What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

http://www.pagef30.com/2009/03/what-chinese-looks-feels-and-sounds.html

262 183 6 years ago

Tade0• 6 years ago

That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand:

https://youtu.be/rzJqXd-1dEU

SwiftyBug• 6 years ago

It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.

Kliment• 6 years ago

While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in many western languages too. Here's an example in English. Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not. Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that are specific to one or several. There are many other words like that, and you find things like this in almost every language family.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

That's the key difference between ideograms (based on pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based writings (alphabet and the like).

Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.

jaclaz• 6 years ago

Can you explain better?

There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages.

As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.

moogleii3• 6 years ago

That one's more fun because it's a little more challenging for the Japanese folk, but the original is a bit more fair since it's vs traditional Chinese characters (and spoken Cantonese is a bit closer to the version that was imported by Japan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw

mytailorisrich• 6 years ago

The first question is funny because the pronunciation of the last 2 characters (拉面 - lamian) is why Japanese call Chinese noodles 'ramen'.

moogleii3• 6 years ago

I found their bewilderment a little puzzling as well, but I believe it's due to the simplification of the last character. If you watch the older Canto/Traditional version of the video, the Japanese folk get the ramen part immediately.

naniwaduni4• 6 years ago

Japanese uses an alternate simplification (麺) for the sense of noodles, and doesn't merge it with 面. Generally you wouldn't expect Japanese person to have exceptional difficulty recognizing 拉麺, though.

dfalzone• 6 years ago

Article mentions Altaic theory without mentioning that Altaic theory is utter horseshit. Still an interesting article though.

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

Thank you for this; I wish we could be friends

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

Ok - this chain is interesting; didn’t have this background; I deserve the downvote. Thanks for context... will go read some more

cmrdporcupine3• 6 years ago

To be fair, if I recall it's only in the last 15-20 years that the Altaic theory seems to have gone from 'speculative' to 'not at all likely.' Those of us who studied this stuff 20 years ago could easily spout off this 'might-be fact' if we didn't bother to verify first.

I guess at this point similarities between the two languages are assumed to be a result of regional influence?

eindiran• 6 years ago

Many mainstream linguists have been against the hypothesis since the 1950s, but there are still plenty of linguists who contend that the Turkic, Tungusic and Mongolian families form a family; a smaller number have arguments in support of the stronger claim that the Koreanic, Ainu and Japanese–Ryukyuan languages are connected as well. See eg: [0] Vovin set out to demonstrate that the latter, stronger claim was true and ended up writing this: [1]

Arguably, the biggest blow struck to the hypothesis in the last 15-20 years came when Vovin, previously a supporter of the hypothesis, wrote "The end of the Altaic controversy"[2]. Among the more notable arguments in it is that the non-traditional methods[3] used to argue that Altaic is a family are rejected by traditional comparative linguistics because they overweight lexical comparisons.

This was a rather prescient point, as some of the methods that have developed since then that have been used to argue in favor of the Altaic hypothesis suffer from this problem quite badly; this is perhaps especially true of the Bayesian phylogenetic inference, sometimes called Bayesian phylolinguistics when applied to historical linguistics. With this technique, used in eg [0], it is pretty hard to argue that this method wouldn't overweight cognates and loan words gained through contact unless you specifically control for that, which will cause you to end up erroneously marking sprachbunds as true families.

See [4] for another usage of the technique, this time to support the Dravidian family, which is already very very well support by traditional comparative methods.

All of this ultimately points to what I think is the real answer to the issue; outside of some arguments about archaeology that I don't have enough background to evaluate [5], most of the shared bits (shared pronouns, lexical stuff) between the languages here exist because of contact.

The languages here, if they belong grouped at all, should be grouped as a sprachbund, not as a family. The possibility that there is a true family with "micro-Altaic" is small, but I think it is still a much greater possibility than the "strong" hypothesis (w/ Japanese, Korean, etc). This paper [6] has a very cool approach to evaluating the weaker form of the hypothesis that I think most HN readers would find interesting.

So to answer your question, yes, I believe your assessment is correct, and mainstream historical linguistics does as well. But I wouldn't go so far as to say there are any nails in the Altaic hypothesis' coffin just yet.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jole/article/3/2/145/5067185

[1] https://www.academia.edu/4208284/WHY_JAPONIC_IS_NOT_DEMONSTR...

[2] https://www.academia.edu/6345901/The_end_of_the_Altaic_contr...

