Thinking of learning Chinese (or Japanese)

[jts]

Hopefully this will help with the deciphering...

http://senseis.xmp.net/?JapaneseGoTerms

[musai]

Hopefully this will help with the deciphering...

http://senseis.xmp.net/?JapaneseGoTerms

Oh, great! Let me just get past the "私は学生です" level in the language itself

[hyperpape]

While the OP didn't mention Korean, I'd like to ask: am I right in thinking that Korean might be slightly more managaeable to learn a bit of, since it has a phonetic alphabet? Both Japanese and Chinese seem very intimidating. For Chinese especially, I think my ambitions end with: The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters.

[jts]

While the OP didn't mention Korean, I'd like to ask: am I right in thinking that Korean might be slightly more managaeable to learn a bit of, since it has a phonetic alphabet? Both Japanese and Chinese seem very intimidating. For Chinese especially, I think my ambitions end with: The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters.

Korean, Japanese, and the Chinese languages are all lumped together under "Category III, 88 weeks, 2200 class hours" by the State Department. I think to a first approximation it would be silly to learn Korean under the impression that it's much easier.

[billywoods]

am I right in thinking that Korean might be slightly more managaeable to learn a bit of, since it has a phonetic alphabet?

Kanji and hanzi look terrifying when you first see them, but with a bit of study they become far more familiar, and even though you won't necessarily know all the common ones within a few hundred hours' study, you will at least become much more confident with learning new ones. (Also, Korean has a lot of Chinese vocabulary. It's only a guess, but I reckon a knowledge of hanja will help. It certainly does in Japanese.) More to the point, the writing systems in Chinese and Japanese are a big obstacle, but by no means the only big obstacle.

[hyperpape]

Does this remain true if my primary interest is reading, not conversation?

[tekesta]

While the OP didn't mention Korean, I'd like to ask: am I right in thinking that Korean might be slightly more managaeable to learn a bit of, since it has a phonetic alphabet? Both Japanese and Chinese seem very intimidating. For Chinese especially, I think my ambitions end with: The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters.

Korean, Japanese, and the Chinese languages are all lumped together under "Category III, 88 weeks, 2200 class hours" by the State Department. I think to a first approximation it would be silly to learn Korean under the impression that it's much easier.

These languages are very different from the Indo-European languages that many of us on the forum grew up with. Not only is the vocabulary and metaphor different, but the grammar differs as well.

Japanese and Korean, at least grammatically, are similar to Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish. If your first language is Turkish or Mongolian, you will recognize most of Japanese and Korean grammar rules, since all of these use Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) sentence structure. Chinese is very different from the previous two. Chinese relies on particles rather than changes in word morphology (word form) to indicate grammatical changes. As a result, word order within a sentence is of high importance when learning Chinese.

Korean uses mostly hangeul, which is alphabetic. However, the letters are placed in blocks to form syllables, similar to how simplified forms of Chinese characters are joined to form new Chinese characters. Apart from that, Korean tends to be very difficult for those who have not learned another East Asian language before. Anyone who's learned Japanese will be able to recognize similarities in Korean, especially in the grammar. Anyone who's learned Chinese or Cantonese will be able to recognize a lot of Korean vocabulary, at least after working out the phonetic changes that happen when a word is borrowed into another language; most Sino-Korean words tend to follow the Cantonese or Wu (old Shanghainese) pronunciations.

[tekesta]

Does this remain true if my primary interest is reading, not conversation?

I would still learn how to speak the language, for it would make it easier to recognize words when they appear on paper.

[billywoods]

Does this remain true if my primary interest is reading, not conversation?

Huh? Hanja are written, so yes, the more time you spend reading and the broader the selection of texts you read, the more of them you'll encounter. Of course, if you happen to only want to read texts that are entirely hangul, then you can manage without hanja. But my guess from before (that knowing some hanja will make Sino-Korean vocabulary easier for you) stands.

[Kirby]

Does this remain true if my primary interest is reading, not conversation?

I think that it's a mistake to think that Korean will be easier because you don't have to remember Chinese characters, and in fact, as a non-native speaker, I think that it is the opposite.

If you are a native speaker of Korean and you already know what different words mean, then sure - it's a big burden off your back if you don't have to learn thousands of Chinese characters, because you can just use Hangul and you'll be all set for reading and speaking in most situations. But as a non-native speaker, you are missing the magic of what Chinese characters provide, and that is the roots of words. Yes, there are thousands of Chinese characters to learn. But there are magnitudes more words to learn, which are comprised of combinations of these characters.

To give a practical example, let's take a look at one of the words someone already posted in this thread in Japanese, 学生. Okay, so you're studying Japanese, let's say, and you can tell that this is student. You might find it annoying to learn how each character looks, and it would seem much easier to just see the sound, "gakusei", right?

Well in the context of this single word, sure. But then you're walking down the street in Tokyo, and you see a sign that says 学校. Let's say that you didn't know any Japanese, and you had never seen this word before. If you just had the sound, "gakkou", there might be a vague connection to "gakusei", but who knows? You've got a "g" sound in there and a "k" sound in there, but how in the world do you know if these two are related?

But now let's suppose you see the value in learning the Japanese character. Now, when you see the sign that says 学校, your mind makes a connection, "Oh wait a second! I've seen 学 before! I don't know what this funny 校 symbol is, but I do remember that 学生 was student. So maybe this funky "学校" word has something to do with students... Or maybe learning..."

When you learn the Chinese character, you don't only learn that character. You learn a variety of other words that use that character, and even if you encounter something you haven't seen before, it's helpful for guessing the meaning.

tl/dr: If your primary interest is reading, as you've suggested, having Chinese characters are more helpful than not having them, especially for long-term learning. There's an investment up front in learning characters, but in the long run, you'll get a natural feeling for new words that you see - something you can only partially do with a purely phonetic alphabet.

[billywoods]

There's a complication further to what Kirby wrote, too. I'll let wikipedia say it for me:

As an example of how hanja can help to clear up ambiguity, many homophones are written in hangul as 수도 (sudo), including:
修道 — spiritual discipline
囚徒 — prisoner
水都 — 'city of water' (e.g. Venice or Hong Kong)
水稻 — paddy rice
水道 — drain, rivers, path of surface water
隧道 — tunnel
首都 — capital (city)

Japanese has a very small number of 'allowable sounds' compared to English (as strange as that sounds if you've never heard such a thing), and a very tiny number of sounds are overwhelmingly more common than the rest in Sino-Japanese vocabulary, with the result that Japanese has an awful lot of homophones. Without kanji, it would be near unreadable - native speakers occasionally have to resort to explaining exactly which of the six identically-sounding words they meant to say in one circuitous fashion or other, e.g. by writing kanji in the air; TV shows very frequently have partial subtitles. I don't know whether it's the same in Korean or not, but the same problem will exist to some extent.

[Kirby]

It's not uncommon for Korean shows to have hangul subtitles, and occasionally, you'll see hanja to clear up ambiguity.

[hyperpape]

Thanks everyone.