question re: chinese/japanese script.

[euphoric1dr]

i'm still unsure about how these two languages compare, in terms of learning the written part to accompany the spoken language. am i right in that, chinese does not have an actual alphabet, with smaller pieces that you then use to construct more complex words - instead, each character corresponds to each syllable that you actually say

Comments

[keilexandra]

I am assuming that Chinese = Mandarin in your case.

Chinese and Japanese are both tonal languages. Chinese grammar is significantly easier to learn, from what I understand. But Chinese also has no alphabet and is not phonetic at all--there is no connection between written and oral. It takes at least 5 years of intensive study to get to newspaper level. I speak Chinese natively and studied it (non-intensively) for 4-5 years, but I can't read a newspaper.

I know nothing about Japanese, but I believe one of the three forms does utilize an alphabet.

[poeticalpanther]

Japanese isn't actually a tonal language, or if it is, they neglected to mention the tones in the three years I took it.

It does, however, use what the Japanese call "kanji" (hanzi in Mandarin, I believe?), which are the symbols from the Chinese ideogrammatic orthography.

The other two writing systems in Japanese are called 'syllabaries', and consist of...46, I think?...combinations of a consonant and a vowel, plus several which are just vowels. They're the same, except that katakana are a simplified form of the hiragana, and are used only for foreign words (basically).

So: a Japanese sentence might have a verb which is indicated with a kanji, conjugated with an additional hiragana or two, and whose object might well be something written in katakana, because it's a foreign word.

The syllabaries are relatively easy to learn. The kanji are somewhat more challenging, as it takes approximately 2000 to read an adult-level text, and that's a fair bit of learning.

[superslayer18]

Japanese has pitch-accent distinction (I think that's what it's called...). It's where if your voice rises with the word or drops with it, it means different things. Some argue that it can make a large enough difference in speech sometimes (though probably not THAT often) that you can actually have said two different things (usually just a word or two different though). Whereas in Chinese tones are SO important that a wrong tone in ANY word and you've said something COMPLETELY different pretty much always.

[poeticalpanther]

Hmmm...it also mentions that it's only 20% of words, at most. Honestly, not something I encountered as a formally-taught concept, and I'd be dubious about assigning Japanese to the same category as Thai or Mandarin, which are, to my mind, really tonal: tones change the meanings of particular morphemes throughout the language.

[superslayer18]

Chinese is pretty straight forward in that each character is pronounced as 1 syllable (usually only with 1 possible pronunciation, though it's not uncommon for some characters to have 2 possible pronunciations, though they usually mean different things when this happens

[tgies]

Hiragana.

[superslayer18]

Eek thank you! It's been a while lol.

[akibare]

The multiple ways of pronouncing the characters is a big challenge in Japanese, particularly for people who don't already speak it going in. Actually some combinations of characters can be read multiple ways, and which is correct depends on context.

This is what happens when an existing language borrows writing from another and does it multiple times at that, I guess :)

Also (as you know, but for the OP) - Japanese borrowed writing (and with it, a LOT of words) from Chinese, but otherwise isn't related. The grammar is completely different.

The "half the character gives the pronunciation, for 75% of characters" thing is the same in Japanese as Chinese, as are all the radical parts. Certainly those things are taught standard in Japanese school, starting in 3rd grade.

[im_an_aaangel]

Since I'm clueless about Chinese, I'll just skip right to Japanese. By the three forms I'd assume you mean kanji, katakana and hiragana?

Hiragana (the basic "alphabet" of Japanese) is what you should start with if you want to learn. See this article for the characters and sounds. These are all the syllables you'll find in Japanese.

Katakana, another type of "alphabet" are basically syllables used to pronounce non-Japanese words in a Japanese accent. I'm very much against katakana, but it's necessary, sadly..

Kanji is the group consisting of 2000+ characters that are made up of more than one syllable from hiragana. They've also got individual meanings and many have more than one.. hard stuff. I'd recommend this site to practice the basics and then you can move on to more advanced kanji.

Hope that helped..

[kohda]

Sorry to intrude, I'm curious about why you are against katakana? Is about using non-Japanese words, or having a second alphabet system...?

[im_an_aaangel]

A lot of times when I see something written in katakana, I can't understand it because it's so different from the original words. But mostly it's having to pronounce non-Japanese words in a Japanese accent just so Japanese people can understand. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I know that it makes it kind of hard for Japanese people to learn English, because they have a tough time breaking away from how they pronounced those words in Japanese.

But it doesn't cause any major problems, I just can't stand trying to translate katakana and I have a hard time understanding a Japanese person when they pronounce a non-Japanese word.

[daemon_will]

This also gets me in China, I sometimes have real trouble saying I study in Manchester because in Chinese (even though everybody's heard of that b***** team) it's called 曼彻斯特 - Man che si te. And that's one of the better ones.

Why not just use inline roman script? Actually I know several very reasonable answers to this question, but I'm still not convinced.

[kohda]

In Japanese, the two kana systems combined are only a little over 100 characters, and they are all very simple. Most students learn both alphabets in their first semester of studying.

For memorizing characters, I think a lot of it is practice. Like, the more you study the language, the easier it is to pick up new vocabulary. Also, you learn to break down the character into its radicals (components). For instance, um, let me grab a character: 最
is made up of these radicals: 日　耳　又 So those three are all you need to know to put it together :)

I hope that helps.

[daemon_will]

I've heard it claimed that you can learn to speak both of these languages by using just their romanisation systems, and in the case of Japanese, hiragana; I'll believe it when I see it, and of course this limits your abilities very much if you actually visit the place, where people are unlikely to bother with such aids most of the time!

From personal experience - only of learning Chinese (Mandarin and a bit of Canto) - the characters are a troublesome but necessary part of learning. Pinyin.info would like that to change, but currently that's how it is.

And you are right - as other commenters have said, Chinese characters when read in Chinese correspond to single syllables rather than being a system comparable to the Latin alphabet. Many if not most words are polysyllabic and therefore require multiple characters (eg 大学 daxue university) and there is no spacing between the words. Some characters are semantic-phonetic compounds which means that their construction gives a hint to their meaning, for example many characters containing

[akibare]

If anyone wants to try all-hiragana Japanese for themselves, I found purely by accident yesterday that there's a version of Wikipedia put through a filter that turns the whole thing to hiragana.

Hiragana Wikipedia (link pops).

(I'm sure the engine it's using can be put on other pages too, I just stumbled upon this one as Google has crawled it in that format).

I can't speak for anyone else but as a regular reader of Japanese it makes my head hurt!

Little kids books in Japan are written only in hiragana, but usually they have spaces between phrases to compensate somewhat.

[loudasthesun]

Youch, that does hurt. I can understand children's books, but anything that uses a lot of Sino-Japanese loanwords is going to be impossible without the kanji differentiating words that sound alike.

... which is why I've always thought Korean to be like kanji-less Japanese.

[sakura_no_kage]

onaji da! i really hate to read only hiragana (or katakana) too! it slows down my reading speed a lot and gives me @_@! games like pokemon meant for children are unfortunately kanji-less. but at least they also have spaces after the word+particles...