[3] "non-traditional" = anything outside the comparative method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics). See eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6tg6cr/why_is_...

[4] https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_2564924_3/component/fil...

[5] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s...

[6] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ceolin/Diachronica.pdf

garmaine2• 6 years ago

The Altaic theory isn't necessary to postulate a connection between Japanese and Korean. It's known that genetically the Japanese population was seeded by Korean settlers which largely displaced the native Ainu populations. Japanese is likely a descendent of the language spoken by these colonists from the Korean peninsula.

The two languages are very divergent, and the usual mechanisms for classifying languages are difficult to apply because the dominant Chinese influence came to each separately after they diverged.

Mediterraneo105• 6 years ago

While a relationship between Japan and certain lost languages of the Korean peninsula is agreed upon by nearly all scholars, that still doesn’t necessarily mean that Japanese and Korean are related. One recent school of thought, for example, is that pre-Proto-Japanese entered the Korean peninsula from mainland China (Shandong province) while Korean came down from the north, so they would not be genetically related in spite of being neighbours.

danans5• 6 years ago

It's known that genetically the Japanese population was seeded by Korean settlers which largely displaced the native Ainu populations

It's even more complicated than that. In addition to the Ainu there were the Jomon people, a non-agricultural but nonetheless settled society who are believed to be the first people in the world to use pottery - which is surprising for a non-agricultural people.

They might in turn have been an offshoot of the first migration of modern humans out of Africa along the south coast of Asia, whose haplotypes [1] occur today at some of the highest frequences in Japan and as far north as Mongolia and as far south as Australia. Some sub-branches spread west all the way to the edge of Europe.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M_(mtDNA)

naniwaduni4• 6 years ago

For an amateur's blog post in 2009 to call Altaic theory utter horseshit would been rather hubristic to begin with, and moreover, not even the point. The Altaic hypotheses were higher-profile proposals that happened to include common origin for Japanese and Korean. Even dismissing the former, the latter is not exactly out of consideration.

And, as the post points out, the whole line of argument is a curiosity that has little concrete bearing on the fact that the two are very similar from a learner's perspective.

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got married after we both moved back to the States.

If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner.

Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)

Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language.

The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.

Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they can’t have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages.

Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago.

The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!

philliphaydon3• 6 years ago

The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!

Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

naniwaduni4• 6 years ago

Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.

Mediterraneo105• 6 years ago

Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

Korean does not have vowel length change the meaning, however Japanese does.

Korean used to be tonal, and you are right it now longer is.

Korean is used in combination with other data points to determine pronunciations.

This works for old English plays, for example too. You can use poems that should rhyme, plus commentary from linguists at the time, to guess what certain words would sound like “back then”.

Just saying that Korean is another super rare but fun random fact that I have heard of being used at least once in combination with ancient Chinese poems, to guess at the old Chinese pronunciation.

z23• 6 years ago

I totally agree with this analogy, though maybe to add some nuance (or pedantry), I'd claim that to start learning Chinese, you need to pick a modern dialect (probably Mandarin), which is like choosing Spanish over Portuguese or Catalan. Then, learning Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese) is like learning a nearby but non-Romance language that was heavily influenced by Latin or Romance languages, like English. Knowing Spanish will let you appreciate the similarities with English, but you'd still need to delve into historical Spanish (or French) to really see the connections.

Chinese is a pretty old and continuous language, so at the advanced level, learners could delve into Classical Chinese, which is truly analogous to Latin, and was also a dominant lingua franca in written form across East Asia. Pieces of Classical Chinese are 'alive' in everyday use, kind of like how Latin is 'alive' in the Romance languages through general and obvious similarities, or specific vocabulary, (e.g. "quid pro quo", "ad hominem"). But Classical Chinese is radically different from any dialect of today's vernacular Chinese.

In any case, the similarities and overlap definitely make learning between CJK(V) easier!

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

100% agree with this post, which I tried to get at saying that Korean and Japanese are distinct. Apologies for not making that clear. Your post is great to clarify this all more specifically.

The cultural side of things definitely requires a lot of time. And that’s fun.

What also takes time is learned how ideas are shared. Not just grammar, but which version of the multiple correct grammar options that is more common. How are paragraphs constructed? What is usually shared first in an idea or argument versus the end?

You can have someone with completely correct grammar and pronunciation that sounds odd to a native speak because the cultural / idea organization is not “native”.

