/lit/ - Literature

>>17347646
I'm learning Japanese, but I think I would start with Chinese. Most of Japanese good stuff has been translated, anon. And after you get hanzi it is not that hard to learn Japanese Kanji.

>>17347673
How long have you been studying it and what's your current level?

>>17347718
I have been starting and quitting a lot of times. Started a long time ago, something like 14 years, but there are definitely more than 10 years of hiatus on that time interval. My current level is that I can read twitter posts with the help of a dictionary, got a vocabulary of a couple of thousand words (considering katakana), and I'm ok with probably 800 or something kanjis.

>>17347754
You need discipline, man. Could have been an expert by now.

>>17347800
Yes, that is true, if I kept a pace of 1 word a day. I would be definitely be better than I am now. It is just that I usually get too excited about it and end up burning out in a month or so. I'm waiting until I finish some exams to get back on track and study Japanese again.

>>17347646
Chinese for the reasons you stated but also because we'll all need to learn mandarin eventually.

>>17347646
Chinese is more applicable in a "real world" sense. Way more job opportunities in China, more Chinese people to potentially talk to, massive Chinese diaspora everywhere. It's probably better if you're into political texts too. I might be biased but I kind of feel like China has "more" to discover in terms of history, culture, old texts, etc. It really depends on what you want to do with it. >>17347832 is also somewhat correct too. Chinese is much more future-proof time investment.
t. waiguoren studying Chinese

>>17347646
Chinese. They have wall street by the balls and gloat about how short sighted American businesses are, considering they only care about obtaining money without regarding the consequences.

>>17347832
>>17347891
Honestly, I'm not really interested in the 'business' part. I'm already building my career as an academic and I have no plans to leave my country. Thanks though.
>>17347869
How long have you been studying? How would you rate its difficulty?

>>17347869
another guilao here, chinese people are much more welcoming if whites try to speak their language
for the language side, its much easier to go from chinese to japanese and not vice-versa
also if you work in IT in asia and speak chinese on top of english its a +20% on your paycheck

>>17347975
>How long have you been studying?
I did two double credit courses in university, took a trip to China, and then did absolutely no learning or practising for almost two years. Currently doing some major brushing up in preparation to move to China in the next few months.
>How would you rate its difficulty?
Hard but not unfair. Let me explain
>Hanzi (Chinese characters)
There are tens of thousands of characters (though you only need to know a few thousand to be more or less fluent) that allllllllll have ever so subtle differences between them that can drastically change the difference- a single stroke or dot can alter the meaning of a word, especially when in conjunction with another character (他 vs 她, for example, meaning 'he' and 'she' respectively). Chinese uses lots of compound words. For example: 电 (diàn) meaning 'electricity' and 脑 (nǎo) meaning 'brain' fuse into one word 电脑 (diànnǎo) meaning computer.
The difficulties with characters are slightly lessened by "radicals" (see picrel) which are a certain dots/strokes that more or less mean the same thing in any given character, which makes sussing out unfamiliar words somewhat easier.
Also it's important to note that Chinese is highly contextual, so it won't always be that hard to figure out what a word means in a given sentence/context.
Hanyu Pinyin (a phonetic rendering of Chinese characters in the Latin alphabet) also helps when studying, but you won't see much of it in China and it can't perfectly render the meaning of a character (the aforementioned 他 vs 她 are both rendered as 'tā')
Personally I find it extremely difficult to write characters from memory, though typing them (which you do in pinyin) is pretty easy.
>Word order
This is probably to be expected when learning a new language, but it could still present issues. For example: the book is on the table = 这本书在桌子上 (Zhè běn shū zài zhuōzi shàng) = the (measure word) book at table on. I'm probably not explaining this very well but you get the rough idea. The sentence structure is pretty different (though I've heard it's even more different in Japanese).
>>17348082
This anon is right. It's a lot easier to learn Japanese if you're already fluent in Chinese (and vice versa) due to Japaneses' usage of Chinese characters. There were a few Japanese girls in my classes and they had a really easy time dealing with hanzi.

Japanese, unless you like reading about betrayal and greed, then chinese

>>17347869
Don't use it for job opportunities. that's how you get pigeonholed as a low importance translator bitch boy. You keep your knowledge of mandarin a secret. Never tell another white person you speak it. Solicit Chinese business people when you see them and offer to sell corporate secrets for millions of dollars instead.

Learn a white man language instead.

>>17348590
The era of the white man ended when Trump was voted out. The 21st century belongs to China now (and that's a good thing).

>>17348150
Those radicals are identical to japanese lol

I’m going to start mandarin this summer for better opportunities in the business world. I’m hoping to be an investment banker and my dad thinks that’s the next best thing I could do to better my prospects. I still feel like I would rather learn something I could have an interest in reading in the original language like French, Russian or German.

>>17347646
If you're going to sink that much time into learning an Asian language, go for mandarin unless you're a turbo weeb.

I've been learning Japanese for a few years and can answer questions if you have them, OP.

>>17347673
>Most of Japanese good stuff has been translated
What do you mean? The classics have been translated, but most contemporary stuff isn't (and they have a thriving contemporary scene).

>>17349550
Yes, there is that too. I'm relatively curious about contemporary stuff. And there are a lot of really different things.

