/diy/ - Do It Yourself

[Anonymous No.113636]

Since we seem to have good discussions regarding linguistics, a question.

I am interested in eventually learning to be fluent in two far East Asian languages. The four I have narrowed it down to are Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin) and Vietnamese. On a scale of one to ten for a native English speaker how hard is each one to learn?

Now, I would want to learn each of the four for various reasons. Japanese because the culture is fascinating to me after getting immersed in Judo and jujitsu. Korean because I have done some research on it and it sounds very unique and pleasant, doesn't seem to have the tonal elements that the rest have and the culture is pretty neat as well. Chinese is kinda eh, I just put it in due to current affairs which doesn't really mean anything. Vietnamese is something of a last addition for me. I've heard several native speakers, and it sounds great. Plus Vietnam is a hub of wonderful food, culture and history.

Which would be the best pick to start out with? Will learning one help learning others?

[Anonymous No.113640]

Not anime.

[Anonymous No.113664]

I think I want all three of their pussies in my face at the same time

[Anonymous No.113669]

Learn Mandarin and Japanese. Mandarin because China owns us, it's just globally responsible to be able to speak that language, and Japanese because manga gives you an endless amount of entertaining reading material with pictures to help you learn. Korean and Vietnamese are probably great, but the first two are the most useful, and there is opportunity to use them.

[Anonymous No.113674]

>>113669

The influence of China is fleeting however - I could learn perfect Mandarin, then the next day their regime collapses and it is near worthless.

[Anonymous No.113675]

>>113669
>because China owns us
>implying the total investment of China's industrial base has made in the US isn't about equal to the total investment of American industries in China
Tangential sage

[HalfKorean No.113690]

Actually, S.Korea is a growing cultural influence in that region. Culturally they are the most relaxed in comparison with westerners.

As a second I would choose Japanese. Not for the anime(a part-I really want to voiceact. Not gonna happen) but because I had a friend to japanese and mandarin and he was literally pulling the hair out of his head.

[Anonymous No.113693]

Learn Mandarin, it's a really easy-to-learn language. It's really straight-forward and logical. At the end of the day, China will be on top of the economic hierarchy, as they're, by the sounds of it, going to spend more money on research these coming years then even the US does. I'm learning it currently, and have done so for 3 years so far, and it's surprising how easy it is to learn. As for your second, I'm not sure, but Japanese ties nicely with Mandarin as some of the characters of Kanji are the same as Traditional Chinese... You'd have to learn Traditional though.

[Anonymous No.113701]

>>113636

I currently know Korean and am becoming fairly fluent in Chinese.

I would say that Chinese is the easiest. It's also a good base language for several other East-Asian languages. For example, there are tons of words in Korean that are based off of Chinese words. There are times that I cannot even tell the difference.

I would also like to add that Korean is really difficult to master. You can obtain a fairly decent level of spoken fluency if you focus on simple conversations that aren't too intellectual. I can speak to pretty much any labourer without any problems. But as soon as I talk to a college graduate from Seoul it becomes more difficult.

Korean grammar is also so different from English that it becomes very hard to quickly translate what they're saying. You have to think in Korean all of the time to truly get used to it.

With Chinese, I can hop back and forth between the Chinese and my native tongue, English, without much difficulty.

However, Korean culture is pretty interesting. And they know how to party better than anyone else.

[someStupidFag No.113742]

fuck no, Vietnamese is the easiest. Native Vietnamese speaker here. Here's why. The alphabet is pretty much the same as English, fuck it's based on the latin letters. You say what you see, it has systems of pronunciation, the tonal system might be one of the more complicated one but once you got used to it, talk in Cantonese/mandarin/japanese/korean is simple. Well, the words are short, you won't run into shit with fucking 25 letters long like Anglicized Japanese. And fuck, if you're one of the whitey, speaking decent Vietnamese, you're golden. Anyhow, the cons, grammar is fucking shit. I don't even know half of the stuff they tried to teach me, but as any native speaker of any language can attest to it, sometimes you use some shit because it sounds right, not because you know the grammar behind it. I'm told Vietnamese grammar was heavily influenced by French/Latin, I can't commend on that. But seeing how the alphabet was developed by some French missionary, I'm not surprised. However, it causes me great deal of pain to say this, the language people speak/use these days is complete shit. I blame it on shitty education low standard shitty translated movie/shows/books. So you might want to learn some other language.