Cro_on• 6 years ago

Go back to middle Chinese, of which, for example, the Shanghai based Wu dialect, or the Southern Teochew dialect, retain much of the features of, and you will really feel like you're studying the mother language.

tabtab• 6 years ago

My spouse is Chinese and I tried to learn Chinese for obvious reasons. However, they speak multiple dialects in practice such that it's hard to focus, and there are limited training materials for some of the dialects. Generally there is Cantonese, Mandarin, and their local dialect, which is what they use most often.

andi999• 6 years ago

Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if you found a solution.

yomly2• 6 years ago

Your spouse must be fairly old school to be using a dialect that isn't mando/canto...

Most millennials I know from mainland china and even Malaysia/Singapore will speak putonghua with their parents/family now. Ofc people from Sichuan and Shanghai love to preserve their dialect. Plus you got the cantos and hokkien/teochew/hakka and even changsharen.

In any case, my recommendation would be to stay with Mandarin and go deep on it. Learning a dialect afterwards is quite straightforward and you can be 80-90% proficient esp with understanding by just developing a sound mapping of each character from dialect->mandarin.

The common idioms you'll pick up with enough exposure.

You'll never regret learning Mandarin first - you'll be able to read/listen to the news and your relatives will understand you. Whereas if you try to learn dialect first you'll find it harder due to the less set of materials AND less people to talk to.

A lot of chinese people joke that they learned their 2nd/3rd... dialect by doing KTV and there's definitely some truth in that

moogleii3• 6 years ago

I came across this quote from the Mandarin wiki:

The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they cannot understand each other.... [They] also have another language which is like a universal and common language; this is the official language of the mandarins and of the court; it is among them like Latin among ourselves.... Two of our fathers [Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci] have been learning this mandarin language... — Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y progresso de la Compañía de Jesús en las Indias Orientales, I:28 (1542–1564)

Mediterraneo105• 6 years ago

Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like

That is rather an exaggeration. Korean and Japanese can be used as guides for Middle Chinese pronunciation, but they aren’t all that useful compared to using China’s own rhyme tables and running the comparative method on the Chinese dialects. For stages of Chinese before Middle Chinese, neither Korean nor Japanese are useful at all.

lifthrasiir6• 6 years ago

Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.

As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and Korean.

stanrivers6• 6 years ago

Yes - you should learned the language that has meaning to your life. If you don’t have a reason to use the language you will forget it all.

And agreed - once you get into more “college level or technical” Korean for lack of a better word, knowing the hanja/ Chinese characters makes vocab acquisition easier.

throwaway665544• 6 years ago

Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language.
The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language.

I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English.

An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max.

Words like "library" use the same Chinese letters, and have very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent.

I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did).

Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

49531• 6 years ago

That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.

AlchemistCamp3• 6 years ago

I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did).

Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when visiting Japan in recent years.

What's your rationale for this ordering?

lhorie• 6 years ago

You can definitely get a deeper appreciation of a language and get extra decoding tools for learning related languages when you learn about the history and etymology of words.

As a romance language speaker, knowing about greek and latin particles helped me greatly in learning english of all languages, just because of the sheer amount of appropriations english does.

Something that sticks with me from my early japanese learning after all these years is that, for example, "あ" (japanese "a") is a stylization of "安" (pronounced "an"). This helps make an association similar to how some kids books overlay hiragana over pictures of things that start with that letter, e.g. overlaying "い" (i) around a strawberry (ichigo). There are tons of similar examples in both japanese and chinese (pronunciation prefixes being a common tool used by chinese learners)

solarmist3• 6 years ago

Speaking sure, because both Korean and Japanese were fully formed languages that borrowed a writing system. I've come to view Kanji/Hanja as an information layering on top of the language used to increase the information density/clarity of the written languages.

If you look at written Japanese/Korean (with Hanja) and you get a much higher transfer. Esp. Someone who knows Chinese trying to get by in Japan.

kazinator4• 6 years ago

Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust".

Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending particle like よ. E.g. "ばかだよ私は". Sometimes that can be because the speaker realizes mid-sentence that it requires a topic to be clear, and you can tell when this is the case when the topic is preceded by a pause. But it has a nuance of its own, so it is used deliberately, even in writing.

jcranmer• 6 years ago

"Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.

freeopinion2• 6 years ago

I think your example highlights one of the amusing things about Japanese. That is the complete omission of the subject. As you said, the 「私は」 might only get thrown on as an afterthought. You can have entire conversations without ever actually voicing the subject. It can come off like a British comedy sketch for somebody to come into the middle of an exchange and try to figure out the topic from the last half of the conversation.

