Is Chinese easy to learn if you're only learning spoken Chinese?
>>57652157
Yes, but there's no use to spoken Chinese as the there's too many dialect. Better than nothing though.
>>57652750
Nah all educated chinks understand mandarin.
It should be, but it's probably a good idea to try and learn how to read it at least, even if you can't write it.
This is coming from someone who's learning Korean though and I honestly don't know how many characters Chinese has.
>>57653199
The total number of Chinese characters were never confirmed, but most estimation ranges from 30000-50000. However, you only need to learn about some 3000 to do basic communication.
>>57653396
REEEEEE
>>57653396
Sounds pretty fucking intimidating.
>>57653446
to learn Chinese characters is similar to learn English words.
not so tough if you get use to.
>>57653575
Out of curiosity how many kanji symbols are in Japanese? Also why use kanji in the first place when you already have a syllabary?
>>57653647
Kanji are just traditional Chinese characters with different pronunciations
>>57653691
I know, but I'm curious about how many are present in Japanese. The whole multiple writing systems thing sounds interesting.
>>57653647
it is said 50,000 kanjis exist, but only about 2,000 is used in usual life.
>Also why use kanji in the first place when you already have a syllabary?
i suppose it's easier to understand long sentences 'cause Japanese don't
divide words in sentence by inserting space.
>>57653895Thanks, two more questions though:
Which language (English or Japanese) do you think is harder. Which do you prefer to use?
>>57653647
~2000 are taught in schools, a few hundred more are important that aren't, and yet another few hundred a basically used only in names. Industrial standards have about 5500, with the additional 2500 coming largely from both extremely niche technical terms and characters that have been abandoned in most places but are still used stylistically. All said and told there are supposed 50,000, but knowledge of only about 2500 is necessary for daily life, and even the about 95% of what you'll see comes from a set of about 1000.
I've heard a dozen and one explanations for why the Japanese use kanji, but the best one I've heard is that it divides important nouns and verbs from particles while clarifying ambiguity that may not be easily addressed in written form, thereby improving readability and making the use of space more efficient.
For example, "Hashi" and "Hashi" (はし) can most commonly mean bridge or chopsticks in Japanese, and can be distinguished in context and stress placed on the syllables. However, in written Japanese there are no stress markers, and the context may not be evident. So they use 橋 for bridge and 箸 for chopsticks, immediately clearing up ambiguity.
Katakana are normally used for transcribing foreign words, onomatopoeia, indicating that a word is extremely important, or may be used to show particularly loud shouting.
>>57654257
English is much harder for me because Japanese, my first language, doesn't have common points with English.
possibly vice versa for who use English as their first language.
>Which do you prefer to use?
I have to use Japanese at offece, but I want to learn English more.
>>57654297
Seeing as you're first language is probably English, mind answering >>57654257?
>>57654639
alright, thanks again. Hope your english gets better.
I took Mandarin for three years in high school. Characters were definitely the hardest part. I probably could have learned twice as much as I did if we only had to learn pinyin (the romanized spelling of words).
>>57654765
They're structured completely differently. I don't just mean sentence ordering, I mean really fundamental stuff is completely different. Particles, which can be thought of as words that connect words together in relationships, don't really exist in English, and only rough equivalents can really be made. Differences between は and が are actually fairly simple if you approach it from an outside perspective, but neither really has a true English translation. Besides that, Japanese has counter words, which you basically need to add to your sentence when giving a number of something, and there are dozens of them. There's also no true future tense or adjectives.
I don't think you can really compare them, they couldn't have evolved further apart in the Old World.
chinese
>>57655098
Alright, so say I want to start learning it (split on whether I want to start French or Japanese in the summer), what would you say is the best way to approach it as somebody who only knows English?
>>57655299
Take classes and read supplementary material, but be really wary of drawing any direct parallels to English in terms of structure. Sure there as still nouns and verbs, and nouns and verbs that can function as adjectives, but you really need to treat it as an alien thing. For things like particles and general grammar, you shouldn't focus on a literal translation at all. Instead, focus on how the ordering of the words and use of particles affects their relations and meanings within the context of the sentence.
As a Canadian I'd assume you have some experience with French. French and English are both closely related and have a long history, so they naturally have a huge number of direct parallels. Don't try to do this if you're learning Japanese.
>>57655521
Yeah I kinda get that whole concept of not trying to just learn English with different words. As for my experience "learning" French, the school boards basically teach you how to use a French-English dictionary. The only useful phrase I learned was "Je ne pas parle Francis."
>>57655138
I've seen this guy post his horror stories on /biz/ before, glad to see someone got a screenshot.
>>57655521
Oh and thanks, that was a lot of really useful information.
>>57655786
No problem, actually just remembered something really important.
The two syllabaric writing systems are really easy to learn. You could learn them in a day if you wrote them down a few times, and they get ingrained pretty quickly when you see a lot of the written material.
Kanji is a whole other world, but not as intimidating as it seems at first. The vast majority only have a few readings, a lot only 1 or two, and most of the time which reading is obvious based on whether it's paired with another kanji or not. The vast majority of exceptions are also extremely common words, so you learn your way around them pretty quick. You will, however, learn to hate some characters, like 生.
Pronunciation is completely regular, and conjugation has very few exceptions, the two most glaring of which are also two of the most common words in the language by far. One of the more interesting conjugations is the potential, which expresses an ability to do something. Instead of saying "I can do X", you just conjugate the X to its potential form.