[Anonymous No.113880]

>>113701
>I would also like to add that Korean is really difficult to master. You can obtain a fairly decent level of spoken fluency if you focus on simple conversations that aren't too intellectual. I can speak to pretty much any labourer without any problems. But as soon as I talk to a college graduate from Seoul it becomes more difficult.

If you're still around, can you please expand on this? Wouldn't this be the case with any language? I.E. having a regular conversation about what you saw on TV last night is always going to be easier than talking about Rembrandt with an Art History graduate, regardless of the language you're learning.

Or am I missing something you're trying to get at.

[Anonymous No.113884]

>>113701

Japanese and Korean grammar are very un-English like. They're not tonal though.

Chinese is structurally similar to English in many ways. Funny thing--- in my head I somehow always manage to get it mixed in with German. The same way that English and German are very similar, Chinese grammar feels like English and they all sort of mash together.

Vietnamese... don't know anything about it. But my Chinese friends think it's completely insane (so heavily tonal, even compared to Chinese, that the Chinese I know have real trouble even hearing the inflections...)

[Anonymous No.113891]

Do you want to use the language that you learn?

1) Mandarin - Most Chinese people worth speaking to (business people) learn English so it isn't necessary, but you're most likely to get some use out Mandarin just because there are so many people who speak it.

2) Korean - Korea is very closely allied with the United States and, culturally, probably has more in common with the US than any other asian nation. The recent passing of a free trade agreement with Korea means that the ties between the two countries will definitely grow closer.

3) Japanese - Japan is an aging nation and, while an interesting place, it is becoming less relevant and there are a million desperate weaboos that will gladly translate for you for free just to practice their hentai-translation skills.

4) Vietnam is like the mexico of China only shittier. Only learn it if you're into fucking child prostitutes.


May I suggest adding Cantonese to your list? Mandarin Chinese is mainland/communist China. Hong Kong primarily speaks Cantonese.

[Anonymous No.114335]

don't bother with japanese. that's so 2003.

[Anonymous No.114601]

>>113636
bump due to my own interest

[Anonymous No.114629]

I may just be a weeaboo, but I would tell you to go with Japanese. As you may already know, Japanese is based on about 45 base syllables. I personally find it easier to form words in Japanese, rather than Chinese, because of this.

Coming from English, Japanese symbols may be easier to learn. The language uses three "alphabets", Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. Hiragana is like the ABC's in that every symbol is for a syllable. Katakana is just like Hiragana, but it is used for foreign words. Kanji is where each charcter is a different word.

[Anonymous No.114715]

>>114629
you are a fucking dope. Have you ever tried learning Korean Hangul? That shit is easier than the English alphabet, and makes more sense too.

[Anonymous No.114798]

Anyone want to add some comments on Thai?
I am seriously considering Thai as way too many people are studying Chinese and I feel a less typical niche might be wise for my field. construction/engineering.

I suck at languages :/

[Anonymous No.114801]

chinese is extremely tonal
i ended up telling my teacher i ate a korean rather then eating soup

Korean and moonspeak would both be easiest to learn compaired to chinese, i dont know about vietnamese though
Korean has a letter system unlike japan with their moonrunes.

[Anonymous No.114911]

>>113636
Korean girl, that's not her real nose, and she's had her lips injected.

Back on topic, good luck with those OP. I'd replace Vietnamese with Cantonese so I could watch more movies, but that's just me.

[Anonymous No.114913]

>>113742
>>fuck no, Vietnamese is the easiest.
>>Native Vietnamese speaker here.

Your argument is automatically invalid.