Kind of like using genderless pronouns in English takes away some hint to help you catch on. Only there's no pronoun at all. For English speakers it can get even worse when all that is spoken is a succession of passive verbs. Hilarious.

Edit: I should say that I never noticed a native Japanese person to be confused about the unspoken topic. They seem to be able to intuit it just fine in any context. I'm mostly just laughing at my own inability there.

thrwyoilarticle3• 6 years ago

Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object)

I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and refined consistently over many years. All of these become harder the further the target language is from the ones you already know. Would French really be significantly harder to learn if they said 'Je le ballon frappe'?.

I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms). Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you need to listen and read for.

Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.

laurieg• 6 years ago

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.

chillacy• 6 years ago

I think you're hinting at the fact that all language acquisition ultimately boils down to vocab acquisition for the long tail to mastery.

As for why people complain about vocab, it's probably because the dropout rate for language learning is huge (look at the completion rates on duolingo or popularity of beginner resources vs intermmediate vs advanced). By the numbers I suspect most learners are struggling with grammar, and most will drop out before "finishing" with grammar and being left with the long tail of vocab.

kwillets• 6 years ago

Just learning the words sounds great until you find out that Korean is agglutinative, and Koreans don't even agree on where the word boundaries are.

rangibaby5• 6 years ago

Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.

If you don't understand what a word means, can't you ask the other person?

totetsu2• 6 years ago

My university Japanese class was full of Korean and Chinese international students. It was hard to keep up.

ngokevin• 6 years ago

If you're learning Chinese from her, you might be interested in my project for couples learning each other's languages! https://learncoupling.com

forkLding• 6 years ago

Just some context on Simplified Chinese, the origin of Simplified Chinese came before the communist years and was mainly aimed at modernizing the Chinese written language and making it easy to learn for the general population as the many strokes to write a character in Traditional Chinese was making it hard to spread knowledge and increase literacy rates among the poorer and rural populations in China.

silicon24012• 6 years ago

Interesting article, though it feels pretty unpolished, like a step above someone's train of thought.

Also odd that Catalan was chosen as the example, rather than french, latin, or German, which all have much stronger and more direct influence on English than Catalan or Spanish.

Also some odd linguistic claims. The Altaic theory is not really supported by most linguists, and is the author claiming that Japanese and Korean are incredibly easy to learn for English speakers, or that Japanese is incredibly easy to learn if you're a Korean speaker and vice versa?

Regardless, interesting blog. Would be great as a first draft to expand upon with more examples to make you imagine what it would feel like.

andrewzah4• 6 years ago

Anecdotally as a native English speaker, I find spanish much easier to guess the meaning versus french or german.

I believe the author means Japanese/Korean are easier to learn if you know the other, versus English which is comparatively difficult for native C/J/K speakers.

In my experience, studying Korean did make studying Japanese a lot easier. There are some shared concepts, but Japanese is still quite difficult and different from Korean. From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.

otoburb• 6 years ago

>* From what I can tell, my Korean friends have an easier time picking up Japanese than English.*

I think it also helps that Japanese and Korean sounds share similar sounds, where as English has sounds that are difficult to pronounce for native Korean/Japanese speakers. My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the English "V" and "Z" sounds.

silicon24012• 6 years ago

yeah, that was pretty much my point. The article wasn't trying to show what language is easy to guess for K/J speakers, it was trying to show what language X sounds/reads like to speakers of languages A and B, where X was a major influence on A and B. In the article, A and B are K/J and X is Chinese. In my example, A/B is English, and X is French/German.

I study both Korean and Japanese and I agree, knowing some Korean helps with learning Japanese. My korean friends who speak both fluently say about as much as this article: it's almost a replace-in-place similarity, so that seems to line up with your account as well.

