So here's a fun bit of wordplay for you kanji scholars...
One of the intriguing things about starting to learn Chinese after five years of learning Japanese is discovering the subtle differences in the use of kanji between Chinese and Japanese. This list isn't going to be that interesting to people who don't know Japanese (and will confuse people who don't have Asian language support on their computers), but here goes:
念 ＝ 読む
作 ＝ する
工作 ＝ 仕事
写 ＝ 書く
听 ＝ 聞く / 聞こえる
手表 ＝ 時計
But my favourite came the other day...
太 in Chinese means does not mean 太ってる ("fat" in Japanese), it means "too" as in "too much" or "too heavy".
So, "it's too difficult" is written 太难。The character on the right is the slightly simplified version of 難しい。
To me it looks like "fat difficult", which sounds like some form of London ghetto slang. "Man, that's fat difficult, I ain't doin' that."
I really want this to become a used expression...
3 comments:
Interesting stuff... A question: does learning Chinese with previous Japanese experience make it easier or harder, knowing the Japanese meanings for each character?
I've had a vague interest in studying Chinese for a while, but I guess I ought to concentrate on the Japanese first. It's fat difficult, innit?
That's an interesting question... no simple answer. There are pros and cons in learning either language when you already know one of them. I can't tell how much you know Japanese already, so I'm just going to assume you know nothing (sorry if what I say ends up being stuff you already know).
Firstly, the inherent difficulties in each language:
Japanese is easier to pronounce, but the grammar is pretty different from English, and just the way they express themselves idiomatically can be quite different a lot of the time. Japanese has two fairly easy to learn phonetic scripts (called hiragana and katakana), like alphabets (ie, the "letters" don't mean anything, they just represent a sound, like a b c). These are used in conjunction with Chinese characters, which contain meanings. Over centuries the Japanesification of the original Chinese sounds and the general appropriation of the characters has made them a biatch to know how to read.
For example, in English, "through, thorough, Slough, tough, dough and cough" are all spelt with "ough" and yet the pronunciation is different in each of them. That must be a pain in the butt for foreigners to learn, right? They just have to buckle down and learn them. Well, imagine if just about every word in English were like that - then you'd have Japanese.
Chinese basically only has one sound per character, so it's much more consistent and the learning curve for knowing how to read words you've not seen before is probably steeper. But you have to get used to the four different tones, which takes a while. At the moment I find individual words, or small groups of words fine to pronounce, but whole sentences which go up and down like rollercoasters are still hard for me. But everyone says you get used to it eventually.
Chinese grammar is very much like English in terms of word order and if you've ever learned French, Spanish or any other European language, the occasional differences in Chinese word order are not going to surprise you much.
But then there's the number of kanji (or "hanzi" in Chinese). For Japanese you only essentially have to know 2000 standard kanji to read a newspaper. The average Japanese will know maybe 2500 to 3000 and a more educated person up to 5000. Chinese is ALL characters, so you need to start off knowing at least 3500 or something. In Japanese, there are a LOT of Japanesified western words like "basukettoboru" for basketball or "orenji juusu" for orange juice. These would each have hanzi in Chinese. Paris, London and Rome are "Pari", "Rondon" and "Roma" in Japanese, whereas in Chinese they each have their own bastard hanzi(usually two or three).
So, if you know Japanese beforehand, you can understand the meanings of some Chinese characters. If you speak English it's not so hard grammatically.
If you know Chinese beforehand, you will be able to understand written Japanese very well by picking up the essential meanings from kanji here and there, but you have to know how the hiragana and katakana are altering verb endings and things...
In both cases it's weird to be seeing kanji/hanzi that you are familiar with but are pronounced differently in the other language, or even have different meanings. Hence my post about 太=fat/too. (Actually I'm going to have to ask my teacher how you write "fat" in Chinese so that I know what "too fat" looks like...!)
I heard that 手紙 which in Japanese means "letter" as in a letter you'd send to a friend, means "toilet paper" in Chinese, so the Chinese find it hilarious that Japanese people send toilet paper to each other. The characters literally mean "hand-paper", so I guess that has evolved to mean different things in each country.
So yeah, man, either way it's fat fucking difficult and apparently you've got to be hard to do it too!
Ultimately what I think it boils down to is which country and culture interests you the most. China will be an increasingly inescapable force of some kind or another over the next decade, but that doesn't mean Japan is going to disappear either. Both have their massive pros and various cons. Frequently brash, direct Chinese versus generally modest Japanese. Massive developing country with currently atrocious human rights record versus not-so-big, ultra-modern (with hidden gems of tradition) democracy which has a bloody past. It feels cheap to sum these complex countries up with such black and white opposites, but they are very different places. So choose by where you think you will feel happy than by the language.
Good luck!!
I just realised you're Jim Moore and I read your blog. Duh... so of course you know some Japanese!
Hope my answer was still helpful
Post a Comment