[Anonymous No.114917]

>>114913
Not the guy you were responding to, but the fuck? I'm a native Vietnamese speaker too, and the only thing that could be seen as difficult about Vietnamese is learning how to use accents properly. It's Romanized, there are no verb tenses, and every word is one syllable.

[Anonymous No.114931]

>>114917
Simply put, a native speaker, by virtue of the fact that they've never had to learn it, is a poor judge of whether a language is difficult or hard for other people to learn.

[Anonymous No.114936]

As a native speaker of both English and Chinese, I would say that the two languages are worlds apart and had I not learned them both simultaneously as a child, I would not be able to learn them concurrently now.

You won't find much variation in difficulty between the other east Asian languages - they're all based on similar structures. As Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, and China is an increasingly prominent world power, I would highly recommend that you learn Chinese.

Best of luck, OP.

[Canti No.114954]

안녕하세요~

Of the four languages I have only had some experience with three of them, so I can't comment on Vietnamese - I lived in Asia for 3 years and I plan to go back in a year or so.

Reading / Writing:
I agree completely with those saying the Korean alphabet is easier to learn - the Haerye says "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." Hangul is awesome, learn it! :)
Kanji would drive me absolutely crazy, just try learning the 2000 needed for everyday use in Japan?! wft?! Chinese use mostly the same characters. fail.

Speaking / listening:
I don't know about everyone else, but tonal languages are extremely difficult for me. I could swear I was saying 'Shenjen' just the same as everyone else, but they really couldn't understand what I was saying - that frustrated me. So Chinese is out.

Conclusion:
Japanese is very easy to speak and to understand - if only it weren't for the writing system!
Chinese is difficult to speak, read and write. May you remain sane if you choose this path.
Korean is a little harder than Japanese to speak, but not impossible! Easy to read and write after a morning, or 10 days :)

[Canti No.114955]

>>114911

She's still cute, and hey, it's only your children that would come out ugly - that's their problem! XD ( yes, i am being a little sarcastic )

[Anonymous No.114957]

>>113636
The FSA (the branch of the govt that trains people to speak foreign languages) has basically said this:
Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Japanese are THE hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn, with Japanese being the hardest of them all.

I'd personally (as someone who knows two and understands something of the third) rate them as
>IMPOSSIBLE TIER
Japanese (grammar complex, writing system MAD complex)
>HARD TIER
Mandarin (grammar very easy, writing system SUPER hard)
Korean (grammar as complex as Japanese, writing system is laughably simple)

Vietnamese is supposed to be easier than all the other three.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014005901/http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectati
ons.html

But consider your professional advancement. Chinese will, hands down, be the most important language for your career of the four. Vietnamese lol. Korean is up and coming. Japanese, well, who knows with their "lost TWO decades" now.

[Anonymous No.114961]

>>113693
Why do you HAVE to learn traditional? Mainland China uses simplified. Only HK and Taiwan use traditional.

Also, Japanese overlaps both traditional and simplified Chinese, with some of their characters being unique to all three.

[Anonymous No.114963]

>>113701
You know what's interesting about those Korean words from Chinese? They almost all originate in Japan.

It went like this:
low tech China gives kanji to super low tech Japan
Japan makes words
Japan becomes high tech
Japan makes many new words
China needs those words as they develop, so take them back from Japan
Korea takes them from China

Some study revealed that a REALLY huge portion of modern Chinese vocabulary originates in Japanese vocabulary.

I can't find the research paper anymore, but this WP article at least talks about the phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_.27Made_in_Japan.27

In any case, I speak Japanese and, to a lesser extent, Chinese. I never really cared the origin of the words. I just liked that they overlapped.

[Anonymous No.114969]

>>113884
I can't speak for Korean, but saying "Japanese isn't tonal" is a bit misleading. It's not like Chinese where each syllable has a tone, but words have a tonal pattern you must follow to sound native (like with Chinese, it is an overstatement and urban myth perpetuated by teachers in America to say "if you get the tone wrong you won't be understood").