HuShifang• 6 years ago

One addendum to this: some of the simplified printed characters actually date back centuries in China (e.g. the 14th and 13th centuries CE), and IIRC were used for easier carving of the woodblocks used for printing. And Japan has been introducing simplified printed characters for many centuries too. And that's before you even get into variant scripts used in calligraphy, shorthand, and personal seals. Point being, it's even more complicated than this, historically speaking.

mrob• 6 years ago

Japanese also has informal simplified characters used in handwriting, some of which aren't in Unicode despite being commonly used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryakuji

andrewzah4• 6 years ago

Korean has a somewhat similar problem where the unicode displays ㅈ/ㅅ, but they're not written like that. It's a common beginner mistake. After all, who would expect characters to be written like they're displayed on a computer? :-) For the curious, ou can see how they're written here. [0]

[0] https://blogs.transparent.com/korean/files/2017/08/Stroke-Or...

danso• 6 years ago

Despite the title, there's not much commentary on how Chinese sounds to Korea and Japan. I was hoping for something like Prisencolinensinainciusol's supposed American-English-to-Italians:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-son...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

elboru• 6 years ago

That’s amazing, I’m not a native English speaker and that sounds exactly like when you are listening to a song in English but you are not understanding the lyric.

bane2• 6 years ago

Another one that's quite good

https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

I agree that 新字体 is preferable to 简体字 for exactly the etymological reason you cite, the thing with 言 only being simplified when it is a radical in 簡體字 really irritates me (especially since it is not a difficult or slow radical to write anyhow), and there are more examples than just that. For me I practice with 正體字 most often despite being more familiar with Japanese; so my preference goes 新字體 > 正體字 > 簡體字.

P.S. adding lang attributes on those spans where you compare versions of the characters would be nice, though I get that you have to choose just one of several, when a character is nearly identical in two or more countries. In my browser it also fixes an issue where despite serif being in your CSS font stack, it will select a sans-serif/gothic font by default if no lang attribute is set.

bgee3• 6 years ago

Saying Simplified Chinese makes less sense in terms of etymology while only providing a handful of examples is cherry-picking, since over two thousands characters are simplified[0].

I can provide a few examples where characters are more "etymological" in Simplified version vs in Traditional: 國 vs 国，黨 vs 党

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20131007231820/http://news.xinhu...

microcolonel4• 6 years ago

I don't see how 玉 has more etymological significance to 國 than 域/或. What analogy are you drawing on where the previous most common character for land/country is a worse etymological root than a character that apparently has meant only jade (or direct analogies to the material preciousness of jade) for longer than 國 has existed.

As for 黨, it is a direct analogy to 當 as in 當天. There is a little bit lost in the conversion of 田 to 黑 but at least they are related.

interestica2• 6 years ago

Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know what you're saying.

Also, it was designed with a certain concept in mind: "The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

em-bee• 6 years ago

i learned hangul characters by reading street signs while travelling through south korea. most signs were both in hangul and latin characters.

then i found a keyboard typing practice program where i patched the letter images and replaced them with the appropriate hangul character parts, to practice typing.

this skill came in handy when i needed to write down some korean words when hearing them.

lifthrasiir6• 6 years ago

To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) is what the King Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal, thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle Korean despite of its failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongguk_Jeongun

interestica2• 6 years ago

Thank you for this! The wiki page I linked to definitely doesn't cover this aspect well (specifically, Hunminjeongeum) and I learned something new.

Of relevance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye

ilamont2• 6 years ago

but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form.

I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional forms. Maybe someone knows the history?

Also, regarding this statement:

臺 (Korea/Taiwan) 台 (Japan/China)

In Taiwan, the latter form of tai (台) is used 99% of the time in colloquial, news, and signage. The complex form (臺) AFAIK is used almost exclusively in certain government situations (e.g. the name of a central government bureau) or on money. Street signs for famous buildings all use 台, i.e. 台北101, 台北松山機場, etc.

lifthrasiir6• 6 years ago

Simplified forms have been common in handwriting for centuries. Korean hanja was also simplified in handwriting when it was in use, even though it never got standardized. The "adoption" thus mostly means the standardization of such established glyphs even in print. (This also partly explains why the second reform in the mainland China [1] wasn't received well and retracted at the end.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...

spongepoc• 6 years ago

Maybe someone knows the history?

You'll need to look up shinjitai, which consists of the simplified characters adopted in Japan, which are different to the ones used in China.

