People who already know English don't know how hard it is to learn!
Some of us do.
You don't know what you are saying. English just isn't logical. Look at these words: bough; rough. Logic would tell you that they should sound the same, but no, they don't. I don't know any other languages like that.
Well then you obviously haven't studied French, which is unutterably worse. French "spelling" is a complete joke that should have been reformed 200 years ago. The trick to reading French is to leave half of the letters silent and to pronounce the remaining half wrong.
But you're complaining about the writing system. That's hardly the totality of a language.
One of my biggest problems, and boy is it minor, is that so many languages attach a gender to inanimate objects. Spanish is the one I studied, and was struck amused by the conflict with "If it ends in -o it's masculine, -a it's feminine."
That's not a rule. It's just a general guide.
Except for the word for 'map', mapa. According to their own rules, it should be la mapa. It isn't. It's el mapa. Why the exception for a map?
It's not an exception. All Greek words ending in A are apparently masculine. Latin retained the gender and so does Spanish.
Programa, artista, diagrama... the list is endless and they're all masculine. English has the same problem: you'll make a big mistake with a lot of words if you don't know the language of origin.
Focus, alumna, and
vertex are Latin, and the plurals are
foci, alumnae and
vertices.
Hypothesis is Greek and the plural is
hypotheses.
And what about nouns that end in a consonant, such as lapiz? Is it el lapiz or la lapiz? I've never understood the reasoning for this, but it's a minor thing at best.
There is no "reasoning"! These things evolved over centuries, some of them over millennia. Why is
die Sonne feminine in German and
el sol masculine in Spanish, since they are merely phonetic evolutions of the same Indo-European word?
If you want illogic in English:
- Sweden: Swedish
- Norway: Norwegian
- Switzerland: Swiss
- Germany: German
- Spain: Spanish
- Iraq: Iraqi
- Greece: Greek
- Poland: Polish
- Denmark: Danish
- France: French
- Portugal: Portuguese
- Argentina: Argentine
- Thailand: Thai
- England: English
- Lebanon: Lebanese
- Peru: Peruvian
- and last but not least, Holland: Dutch
I'm told that in Japanese, the slightest change in how long you hold a syllable can make all the difference in being in a bar and ordering either a beer or a building. Both, I am told, are biru, but one (can't recall which) has the first syllable held slightly longer. (Fortunately for my friend, the bartender wasn't an idiot.)
But your friend is.
"Beer" is spelled phonetically in the
kana syllabary as
bi-i-ru. In schoolbook romanization it would either be "biiru" or "biru" with a macron over the I (which I don't have in my character set) to indicate a long vowel. No Japanese would ever confuse the two, and a student of the language would pick up the distinction rather quickly. It's about the same as the difference as between a long
í and a short
i in Czech. Once your ears get calibrated there is absolutely no confusion. Speakers of Spanish have the same problem with "pick" and "peak" in English; there is only one series of vowels in Spanish so their ears are not calibrated to recognize that difference as phonemic.
Aren't the German words for 'please' and 'you're welcome' the same (bitte)?
Oh heck, greetings and other social words are almost totally meaningless and evolve and change rather rapidly. You can't put much stock into those that any language happens to have at the moment.
Bitten is the German cognate of "bid" and means "to ask [for something]." So
bitte literally means "I ask [for whatever makes sense in this context, you figure it out]." The first time you're asking me for some object or favor, the second time I'm asking you to feel free to request anything you need because it's an honor to provide it. Look at the etymology of the English word "please;" it doesn't make any more sense. A fragment of "If it please you." How about "goodbye," a contraction of "God be with ye," something that the irreligious can hardly utter with sincerity.
I've been told by several foreign friends that English is one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn. I think only Mandarin Chinese beats it out.
I disagree. I think Chinese is remarkably easy. There is no singular/plural, no present/past/future, no masculine/feminine. If it's important to make it clear that two dogs ate three fish you just say "two dog yesterday eat three fish," otherwise it's "dog eat fish." There's no utterly worthless paradigm of around twenty prepositions left over from the Stone Age that's supposed to describe every conceivable relationship between two nouns... at, of, in, by... yeah right. You express relationships with your choice of thousands of nouns and verbs and you do it with whatever nuance and precision you need. Not, "The dog is in the house," rather, "dog occupy house interior," except those words don't take up as many syllables in Chinese.
The hardest part of spoken Chinese is the fact that tone is phonemic. You don't get to express how you feel by changing the tone of your words. You have to actually be an articulate master of your native language and just
say it!
Shouldn't this be in linguistics?
Yes, I'll make the appropriate inquiries on the Moderators forum.
seriously oriental language is fucking hard to learn, the verbal side is not so bad, but the written side is freaking difficult,vthey have like a different symbol for every freakin word in chinese
Yes, but the up side of that is that you can be partially literate by knowing a small set of words. That was probably a tremendous advantage in the era before universal education. I'm sure in the days when 99% of Europeans couldn't write their own name, most Chinese probably knew a few dozen
han zi for the words they used most often in their work.
even a 40 year old chinese guy doesent know half of the symbols
These days any Chinese with a high school education knows something like 2000
han zi which gives him the ability to read a number of compounds equivalent to the vocabulary of a university-educated anglophone
and each family has their own symbols
Someone is either pulling your leg or referring to some awfully ancient traditions. There is a standard set of about 5000
han zi used in everyday typography. I've got the dictionary, it's called the Fenn 5000.
and there are rare symbols that only certain people know
Sure, scholars in arcane specialties. Don't you wonder what reason there could be for knowing a word that nobody else knows, given that the whole purpose of language is
communication?