For example, あめ can be pronounced with a high-high pair of tones, or a high-low. The first means "rain" while the second means "cough drop" or "hard candy."

I mean, you may get it wrong, but it'll be pretty obvious that you don't mean "the doctor prescribed me three rains a day."

Same with English if you think about it. The only aural difference between "dessert" and "desert" is where we put the stress. (stress accent is what English has; pitch accent is what Japanese has)

[Anonymous No.114972]

>>114629
The Korean writing system can be learned in an hour.

[Anonymous No.114973]

>>114801
You're wrong. Lrn2science

[Anonymous No.114981]

Also, regarding the similarity of Koraen and Japanese grammar, check this shit out

안녕하세요 = How are you? (K)
お元気ですか = How are you? (J)

안녕 = well-being
お元気 = (honorific indicator)well-being

하세 = to be
です = to be

요 = marks the preceding sentence as a question (I think, but since I don't speak Korean I'm not totally down with how this particle actually works)
か = marks the preceding sentence as a question

I mean, fuck, it's like 1-1 correspondence. IRL it doesn't match up this easily all teh time, but there is SUBSTANTIAL overlap in grammar. Both are particle-based, agglutinative, synthetic, subject-object-verb languages with extensive use of honorifics to express the relationship between speaker, addressee, and sometimes the topic of conversation.

[Anonymous No.114990]

Is Rosetta Stone a good course for learning Asian languages?

[Anonymous No.114992]

>>114990
rosetta stone is not good for anything

[Anonymous No.115022]

>>114992

why is that?

[Anonymous No.115030]

>>114981
I'd say I'm pretty fluent at Japanese at the moment.How long would you say it would take for me to get Korean vocab down, because basing it on what you said most of the rest is the same.

[Anonymous No.115050]

>>114990
It's a love it or hate it thing, but I find Rosetta Stone useless. It doesn't teach you anything useful, doesn't teach you anything worth saying and is boring as hell. If I want to parrot "The boy is sitting on the ball" for 30 minutes, I'll at least get Pimsleur and improve my pronunciation while I'm at it.

[Anonymous No.115055]

>>114961
And Singapore and Malaysia IIRC, and written kanji in Japan is almost always closer to the Traditional form than the Simplified. The main reason is because it's easy as hell to "get" simplified characters when you know traditional than to go from simp to traditional. It's like how someone who can read an encyclopedia can also read a children's book, but not necessarily do it the other way round.

[Anonymous No.115060]

>>114969
9 times out of 10 when people talk about Japanese being tonal, the only examples they can give are "ame" and "hashi." It's really not that tonal, in the same way that a speed bump is really not Mount Everest.

[Anonymous No.115070]

>>115060

Huh? Japanese is not a tonal language. Full stop.

[Anonymous No.115078]

tl;dr but have something from the earlier language thread

[Anonymous No.115091]

>>115078

[Anonymous No.115318]

>>114981
>하세 = to be

not really

>요 = marks the preceding sentence as a question

and not at all. broadly speaking there are two levels of politeness in korean, if you see sentences that include 요 in them it's a formal sentence rather than an informal sentence. it's got nothing to do with questioning.

your point is still correct about the two languages being similar but you chose a pretty shitty example.

[Anonymous No.115324]

CHINESE RESOURCES PEOPLE

[Anonymous No.115359]

>>114715
Hangul is fucking retarded. The stupid way they stack letters to form syllables...why not just be smart like the Japanese, and have one character represent the syllable?

And the "syllables" are a joke, like when the R at the bottom of one stack and the R at the top of another stack actually represents a sound similar to L...because Hangul is fucking retarded.

There's a reason people in no other country have ever had any desire to use Korean letters: Hangul is fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.115363]

>>114972
That's bullshit. Just because you learn the letters doesn't mean you have any clue as to how one should stack them, let alone pronounce them. They sound different whether they're at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, for example.

