What language ....

[El Teboso]

Speaking as a linguist here, Chinese is deceptive. For reading and writing, it is fine, but if you ever hope to speak the language with native speakers, You'll find that learning any form of standard chinese will leave you so dicombobulated as to regret it. The many hundreds (it's almost a thousand, actually. Almost.) of dialects are really different from each other and divergent as to be considered practically different languages in themselves. For example, even in shanghai, you could learn the standard language of the newscasters, but you would be utterly incomprehensible to the average man in the street. (Well, maybe not utterly incomprehensible. But it would be pretty bad.)

Linguistically speaking, the range of speech in chinese is too different to just learn one language and be able to communicate everywhere. Luckily, china is so huge that you can pretty much pick your community language and stick with it. Also, the writing system is pretty much standardized. Which is what unifies china, linguistically speaking.

Japanese will be the easiest to learn, because even though there are various dialects, they are the most similiar, and you can simply learn the standard edokko dialect and get around anywhere.

But in terms of writing, if you want to learn to read Go books and materials quickly, then Korean is your best bet. The Korean Writing system is by far much easier to learn than chinese and the beastly monstrosity that is Japanese(which will take you many years to gain even basic proficiency in.)

Hope I helped.

[Loons]

That`s something I`ve always wondered about, El Teboso, so the regional differences in Chinese are, for example, greater than the regional differences in German ? Even adjusted for greater geographical separation ?

[Peter Hansmeier]

As someone who has studied--and continues to study--Chinese as a foreign language, here is my input.

For native English speakers, Chinese is quite easy to learn to speak and extremely difficult to learn to read. Speaking Chinese is easy because there is no gender, no conjugation of verbs (just add particles to change tense), and you get great mileage from learning the basic rules of grammar. This is significantly easier than Korean and Japanese. The phonemes are not too difficult for a native English speaker (harder than Japanese, easier than Korean). Using correct tones will always be a problem unless you work hard at them and use spoken Chinese with native speakers. Understanding tones is much easier.

If you go to China, your standard Chinese will be understood by most people you would actually meet, regardless of location. I lived in China for ~2.5 years and traveled extensively from Inner Mongolia to Sanya, Qingdao to Kunming, and had little trouble speaking with local residents. There are certainly many local and regional dialects that you will never learn, but most people speak at least some of the standard dialect. You can thank the Communist Party for this! If you DO learn a bit of a local dialect--even just some slang--you will earn serious cred when you meet anyone from that area.

Reading and writing Chinese is extremely difficult because you must memorize over a thousand(!) characters to read anything interesting. You must memorize them one by one. Sometimes there are clues within characters as to sound or meaning, but if you do not know the character you are stuck with an unlikely guess. This is the hardest part about Chinese. Sure, you can look up characters in a dictionary, but that is a painful process where you must (1) determine the radical used to classify the character, (2) look up the radical number, (3) look up the character. Reading online makes this process MUCH faster, but that is not an easy option if you are trying to read a pdf or a Go book. Also, once you get past learning the basics of grammar, there are many constructions and idioms to learn. Learning Chinese has required much more effort than learning French.

Of course, the best way to learn a language is to find a girlfriend/boyfriend who speaks that language.

[topazg]

Mod commentary: I have removed two posts and all material that was a direct response to those posts because there's a really good discussion going on here I didn't want to be ruined (and it was bought to my attention as being in danger of doing so). Anyone following this topic probably knows which ones I mean.

[kokomi]

but if you ever hope to speak the language with native speakers, You'll find that learning any form of standard chinese will leave you so dicombobulated as to regret it.

hm, what is 'form' of standard chinese'? There's only standard chinese. And it's standard because it is supposed to be used to communicate with other chinese who speaks different dialect as you do. And I even have no problem to communicate in standard chinese with chinese-speaking people outside China, e.g. Singapore.

For example, even in shanghai, you could learn the standard language of the newscasters, but you would be utterly incomprehensible to the average man in the street. (Well, maybe not utterly incomprehensible. But it would be pretty bad.)

I don't feel it's true. You may have difficulty to speak with very old people, But generally speaking you will have no problem in communicating with people in the street. It doesn't take me longer to understand shanghai dialect than to understand Indian accent English.

I don't know where you gether those information, but it seems you have some misunderstanding of standard chinese. I would agree most Peter Hansmeier said.

[kirkmc]

I'm late to the party, but here's some feedback.

A long time ago, I studied Chinese for a while. I found it a wonderful experience, because it's an ideogram-based language, and, while it's difficult to learn to read Chinese characters, I have a friend who's a sinologist who gave me plenty of tips. (Learn the couple hundred roots characters by heart, and you'll be able to figure out some of the more complex characters in context.) I found that the pronunciation was no problem, but I'm already bilingual (and actually had good knowledge of a third language at the time), and in such cases, one learns to use new sounds more easily. This said, I'd disagree with the poster who said that what you learn will be intelligible. While I've never been to China, this friend goes regularly leading groups of tourists, and he's told me that he's always understood. People in China seem to speak at least one standard form of the language and a dialect.

If I had the time and inclination to learn a new language today, however, I'd probably choose Japanese, if only because I find the Japanese go scene a bit more interesting, especially the historical aspects of it. Alas, I don't have time for such studies now...

Nevertheless, having taught English as a foreign language for many years (and having a graduate degree in applied linguistics), I'd suggest that the choice should focus on what resources are available. It's extremely difficult to learn a language without face-to-face interaction, so if you can't get classes or find native speakers willing to really make an effort to help you, you won't get very far. You might be able to learn enough to read go books, but that won't help much if you travel to a country that speaks the language you're learning.

