global_jd

Understanding speech, J vs C

One of the nice things about an evening ballgame on the radio is that KEST and KVTO carry Japanese and Mandarin programming against each other, so I can switch back and forth between innings. (Small of me, I know, but that's the way I work.... ;-)

Anyway, I realized some differences this week between listening to Japanese and Chinese:

• Sentence structure carries significant implications... the verb endings, particles, and fewer homonyms in Japanese make it much easier to hear the overall structure of a sentence. I may not understand the verbs, nouns, and modifiers in Japanese radio, but I can definitely hear how the pieces fit together. On Mandarin or Cantonese radio I might understand some phrases, but I still can't hear how the whole sentence fits together. The use of particles in Japanese lets me put each phrase into its proper place.

• Speaker variability, uh, varies. In Chinese radio or video there can be a great variety of voices, and each takes me a little bit to get acclimated to. Spoken Japanese, on the radio or television, takes a homogenous formal form, where if you understand one speaker you can understand another. On the other hand, a wider range of Japanese speech takes you into a wider variety of actual languages, where the phonemes and sentence structure can vary depending on the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Chinese, despite its regional variations, is more homogenous across social situations. I'm not sure I described this distinction accurately, but Chinese radio has more variation among speakers and less variation among situations, while Japanese radio has less variation among speakers, but differs more from non-radio Japanese. For me, at least. ;-)

On another topic, one study book I've added to my routine lately is Sun Tzu's "Art of War". I'm using an edition which has the original Chinese on the left page, and an English translation on the right page. I haven't had many study sessions here yet, but have gotten a lot out of it so far... seeing how ideas are constructed, seeing how writers try to expand the Chinese into longer English wordcounts. It's also pretty cool to think about reading a book in the original like this.... ;-)

Pedagogical styles

Today I started my first review of Korean, after my first intensive on Cantonese. With Cantonese I really got into an aural learning style, and realized I don't have similar resources in Korean. Made me think of how the learning materials almost mirror other aspects of the culture. All the following are necessarily over-simplifications.... ;-)

Cantonese has *some* written materials (the recent great Routledge grammars, a Teach Yourself, the older Lau books, a phrasebook maybe two), but it's greatly a spoken language, and I found audio materials I had not seen in my previous studies.

The Korean materials I've found have been more academic and serious... courseware for classes, academic/research books from universites... I haven't been able to locate anything as casual as the Hong Kong "Elementary Cantonese" tape system.

Mandarin had had a few western study books (Defense & State Depts), but recently there's an explosion of very good books for English speakers to learn Mandarin. Many of these are from the PRC government, and I'm not sure that the remainder don't have such a funding background.

Japanese textbooks stretch for miles and miles, but I still haven't found anything to help me understand the spoken Japanese in the Tora-san movies.... ;-)

For books on Hindi and other languages of India, I've managed to get some useful courseware in second-hand shops (particularly near the UC Berkeley campus), but I'm not sure how someone outside this particular region might be able to learn.

Cross-cultural @

That item delimiter in email addresses -- even in English we're not sure whether to call it "at", "at sign", "snail" or something else. Here's a list of how this problem is handled in different languages.

Which language?

If I were setting my priorities from scratch, then here are some things I'd weigh when deciding what to study first, from the perspective of an adult English speaker in San Francisco . In comments.

Chinese vs Japanese

This isn't definitive, by any means... just some things I've been thinking about recently.

Learning Chinese feels like laying bricks for a building... once I learn something, it stays in place, and I can build on it. Even the language constructs multi-character words in a predictable way... "famous" is "has name", "wealthy" is "has money"... so far, from what I've seen, things build upon each other.

Learning Japanese is more like constructing a bamboo dwelling, where I might build up a structure and then later have to shift it in light of later knowledge. The characters have multiple readings... the vocabulary and structures you'd use would vary depending on the social situation. I've studied Japanese longer, but my footing feels less solid than with Chinese.

Honorifics differ greatly... whew. So far in Chinese I've seen a less-formal and more-formal second-person-singular pronoun, and that's it. (Although I'm wondering about verbs of giving and receiving.) No comparison.

Japanese is easier to listen to, because of the strong patterning in the sentences... there are pattern sentence endings, like "-mashita ka" and so on, and a great deal of patterned sentence fillers like "so desu ne" and so on. When listening to Japanese I can hear the shape of the sentence, even though there are great blank spots for content-related nouns and verbs. There are sentence patterns in Chinese, but it doesn't seem anywhere near as pronounced... verbs don't inflect, adjectives don't inflect, it's more a succession of specific concept syllables. It's easier to hear the shape of a conversation in Japanese.

I'm starting to see some of the common interpersonal drivers behind both languages... I'm seeing how you'd phrase things to avoid flatly contradicting someone else, for instance. After the intermediate level it seems that there's also a lot in common between the two languages in how they rely on proverbs and idiom to draw upon shared cultural context... in America there are often many cultures so it's rare to rely on Aesops' Fables in day-to-day conversation. At this early level I'm at, though, Chinese seems a lot more direct than the ambiguities in Japanese. I still like 'em both, though.... ;-)

One more, although I haven't thought this through much: Mandarin seems a spoken language, connected to an older written language. Spoken Japanese, when you get down to it, is best as an unspoken language... there's great reliance on an unspoken understanding between the participants. Written Japanese seems like it takes longer training and commitment, and there's a great, great variety in written materials... even the use of text graphics on TV and the role of manga show this. hmm.....