Japanese katakana and hiragana, on the other hand, are very consistent and easy to learn. Their sounds remain the same at all times, there's no stacking involved, and they just make sense.

Kanji are more difficult, but then again, there's no bullshit hype telling people they can learn it in an hour, either.

[Anonymous No.115364]

>>115359
relax

[Anonymous No.115392]

>>115364
I reckon some little blond bitch called Goldilocks ate all his porridge so his got an insane amount of rectal pain going.

[mx No.115458]

>>115091
>>115078

From where are those images?

[Anonymous No.115482]

>>114957
Have to Agree.

[Anonymous No.115495]

Chinese is kinda eh
>stocks

Also if you were a conspiracy theorist.
China makes about practically everything you use.
Anyway,
Pick one that will provide a valuable skill to your Field.
Also of a country you wouldn't mind living in as an English teacher for most of your days.

[Anonymous No.115614]

>>115458
from your mother's vagina.

[Anonymous No.115840]

The Chinese girl in that pic is probably the prettiest of all three.

The Korean bitch looks plastic as hell.

1st, 2nd, 3rd from left to right in perfect order.

[Anonymous No.115860]

I lived in Korea for a year and in Japan for a bit over two. I would say Korean is the easiest to learn, and in general just makes sense for its structure. Japanese isn't too bad either. Writing in Japanese has three writing forms though, and while two are pretty easy, the third one, kanji, I found pretty tough. It can be very complex for drawing the characters, and the meaning and sound can be up to five different things depending on the placement in a sentence.

[Anonymous No.115887]

CHinese and Japanese are crazy hard.
Chinese is useful
Korean is easy, I am learning it.

[Anonymous No.115894]

Vietnamese learning English is easier because we uses latin alphabets too.

Besides Viet girls aren't plastic tier

[Anonymous No.115927]

>>115894
Vietnamese is easy to learn but nearly impossible to master, what things mean change a lot based on how you pronounce them.

[Anonymous No.116104]

So as suggested Rosetta Stone is out.

What material should I go with instead? Pimsleur (spelling?)?

[Anonymous No.116122]

I started to learn Japanese in University and it is actually easier than i expected it to be. After 2 years with 1 hour per week and no practice at all beside this, i can almost fluently(but still slower then english) read/write Hiragana and Katakana (the syllables, 50 of each) and know a dozen of basic Kanji.
A big hurdle at the moment is the grammar, but only because its my personal nemesis. It doesnt have much more rules/exceptions than european languages, its just that i dont know shit about tenses and rules for verbs even in my mother language, even though i speak it every day

[Anonymous No.116214]

>>116104
For pronunciation, yes. Otherwise get anything you can get your hands on. When you're a beginner any material is better than none. Start getting entertainment material (music, books, drama) in your target language too, so your ears can get used to the sound.

[Anonymous No.116311]

Chinese and Japanese for sure. Both use the chinese characters (with some variation) and they are useful in a business sense. Enjoy killing yourself before you ever become fluent though. Unless you are really serious about learning, it won't be easy.

[Anonymous No.116317]

>>113891
> and there are a million desperate weaboos that will gladly translate for you for free just to practice their hentai-translation skills.
Fuck this is me... I run a scanlation blog for the purpose of Japanese reading practice since my school doesn't offer any classes over 2002.

[Anonymous No.116387]

I really would like if more languages(even more the tonal ones) had explicit accent marks, like most of the latin languages

I tried to start learning japanese and now i'm trying korean and korean seems far easier to start.

[Francis Nol No.116424]

>>113636
do NOT do chinese. Look into either Korean or Japanese!

[Tyler Durden No.116466]

>>113693
>Learn Mandarin, it's a really easy-to-learn language. It's really straight-forward and logical
What?
Definitely try Japanese, it is the easiest to learn out of those four, also you seem most interested in that one. The phonetics match up with the written language unlike Chinese, where their spoken language and written language are completely unrelated. Japanese is easier to pronounce as well. I know nothing about Korean or Vietnamese though.