Somebody is really putting you on. If you want to read the original writings of the ancient philosophers you have to learn some words that are not used any more... but so what? If you want to read the original writings of Plato you have to learn Ancient Greek. That doesn't stop most of us from being sufficiently familiar with them in modern translations.
i know some chinese (a fare bit) i know very limited japanese, and i am currently "trying" to learn korean fluently, korean is like a mix between chinese and japanese symbols, actualy no its not, its more like japanese with alot of circles and squares, oh and zig zaggy type lines,
You haven't learned much about these writing systems. Chinese is
han zi (more familiar in its Japanese pronunciation,
kanji). Each elementary morpheme has its own character. (I'm hesitant to call them "words" because Chinese is just not put together like an Indo-European language.)
Japanese uses kanji for the thousands of words it borrowed from Chinese, and just to make it harder (must be some zen value in that) it has a parallel series of pronunciations for each one, for the more-or-less equivalent native Japanese word. You have to tell from context which way to read it of course, more zen. And then for all the words that didn't come from Chinese and have no Chinese equivalents, they use
hiragana, those symbols that look like stylized kanji because that's what they are, each of which representing one spoken syllable. A KA SA TA NA HA MA YA RA WA, I KI SHI CHI NI HI MI null RI null, U KU SU TSU NU... well you get the picture, a lot more zen in there with the phonetic vagaries of the language superimposed over the symbols. And little diacritical marks to distinguish TA from DA and HA from PA or BA. And the second vowel in a long vowel is written real tiny, and the second consonant in a double consonant is a real tiny TSU... more zen. Wait I'm not done. Then there is
katakana, a complete second set of the same syllables in a much squarer style that is used for transcribing foreign words. That is if you consider
rokido as a "transcription" of "Lockheed."
Korean has a totally phonetic alphabet. Three or four letters are arranged artistically into a square shape to form the symbol for a syllable, yes folks there's a bit of zen there too. Also they use kanji as well, but not as prolifically as the Japanese, mostly for proper names.
You can spot printed Japanese in a second because so many of the syllabary symbols look brush-written. You can spot Korean in half a second because it's the only one with circles.
its hard thats all im saying i have just learned 1 set of numbers from 1-10 then i find out there is a complete different set of numbers from 1-10 what the hell man!,
One, two, three, four... then first, second, third, fourth. We have two series of
cardinal and
ordinal numbers. Chinese think that's pretty odd, since in Chinese it's
yi, er, san, si... for cardinals and
di yi, di er, di san, di si for ordinals.
and i have learned some phrases for basic communication then i find out that i cannot use those phrases when talking to an "elder" and that i have to use a different phrase,
Many Indo-European languages have two forms for "you," one familiar and one former, and goddess help you if you use the wrong one. After staying in my Spanish friend's house for a week I accidentally called his mother
tú and I got the cold shoulder for the rest of my stay. (In Mexico people are much less formal, even waiters call their customers
tú.)
the one thing that connects all chinese speakers is the symbols wich are the same as a universal rule in general, but how you pronounce those symbols is different in each how can i put it, "village dialect".
There are regional dialects in Chinese as in most languages, but the definition of "dialect" is "mutually intelligible, perhaps with a little effort." For example, the speech of Sichuan is a dialect of Mandarin. The tones are different and there are some phonetic shifts, but after a few days a person from Cheng Du and a person from Bei Jing suddenly find their ears recalibrated and they start to understand each other. Cantonese, on the other hand, is a different language. There is no intercomprehensibility between Cantonese and Mandarin. Yes they use the same words in the same sequence, at least about 98%, but the phonetics have changed so much over the centuries that the similarity is lost. There's no "mapping" of Cantonese phonetics into Mandarin. Shang Hai, Fu Qian, and many other regions have distinct languages, rather than dialects. But they all use the same words in the same order, an interesting phenomenon due to the unifying influence of a non-phonetic writing system.
English has so many more rules and exceptions to those rules than Mandarin. Mandarin uses extremely simple and intuitive syntax.
Mandarin has a huge number of micro-rules. Like the "measure words" that go with numbers. One person is
yi wei ren, one dog is
yi tiao gou, one book is
yi ben shu and one large flat thing like a table is
yi jang juo zi. There are micro-rules for the way individual words fit together, each rule may only cover a few dozen words. Still, I agree that is easier than one macro-rule with lots of little exceptions.
They don't even conjugate their verbs! How many languages are there that don't even require you to conjugate verbs? In some ways it's like German. Many of the words are compounds. When you analyze words with more complex meanings, you can see how it makes sense when you break the word up into its constituent parts.
Chinese is what is called an
analytic language and that is actually the engine for word formation in the language. There are only 1600 distinct syllables in Mandarin, meaning that every morpheme has quite a few homonyms, so most "words" must be compounds of multiple morphemes to be understandable. Most of the compounds make sense, but not all. For example
dong xi, "east-west" means "thing."
But, you're right about the kanji. I've heard that learning Mandarin kanji is extremely difficult and very few Chinese people learn to master it.
Universal education is one of the very few things that communism does right, and since the communists took over China literacy has become as universal as in America. Virtually every Chinese under the age of 40, except in the remote provinces, can read and write the couple of thousand kanji that comprise what we would call a high school vocabulary.
However, I'm talking about being able to converse in Chinese and learning conversational word syntax. It's much simpler than English. By far.
I agree with you. I think it's also easier to learn since it generally takes fewer syllables to express a thought in Chinese than in English. As a result the language is spoken somewhat more slowly than English, and far more slowly than, say Italian. That's a real boon to a student, who has to parse every sentence in real time.