[Christos]

Thank you guys for your feedback. Sorry I've been so inactive in this topic, I've been sick for a while now, feeling better though.
Some of you have offered me great insight into all languages and linguistics in general. I can't believe how many linguists this forum has, I had expected a lot more math-orientated professions for some reason. Sadly I'm still torn between these wonderful languages. I've been looking around for classes, however, pretty much all of them are located in Amsterdam which is over an hour away, so that seems a little impractical. Because of this unfortunate truth I have also been looking into self-study courses, but the schools I've been able to find don't offer Korean, and a rather limited amount of Japanese and Chinese (Both mainly centered around speaking, one of them assures a 340 character vocabulary, which is supposed to be around 800 words, which seems really really low).

Considering I'm unable to find courses in Dutch perhaps it's time to look for courses in English, but that would make it harder to find native speakers and converse with them on a regular basis. All I can find at this point are books from the "for dummies" series (in all three languages) though, and however accurate that name might be, I'm not sure they'll be able to teach me the things I want (which is mainly reading, at this point in time).

Any help finding resources would be very much appreciated.

[tapir]

Greetings fellow L19x19ians,

Seeing as I'm sick right now and woke up at 2 AM, I found myself with some spare time to ponder a question I've had for a while now.
You see, I've been wanting to learn another language for a while now (one of the big oriental ones) and eventually I'd like to learn all of them,
but starting all three of them at the same time, is simply pure madness, it would leave me with no time for Go.
My question to you guys is, which language would best coincide with my go studies, Japanese, Korean or Chinese? Of course Go is not the only reason,
I'd like to learn these languages for several reasons (like a job maybe, at some point), but I feel like it's an extra motivator.

Whilst contemplating your answer please take into consideration ;

- Studying resources for go in that particular language (whether it be online or in books/magazines doesn't matter)
- Online learning resources for that paricular language, as we have a pretty crappy library
- What language will be most useful outside of Go

I honestly can't decide, each language (and country) has other qualities I'm attracted to, please help me decide, any help is appreciated.
Thank you in advcance.

I can't say anything about the three languages concerned, but I learned a non-indoeuropean language as well, and am learning another one currently. I would not consider "usefulness" of a language in terms of speakers. You are unlikely to speak with more than 100.000 persons in your life. So it does not make a difference whether the language you learn has 10 million or 500 million speakers. You usually do not meet totally random persons either, but meet persons according to your social networks - which will change with the process of language learning. Do not overemphasize the public library - if you learn a language you should spend the amount of money necessary to buy some material - you can labour on it for month to come anyway - saving a lot of money elsewhere. If Go is the most important thing in your life, do not learn a new language, you will have less time to study and the time you study a language if you are serious about it will likely exceed the time you spend for Go.

I would think about, which of the three/four countries I can imagine to spend time in, residing for a longer time or even settle down. Then choose three objects representing each language. Put them before yourself, think hard. If you can't decide take a coin in your hand and prepare yourself to decide the issue by coin tossing. If you're uncomfortable with that idea, then you do have a preference, make your mind up, which one it is, choose it and don't look back. If not, toss the coin, as the decision is the only thing lacking and all choices are equally good to you, it won't do any harm.

When you start a course (you can try to sneak in university courses intended for students of the languages, if it works it is a good idea) or a self-studying course (you really need self-discipline here) try to find real people for face to face meetings, put up an ad in some suited shop/restaurant, ask your friends and language teachers. This should be possible nearly everywhere in Europe (you're from Netherlands I reckon), and never be overwhelmed by fear but go out and look for opportunities to practice from the first day on. Never stop learning and be prepared to learn seriously - one evening a week will still take a lot of time but won't teach you the language.

[tianzuo]

Chinese, of course.
Chinese invent Go 3000 years ago, and now, they have lots of world best Go players.
I'm a Chinese, I may give you some help, if you want.

[Magicwand]

Chinese, of course.
Chinese invent Go 3000 years ago, and now, they have lots of world best Go players.
I'm a Chinese, I may give you some help, if you want.

happy birthday to chinese go invention. but what does invention of go 3000 years ago have to do with what language is the best to learn go?
NOTHING!

easyest language to learn would be korean. their writing is easy to learn and all you need is few hours to memorize 24 different sounds to read a book. you wont know what you are reading..but at least you can pronounce them and lookup.

i am korean and know some chinese character to start with and studied for a while but i was still unsuccessful.

[Kirby]

...

i am korean and know some chinese character to start with and studied for a while but i was still unsuccessful.

I think that it might not be necessary for a native Korean speaker to know Chinese characters to speak Korean well, but it can be helpful to a non-native speaker to guess the meaning of words.

For example, if you know a little about Chinese characters, and you know the hanja for the words 선생님 and 방학, you might be able to infer the meaning of 학생, even if you didn't study that particular vocabulary word, yet.

[rubin427]

If you've chosen to study either Mandarin Chinese or Korean, then you might want to check out Radio Free Asia. You can listen online - or with your short wave radio.

RFA homepage (english)
RFA broadcast schedule

[tianzuo]

Yes, you can see the pronounciation by the word itself is an advantage. From this point, Korea maybe more easy for European to master.
Chinese is a very different language, and much more difficult to master, I have to admit.
But，Go is much more difficult than fly chess too, why didn't you choose fly chess?

[Magicwand]

Yes, you can see the pronounciation by the word itself is an advantage. From this point, Korea maybe more easy for European to master.
Chinese is a very different language, and much more difficult to master, I have to admit.
But，Go is much more difficult than fly chess too, why didn't you choose fly chess?

because go is a game and learning new language is not.

[palapiku]

What the hell is fly chess?