[Anonymous No.116564]

I agree. Skip the Chinese. China does not need any more lowly who waste their time in bars and driving drunk.

[Anonymous No.116580]

How different are Cantonese/Mandarin anyway?

Is it like Spanish-Portuguese? Swedish-German? Or completely two completely unrelated languages like Arabic and Swahili?

[Anonymous No.116584]

>>116580
according to wikipedia "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible largely because of pronunciation and grammatical differences"
if you believe wikipedia, you got your answer

[Anonymous No.116740]

>>116580
If you have to ask...

[Anonymous No.116742]

>>116740
Then it's because I want to know from a know-it-all such as yourself.

[Anonymous No.116824]

>>116584
Learning Cantonese now and know a bit of Mandarin. When they're spoken they're mutually unintelligible, but when they're written it's pathetically easy for a Mandarin speaker to understand Cantonese. In fact most Cantonese TV broadcasts come with Manda subtitles these days. Almost all the words map 1-1, with just different pronunciations, e.g. 你好 is "ni hao" in Manda and "nei hou" in Cantonese, 不 is "bu" in Manda and "bat" in Cantonese, etc.

It's the different grammar and the parts where they use different vocabs that can trick you up, but even then it's not sooooo different that you can't pick it up in a few weeks of studying. I estimate a Mandarin speaker could pick up perfect Cantonese and vice-versa in a year-18 months of hard studying.

[Anonymous No.116826]

>>116317
I used to run one, but I got frustrated and quit. Now I work as a translator charging $0.10 per character. And apparently that's small potatoes.

[Anonymous No.116998]

>>116742
lol

[Anonymous No.116999]

niggers.

[Anonymous No.117031]

anyone knows good resources to learn korean?

[Anonymous No.117038]

>>117031
your mother's vagina

[Anonymous No.117040]

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

learn Esperanto instead

[Anonymous No.117061]

>>117040
>esperanto
>bullshit language no one bothers with and will never, ever catch on.
>waste of time
>you are a cunt
>go fuck yourself
>you dick

[Anonymous No.117072]

>>117061

>anger problems

I'm sorry for your shitty life :(

[Anonymous No.117091]

>>117061
>>117072
He's right.
Nobody worth talking to speaks Esperanto and it's the quickest way to ensure a life without sex.

[Anonymous No.117120]

>>117040
If you're going to learn an artificial language that you'll never actually get to use, you might as well make your own, or at least learn one that's somewhat interesting, like Ithkuil.

[Anonymous No.117127]

>>117061
>>117091
Some people actually practice esperanto as some sort of intellectual hobby / social experiment, but it's a functionally useless language ,so why waste your time? Learn your ass some Hindi Arabic and Swahili and become an old-timey adventurer.

[Anonymous No.117134]

>>117120

Let me guess, by "interesting" you mean that it's complex just for the sake of complexity?

If you like shit like that, you might want to consider programming languages instead. There are many languages which are specifically designed to be hard to use.

[Anonymous No.117144]

>>117134
The reason I think Ithkuil is interesting is because it's so information-dense, although I realize that it's not really practical to actually speak because of all the information you need to say anything and because of how incredibly slow you'd have to speak it.

But like >>117127 said, the only reason to even try to learn an artificial language is as an intellectual hobby.

[Anonymous No.117778]

anyone who learns a made up language instead of one they can actually use to communicate with people is an idiot

just saying

[Anonymous No.117804]

>>116122
>2 years at uni
>kana and a dozen kanji
>still can't into grammar

I don't even... Jesus christ, dude. I've been doing it for less than a month and I've already memorized all of the kana, most of the basic grammar and about 50 kanji.

[Krishna Mulvaney !!gWMe0MnDkzf No.117813]

>>114981
>mfw someone used the word agglutinative on 4chan

Linguist here, I can answer questions if people have any.

[Anonymous No.117825]

Japanese bro.

And, actually the 'difficulty' of the language depends on how it is taught.

