing culture. But as a Westerner non Japanese writer you will not up front see the connections. I have only discovered them by looking for them.
Some zen monks practice a form of shodo where they meditate and then write a character or phrase in the state of no mind. We call it zen calligraphy in the West, but it is an integral part of the cultural tie to Buddhism. The word they write in the state of no mind and how they write it transmits a physical manifestation Buddhist practice.
I think you are kidding me, but I need to teach you a lesson you heathen. Now send me a dozen burritos packed in a stay warm foam container via one day air mail.
Also very weird to my eyes, in the big cities you can see gang tags and grafitti, only those kids are not in the Salva Trucha, they are just doing because it is cool looking...The first time I saw that I said are you F-ing kidding me?
That is the strange binary opposition aspect of Japanese culture. On the one hand there is adeep meaningful anceint culture that is cohesive and long in history, on the other extreme there is a crazy assimilate it for fun without understanding the meaning at all thing.
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Date Mar. 5 2016 2:03:35
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