AlchemistCamp3• 6 years ago

That's a pretty extreme exaggeration. 臺 is on many, many famous buildings: https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/2...

ilamont2• 6 years ago

The example you cited is operated by a central government entity, the Taiwan Railways Administration, and is used in a few places inside and outside the station, just as every other central government building uses the traditional form. On every other map and sign it's 台北車站. The tickets printed by the TRA even use 台北 or 台北車站.

kazinator4• 6 years ago

Chinese characters (known as hanzi in Chinese, hanja in Korean, kanji in Japanese) have had a huge effect on the two languages similar to the effect of the Greco-Latin vocabulary present in English

This is simply misleading. Japan was the target of massive immigration from China. Modern Japanese people are of Chinese descent ("yayoi"), with aboriginal DNA. So it is not simply the case a writing system having an influential effect. Foreigners brought their language, mixed it with the local language and evolved a new one out of that.

Mediterraneo105• 6 years ago

I’m afraid that you misunderstand the chronology. The development of the writing system in Japan postdates the Yayoi immigration by several centuries at least. The original immigrants from mainland Asia brought no writing system with them. Japanese writing is the result of later adoption of Chinese writing by Japan’s learned elites. Any introduction to Old Japanese orthography will explain how this happened.

kazinator4• 6 years ago

I'm afraid you're fishing for assertions in my comment which are not actually there. For one thing, I make no remarks about any writing system at all, let alone any specific timeline regarding the development of literacy.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

imo Traditional written Chinese (what the Japanese call Kanji and that's used outside of China) is easier than simplified written Chinese. While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning. Consequently, you can guess what the word means. Conversely with simplified, there less sub characters, so there's a lot of lost context. Easier to write by hand is also not so much of an advantage anymore given computers.

If you're going to learn to read or write, learn traditional. It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.

lifthrasiir6• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean: are you claiming that...

While hand writing traditional Chinese is harder, more complicated characters are made of other characters with a related meaning.

..."traditional" characters (which do not equal to Japanese Shinjitai!) is easier to write but harder to read, or...

It's easy to read simplified, but not so great the other way around.

...it's easier to read but harder to write?

There is some truth in your claim: simplification does discard some context and can be harder to read. But that's only the case for irregular cases (notable example being 漢 to 汉). In many cases they are highly systematic and phono-semantic roots are preserved (e.g. 訁 to 讠, so no information is lost), or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway (e.g. 飛 to 飞). Pronunciation-based simplification (e.g. 後 after, behind to 后 empress) is debatable, but it also tends to occur in frequently used characters.

chaostheory2• 6 years ago

Sorry, I didn't realize that the Japanese simplified kanji.

...it's easier to read but harder to write?

Harder to write because you have more lines and characters to draw. Harder to read because there are less sub-characters due to there being less lines. Judging from what you wrote, you probably understand my point just adding it just in case.

Yeah, I've been gone a long time and I've been assimilated i.e. I don't read and write often anymore so you're probably right.

or characters are so frequently used that you will have to memorize anyway

This is why I feel it makes it harder, especially for less common words. It's just more unnecessary work.

maple3142• 6 years ago

Native Chinese speaker here, and this is how I view Japanese before/after learning Japanese:

Before learning: Japanese is some hanzi/kanji characters and words in tons of unknown characters. To try to grasp a meaning from a Japanese sentence, just remove all the hiragana and katakana and try to make sense from the remaining words. I found that it is similar to reading Classical Chinese.

After learning kana: Could understand more things about a sentence by ですないか... Also, can read some katakana words if it is originated from English.

Actually learning Japanese and start memorizing Japanese words: Grammar is quite different, but still can find some sentence structures that are similar. Such as …も…ない and …也…沒… It is easy to find that 訓読み words have similar pronunciation with some Chinese variants. It is usually more similar to Minnan(Hokkien), Cantonese... compared to Mandarin.

IMO, knowing Chinese do make me easier to learn and read Japanese. I am still trying to get JLPT N3 this year, so other people knows more about Japanese may have different experience.

kagevf2• 6 years ago

音読み is the sound based on the original Chinese pronounciation, and 訓読み is the Japanese pronounciation.

ms1234rth• 6 years ago

If you know Turkish (or any Central Asian language barring Tajik[not familiar with Persian adjacent languages]), learning Japanese is a breeze because you can translate a Turkish text into Japanese word for word and out comes a perfectly constructed Japanese text. Obviously, it works in the other direction as well.

I remember trying to learn Japanese through Russian and having hell of a time untill I came across a Japanese textbook written in Turkish.

If you are from Central Asia, you can leverage both of your languages (native Central Asian & Russian) for learning English. It's better to learn English through Russian untill it's time to learn the English tense system at which point you can swith back to your native Central Asian as Russian is not very amenable for learning the English tense system whereas the tenses(rather aspects?) of C.A. languages line up with that of English in almost one to one manner. Thinking about the English tenses through the "Russian mind" was a nightmare untill I realized I already know the tenses through my native Kazakh.