I am a language teacher, and I use the Silent Way method, shit just work. So, even for japanese, look to learn it trough Gattegno (Caleb) approach, instead of sticking to grammar and shitty books, that do not teach you anything. It does not work like this, a language has to be spoken first, then written, so wtf you'll ever need grammar books by the way ...

>>113690
Anyway, in a country that people just got scared because a black woman enter a supermarket.

Anyway, learning Japanese first, is helping because the grammar is very similar to korean, and the kanjis are the same in chinese. In chinese, most of them, are simplified, but if you learn the "old" ones, you can guess the simplified ones, but not reverse.

so, I would learn first Japanese, then chinese, then korean.

But , I know 5 languages, almost native level speaking for 3 of them, and I can tell you it's a lot of work, so if you can figure out with already one, be happy.

And remember, GATTEGNO. Shit just works.
Whatever you ever try to learn, use the approach, it works just fine, even with only 2 or 3 hours per weeks.

[Anonymous No.117826]

>>117825
I'm using Tae Kim (http://www.guidetojapanese.org) and after that I'm using Genki. And then kanji grindan. But yeah, Japanese is piss-easy if you're the kind of person that can spend hours at a time on memorization drills; I've been doing it for five days and I have almost all of my hiragana down very well. I expect to finish with the katakana by this time next week.

[Anonymous No.117828]

>>117825
Man, you drank the cool aid hard.

[Anonymous No.117869]

>>117825
very interesting. Very interesting. Thanks.
also, someone can smuggle the material? those color charts and fidel should be opensource... Well, any good link?

[Anonymous No.118001]

>>117826
You've only been learning for 5 days. Your argument is automatically invalid.

[Anonymous No.118085]

>>118001
This. A million times.

[Anonymous No.118963]

bump

[Anonymous No.119258]

>>117825
So how does the Silent Way method work?

Is it just having students associate phonemes with colors so that weird rules and exceptions in the orthography don't cause students to mispronounce words?
And it has something to do with colored rods?

[Anonymous No.119270]

abc here... currently learning korean and japanese. Not a good idea to do both at once fml. What I've found is that ppl in both of the non-Chinese speaking countries recognize some chinese characters, and that you can basically get by in Japan with only knowing Chinese if you just communicate through writing. Did that for a week after missing a plane once... met a lot of friends that way. :D

TL;DR
Chinese: good base. hard to learn for westerners.
Japanese: more practical if you're going into business.
Korean: pop culture. growing, small market.

[Anonymous No.119278]

don't have anything to contribute other than this pic that OP's reminded me of

[Anonymous No.119302]

You can look up the average amount of hours required to learn any language as a fluent English speaker on the State Dept.'s website. They'll all be hard as hell, but from what I've heard, Korean is harder as the syntax is nothing close to English

[Anonymous No.119662]

Not OP, but what would people recommend for learning a language at a very basic level? I'm going away to Japan for a couple of weeks in the next year or so and want to be at least able to hold a basic conversation with someone.

In the past I have tried Pimsleur's and got on with it fairly well.

Would it be wise to carry on with that or use a different method?

[Anonymous No.119670]

>>117804

This

2 Years? What the fuck man. Namasensei teaches all.

[Anonymous No.119801]

>>119662
This is what I suggest:

>grammar, grammar, grammar, grammar and then some more grammar.

People love to talk about immersion as if just by watching loads of tv shows, movies and listening to loads of music in your language of choice you'll magically be able to understand it after a while.

To a certain extent, when it comes to vocabulary, that's useful but struggling with the nitty gritty grammar and sentence structures is so much more useful in helping you to learn the language. Something basic like understanding when a verb is being expressed in a passive voice or in an imperative form adds so much to your understanding.

tldr: don't waste your time memorising phrases. Focus on patterns and forms.

[Anonymous No.119833]

>>119801
Where would I go to learn such things?

Excuse me if that's a dumb question.

[Anonymous No.120336]

.