[Sat Aug 14] One more comparison I've been thinking about lately is how some of the commonplace words are constructed in each language. In Japanese there's "nanika" for "something" (lit. "what" + question-particle) or "dareka" for "someone" (lit. "who" + question-particle) or "itsuka" for "sometime" (lit. "when" + question-particle). In Chinese there are constructions like "dongxi" for "something" (lit. "east" + "west"), or "duoshou" for "how much" (lit. "many" + "few") and "zuoyou" for "approximately" (lit. "left" + "right'). In Japanese these words are constructed grammatically, while in Chinese they're constructed by the juxtaposition of opposites. Rules-based vs yin-yang? Not sure what this might really indicate, but it's interesting to see such a pattern emerge.

Chinese vs Japanese

Interesting short article comparing learning Japanese vs learning English. I haven't logged as many hours of study as the author, but Chinese also seems to be coming much more easily than Japanese, at least at these stages.

Dictionary order

Dictionaries... can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.... ;-)

Let's see, in English, if you memorize an order of 26 letters, then it's absolutely easy to find a word in a dictionary -- but only if you can spell it! That's hard, because English spelling is so psycho due to all the places and times from which it has swiped words.

A Hindi dictionary in Devanagari offers much more predictable location -- if you can say it correctly, then you can pretty much automatically spell it correctly -- but the initial order is a little harder. The basics are easy: dictionary order follows the location of production in the mouth, where back-of-the-throat letters are listed before palatal or labial sounds. But then you get into the vowels and semi-vowels, and the long syllables versus the short, and I have no idea yet how to find where a conjunct consonant is listed. It's an achievable task, but it's funny how much time I spend paging through a Devanagari dictionary to find a word -- easier to spell, but harder (at first) to locate than in English.

But at least it's not Chinese. Assuming it's a pinyin dictionary rather than hanzi (Latin transliteration rather than characters), then different dictionaries handle tones differently. I have some pinyin/english dictionaries which list all four tones together for a given syllable and then get into compounds which start with that syllable, while others start with all words which start with that tone of that syllable, then all words for the next tone of that syllable, and so on. It's hard to compactly describe, but once you find the basic starting syllable in some pinyin dictionaries, you might have to page through four different alphabetized sets of words to find the compound you're seeking.

And then... there are the character-based dictionaries. There are many different ways to order them. My favorite these days is Halpern's Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which uses the really nifty SKIP system, in addition to the usual radical, strokecount, and phonetic options. It's often as easy to find a character with SKIP as it is to find a word you can spell in an English dictionary. But then when I crosscheck with a Chinese dictionary, or seek a deeper understanding in a larger Japanese dictionary like Nelson, I have to figure out how they might have filed that little character away.... ;-)

Anyway, it's pretty funny -- I never had these problems when I was studying French or Spanish.... ;-)

Syllables and meaning

I realized something interesting about Chinese today. Because characters are represented as a single syllable, then even with the "tone" multipliers there are fewer unique atomic elements than in English, Hindi, or other languages where individual words are made up of more syllables, more total sounds.

I haven't checked into how many separate syllables are available in Chinese, but I'm already running into words that sound exactly the same, but which are distinguished in meaning only by context. (Example: xiang (say "sheng"), with the third "dipping/rising" tone, means both "to want" and "to think"... "I want to go" and "I think I will go" would be, in word-for-word English translation, "I want go" and "I think I want go", respectively... more or less ;-).

Rephrased, where in Japanese we string along various topics and find the total meaning at the end of the sentence with the verb choice, in Chinese we may have to listen to the whole sentence and fit the words together with various meanings so that the whole phrase makes a pattern.

Hmm, now I'm wondering about average sentence length in the various languages... if Chinese has shorter sentences, on average, than English or Japanese, then that total-sentence pattern-matching wouldn't be as hard.

It's early, and I could be wrong here, especially considering that many Chinese "words" are actually compounds of shorter atomic units, but it's an interesting difference in the languages... Japanese kun readings and Hindi and English are usually in polysyballic units, but Chinese and Japanese on readings may depend more on context for meaning.

Vegetarian phrasebook

I ran across this while looking at referrer links from search engines... a long page with ways to specify vegetarian diet in many languages. Also came across Wikipedia pages on Common phrases in different languages and A Comparative You.

Dyslexia and uncertainty

I think it's taking me longer to learn hiragana and katakana than it takes many people, and suspect it may take longer for me for Devanagari script too. I've seen a number of books say that kana can be learned in "a few hours" or "a few days", but I still have intermittent difficulty associating mirror-image shapes with their correct sounds... comes and goes, depends on setting. Sometimes it's even easier for me to recall a katakana by visualizing a word in which it appears, such as the shape of "terebi" ("television"). Rote seems harder for me than for many... I feel better when I can set a bit of knowledge within a pattern, when I can lock it in with other things.

Same with Chinese characters... knowing the romanized pinyin pronunciation alone doesn't do it for me as much as knowing the hanzi, and the associated kanji and their readings, and being able to analyze the parts and write it out. There are distinct feelings of uncertainy/ambiguity, shifting over to comfort once I see how it fits in, and can look at the info in multiple ways.

There's also a difference in going from character-to-vocalization between Chinese in Japanese... Chinese has a single sound associated with a character, while Japanese usually has at least two, sometimes more than a half-dozen, different ways to pronounce a single shape. On the other hand, sometimes Chinese has multiple shapes for the same word, depending on when and where the character was written... the simplification in PRC towards 1950 made a split with the past, with Taiwan, with Japan... knowing both sets of shapes is necessary.

Still, in Chinese I think we can read and pronounce serially, character by character, but in Japanese there's often a need to look beyond the character to see what follows before deciding how to pronounce it.

This week I was also puzzled by why the characters for pronouns and some common words differ between Mandarin and Japanese.