Mathematicians never shy away from throwing everything at their disposal at a problem. Acting like them speeds up language acquisition process considerably.

winter_blue• 6 years ago

How close are Turkish and Japanese? I know there is a proposed "Altaic language family"[1], but I'd love to hear the perspective of someone who actually knows two such languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

darkhorn• 6 years ago

Vowel harmony, no genders, no plurals, agglutinative etc are similar.

The only thing you need to learn is new words. The grammatical structure is same. Translation between Indo-European and Altaic is very hard. Translation beween Altaic languages is very easy.

moufestaphio• 6 years ago

Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did the JLPT as a native English speaker.

Among my friends: Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading. Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar. English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah.

As per Chinese characters. There are a lot of subtle differences: 'Traditional Chinese' is the original. 'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party, is the standard in Mainland China. With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan

For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai

But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified)

I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese.

Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning. My favourite was:

手紙 The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively.

In Japanese, it means 'Letter'

In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'

wst_• 6 years ago

English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation

This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers.

On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.

krebs_liebhaber3• 6 years ago

In Japanese, it means 'Letter'
In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper'

I immediately thought of the toilet hand from Majora's Mask:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcUXuCU2pxE

[You give him a property deed to wipe himself with]

PaulDavisThe1st3• 6 years ago

Fun fact: on most proposed trees of human languages, Korean and English are closer to each other than Korean and Chinese.

gizmo385• 6 years ago

Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)

danans5• 6 years ago

They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic.

Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese languages), most languages of Southeast Asia, and all the African languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages

Again, it's so broad a grouping, projected so far back in time and based on such weakly detected feature similarities, that it's by no means broadly accepted as a language family in the way that Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, etc are.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 6 years ago

this would be a somewhat representative example of such a tree:

https://www.angmohdan.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/languag...

You can find more very easily with a google image search on "human language tree"

xiaodai• 6 years ago

What abt vietnamese?

howlgarnish2• 6 years ago

Vietnamese adopted the Latin script in the late 19th century, and Chinese characters are effectively obsolete now.

They do still use a lot of Chinese-derived vocabulary, which you can occasionally spot if you squint hard enough. Xã hội chủ nghĩa = 社会主义 she hui zhu yi (socialism).

qlk1123• 6 years ago

I always consider that the CJKV (Vietnam) or 漢字/Kanji/Hanja (Kanji below) writing system is like CISC, and other alphabet systems are like RISC.

_5659• 6 years ago

To me, the difference almost feels like Chinese is an acoustic instrument that has more flavor in how its played and Japanese feels more like a digital instrument in how its programmed.

dwg2• 6 years ago

I live in Japan and work at a Japanese company. I can't understand Chinese at all. Even though the Japanese version of the Chinese pronunciation is somehow vaguely familiar at times, there is no making any sense of it.

I suspect Japanese folks feel the same way so I turned to my right and asked a coworker what Chinese sounds like to him. His answer was ちんぷんかんぷん (gibberish).

dwg2• 6 years ago

Just to clarify he did not say this in any sort of derogatory sense, nor do I wish it to be interpreted as such. Just that he can't understand! I think the difference is greater than the author states (except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters).

Liquid_Fire• 6 years ago

(except written, which is is a little easier to understand because of the borrowed characters)

I understood the article to be talking entirely about the written language. Despite including "and sounds like" in the title, there is barely any discussion of the spoken language.

dboreham• 6 years ago

Like Dutch to an English speaker?

bane2• 6 years ago

For other languages, there's a pretty interesting youtube channel called ecolinguist that frequently tries to test mutual intelligibility of language pairs to various extents. It's actually quite fascinting.

https://youtu.be/m9Dagt3SWoo

karmasimida2• 6 years ago

Interesting observations.

As native Chinese speaker:

The Look:

1. Japanese: I like the kanji, it is very recognizable, even the character set is different. Most Chinese will have no problem reading traditional Chinese characters, though somewhat slower. The rest...not so much, kanas are my biggest headache.

2. Korean: First thing I noticed is the presence of circle, which is not part of Chinese radicals until very recently. Because it looks like bubbles, so it looks somewhat ... cute? No meaning can be inferred beyond that. Also the use of spaces are noticeable.