[Hetynne No.120342]

>>113664
5 star post/thread

[Anonymous No.120350]

Any Japanese businessman can pick up a Chinese newspaper and read it. Any Chinese businessman will fail at reading a Japanese newspaper if they haven't taken Japanese.
It depends on what you want to do with the language, but Japanese might cover more bases for you. Plus, Japanese songs have actual lyrics and music. That tonal thing results in Chinese music suffering on one end or the other.

[Anonymous No.120353]

>>120350
So Japanese is backwards compatible?

[Anonymous No.120553]

1-5 scale, 5 being the hardest.
Chinese - 5
Korean - 4
Japanese - 4
Vietnamese - 3-4

[Anonymous No.120555]

>>120553
Also, Chinese is the base of all Asian languages, like Latin is to English and most European languages. You learn chinese first, and it will be far easier to learn the rest of the languages in the region (Not so much Vietnamese, because they root their languages from other places also). The only advantage to learning to Chinese first, is the fact that Chinese still exists as a learning language, were Latin is dead. Learn Chinese first and the rest will be far easier to learn.

[Anonymous No.120556]

>>120353
Yes it is.

[Anonymous No.120646]

Since this is a linguist thread, Is anyone on here an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist? I'd like to know what the job is really like. My recruiter won't tell me shit about it.

[Anonymous No.120794]

>>120350
>Any Japanese businessman can pick up a Chinese newspaper and read it.

[Anonymous No.120807]

>>120555

nnnnnnnno. no. nope nope nope. Go do your high school spanish homework kid.

[Anonymous No.120810]

>>120555
>Latin
>the basis of English
looooooooooool

[Anonymous No.120828]

>>120350
Someone didn't play shenmue

[Anonymous No.120847]

>>120555

i dont even know what is this thread about, but this is so freaking wrong. You know why latinos are called latinos? Because spanish and portuguese come from latin, if english come from latin americans would be latin americans too.

[Anonymous No.120879]

>>120555
>>120555
A lot of english is based in Greek, actually. Some of the language has romantic derivatives, but most of it is greek. Second to that, Scandinavia, and Germany have Germanic origins, and Arabic and Basque and Irish are closely related. Not everything comes from Latin.

CHINESE ISN'T A FUCKING LANGUAGE. Mandarin, Cantonese, and so on. They're not just dialects, they're actual languages.

[Anonymous No.121426]

>>119833
Well, Japanese is not a language that I've learnt but I suggest that you just look for books/websites that have a clear curriculum you can check out - and if it's clear that they focus on grammar for a large part then it's probably going to be good for you.

[Anonymous No.121480]

>>120879
Thats like saying every province of Japan had its own language before Meiji language reforms.

They're dialects. Deal with it. The grammar is the same, the words more or less correlate with one another.

[Anonymous No.121493]

"they arr rook same" has never meant so much

[Anonymous No.121510]

Japanese since you're already invested in some interests there. Korean since the grammar structure is very similar if not 90% identical to Japanese. There are also a lot of similar words that are either both drawn from Chinese, or introduced from the time they were occupied by Japan.

[Anonymous No.121515]

>>121426
Thanks, man.

[Anonymous No.121544]

>>120555
I hear Vietnamese shares a lot of vocabulary with Cantonese

[Anonymous No.122191]

I myself am learning Japanese, because i like the way of the speaking. That is, consonant-vocals-consonant-vocals. Shouting or being angry in the language still retains that wonderful word flow. A huge difference from my mother tounge, finnish. I do not know if Korean or Vietnamese works that way as well.

But that is just me. What i can say of worth to OP is this; Ignore all the Pros and Cons that comes with learning and knowing the languages, and pick the one you want to learn the absolute most.

[Anonymous No.122995]

>>122191
Japanese and German always make me laugh with regards to that. Even when people are whispering sweet nothings they sound like they're about to kill you for dishonouring their ancestors.

[Anonymous No.124765]

Rescued from page 15. Easier than making a new thread.

[Anonymous No.124770]

>>124765
UR MA HEEEERO