The Sound:

1. Japanese: Fast. Less variation in the speech itself. Notice the presence of pitch. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese

2. Korean: Not as fast as Japanese, but still faster than Chinese. A lot of unfamiliar sounds that are absent in Chinese pronunciation. Sometimes I would be able to find one word or two that sounds like Chinese and makes sense in the context, but the rest is just foreign.

Question to Korean speakers:

Do you guys recognize each individual Hangul character's meaning (under the context of the word of course) if that word has a Chinese origin? Or the word is recognized as whole. For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?

yongjik3• 6 years ago

For example 부동산(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, 不動産, which in Chinese means 不(not)動(moving)産(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?

It depends. For this particular example, I think most Koreans will treat 부동산 as a single word meaning "real estate", because it's not a very productive combination: the alternative 동산 (moveable properties?) is a legal term which is much less common, and 산(産) as "property" isn't common either.

On the other hand, a word like 고밀도화(高密度化 - densification) is transparently decomposable to 고(高 high) + 밀도(密度 density) + 화(化 -ify). Few people can write it down in hanja (I just copy-pasted from dictionary), but most people will immediately recognize its meaning, even if they've never seen the word before.

karmasimida2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. Appreciated.

I think this answers part of my question as how modern Korean create new words/concepts, if not via English loanwords. So those word roots could still be applied in certain cases.

tokyoseb• 6 years ago

That example is interesting. The Japanese word for real estate, 不動産, actually came from French [1], 'immobilier' (real estate, by opposition to what is movable or 'mobile' such as 'meubles' or 'mobilier', i.e. furniture). And of course the French word comes from Latin...

[1] https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%8B%95%E7%94%A3

The Japanese would treat the whole combination as a single word (in my experience) and wouldn't analyse the components either (although 'they make sense'). The etymology is often more apparent in Japanese and Chinese thanks to the characters, whereas it's not always easy to see it in other language (unless you speak Latin or Greek..). But this is a borrowed word and in this particular case it's very intuitive to French speakers as immobilier / mobilier / mobile are all common words.

jimmydef• 6 years ago

1. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese

This is because you are probably speaking in mandarin which has deviated a great deal from Middle Chinese ever since the Jurchen Jin conquered northern China.

But if you were to compare it to a more conservative Chinese language like min-nan or some other southern chinese language, the similarities are unmistakable.

examples of pronunciation:

忍者: Ninja (JP), Nin-jia (Minnan), Renzhe(mandarin)

美人： Bi Jin (JP) , Bi Jin (minnan), meiren(mandarin)

簡単: Kantan(JP), Kan Tan (minnan), jiandan (mandarin)

時間: JiKan (JP), Si Kan (minnan), shijian (mandarin)

世界: sekai (JP), Sei Kai (minnan), shijie (mandarin)

速度: sokudo (JP), Sok Do (minnan), shudu (mandarin)

確認: kakunin (JP), Kak Nin or Kak Lin (minnan), queren (mandarin)

区别: ku betsu (JP), ku piat (minnan) , qu bie (mandarian)

人類: jin rui (JP), Jin Lui (minnan), ren lei (mandarin)

and korean: 金： Kim (kr), Kim (minnan), Jin (mandarin)

新婦： Sim Pu (kr) , Sim Pu (minnan), Xin fu (mandarin)

學生： hag saeng (kr) , hak seng (minnan), xue sheng (mandarin)

參加：Cham Ga (kr) , Tsham Ka (minnan), Can Jia (mandarin)

Notice how minnan and korean preserves the ending consonants like "t" and "g" sounds while Japanese simulates the ending consonant with a new character. So the character 速 is pronounced Sok but in Japanese is split into So & Ku where ku simulates the ending consonant.

Mandarin just does away with ending consonants completely. Many other changes such as the lack of the "f" and "v" sound in early middle chinese which is preserved in korean and minnan but not in other Chinese languages where many "b" consonants are converted into "f" consonants. Or the lack of ending "m" consonant in mandarin which is still present in minnan and korean.

kagevf2• 6 years ago

any source on the mapping for the sound changes? That's very interesting and I would like to learn more ...

totetsu2• 6 years ago

When using the camera feature of the Google translate app, I got the idea for making something similar, but instead of translating, it would just blur out all the words that a certain person couldn't understand. That way people designing accessible spaces could get an idea of how other people experience the information in them.

What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

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