>>17347646
learn CLASSICAL CHINESE instead, then learn classical Japanese and modern Japanese. don't bother with modern """chinese"""

also
>learning any modern language other than English

>>17349533
I already know French, spanish and portuguese. German or latin would be good, but I'd gladly swap them with mandarin or japanese.

>>17349661
>don't bother with modern """chinese"""
Care to expand? Modern chinese would be simplified chinese while classical chinese would be traditional chinese?

>>17349741
if classical chinese is latin then modern mandarin is french

>>17347646
chinese is pretty cool, but you really need to go all-in if you want to get anything out of it. i was never super interested in old china, but having a foundation in classical chinese is important if you want to catch all of the references in modern/contemporary chinese literature. if you haven’t read them, authors like Wang Shuo (王朔), Bei Dao (北岛), and the films of Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) really are great and a good place to get a feel for contemporary china (if you end up wanting to look into it).

you will need to spend years though if you want to get good at chinese. i am professionally proficient in my field (which is not literature related), but have had around 7 years of formal schooling in mandarin (including language courses and courses taught in the language) and have lived in china for over 10 years. i was trying to be a translator of contemporary literature and did a novel and some poems back in 2015, but found opportunities elsewhere and haven’t done literary translation work since. it was a decent experience, but working with the editors was a pain (not for censorship reasons, but due to the fact that my proofreader made a lot of mechanical errors that i had to go back and correct).

i don’t really know much about learning japanese, but i can say that trying to pick up korean was hard. superficially it felt like chinese due to loanwords, but grammatically it got really difficult—more difficult than chinese in my opinion.

How good would you say that RTK is at teaching one how to write kanji by hand (I can learn their meaning in context by learning vocab and reading)?

>>17349911
If you are proficient in Japanese and have some Chinese knowledge, picking up a solid understanding of Korean will be a breeze, as Japanese and Korean have many similarities and both languages heavily borrowed Chinese expressions.

>>17349911
How difficult would it be to go from modern Chinese to old Chinese? I'm currently studying modern Chinese and am interested in literature. It's not my main goal, but eventually reading old Chinese texts would be pretty awesome.

Also, as a beginner Mandarin speaker I would advice beginners to not be afraid to write down the characters with pen and paper instead of relying solely on pin yin. Knowing the symbols in the end of the day is all about muscle memory and, a scientific paper has shown, substantially improves reading and character comprehension.

>>17351428
>a scientific paper has shown
Do you have that paper with you? Not doubting you, just interested in reading that paper.

>>17348442
t. doesn't speak chinese

https://youtu.be/ia709Mh0OB0

Why are chinese people so nice and westerners so cringe?

>>17347646
learn Classical Chinese then, not Mandarin. Classical Chinese was the literary language of China before the 20th century

i'm a reclusive neet who knows chinese, modern and classical, will someone really give me money for this seemingly useless skill?

better off waiting for things to be translated into english than learning classical to read them yourself

>>17352222
you can be a translation monkey

>>17352290
How?

>>17352222
translate all of the Dream of the Red Chamber

>>17352364
It's already translated though.

>>17347646
I'm Japanese N2 level. I should have learned Chinese.

>>17352463
Care to expand on your answer, fren?

>>17352427
not sufficiently

>>17347646
never had any interest in anime or manga either, in fact i never had any sort of interest in japan at all, never liked samurais or ninjas or that stuff as a kid at all. i just wanted to learn a 3rd language and teach myself some self discipline, and i read that japanese would be the hardest language to learn, so i did that.

stuck to it hardcore every day and am now reading dazai, mishima as well as contemporary authors and am enjoying it a lot. while i'm still more of a film guy than a literature guy, learning japanese has pulled me back into reading way more than i used to in recent years.

the only thing that matters when learning a language is that there is some form of media you can immerse yourself in every single day that you don't actually hate. i'm sure china has loads of interesting stuff, but for me personally japanese cinema, music and literature were just way more interesting, though as i said before i didn't put much thought at all into my choice of learning japanese in the first place.
but yeah, to answer your question, jp literature is pretty dope, to the point where i kinda hate reading anything non-japanese now. i just learned to love the language and how, i don't know, poetic or whatever it can be, how prevalent and distinct all the dialects are and how large the range is from simple, everyday language to fancy akutagawa or mishima prose.

>>17352663
how long did it take until you were able to read literature without having to look up stuff all the time?

>>17352705
well i started about 2 and half years ago, so not that long. as i said though i went at it fairly hardcode, racking up probably 4500+ hours of immersion in 2 years.
i do still need to look stuff up when reading something like akutagawa since it uses tons of just about dead words for things that don't even exist anymore, but i can read contemporary stuff just fine at almost the speed of english books. though that depends on the author of course. ive long stopped using subtitles for movies as well and have no trouble at all following them.

so i'd say somewhere along those kind of hours, 3000-5000 is where things get more comfortable and you stop worrying about "studying" the language so much.

>>17347819
decide of a number of new words to learn to day and stick with it. Consitency is key. Look into Anki, there are many anki decks with 10K words in etc. Also, learn grammar from Tae Kim if you haven't already.

>>17352779
What are your other hobbies besides literature and movies?

>>17348596
I know that you only post posts of this nature ironically, but that does not change my opinion on your deserved eventual fate.

Yapoo has yet to be translated so pick japanese

>>17352909
coding and motorsports

>>17352187
Why are chinks and hafus so rabid in their china-shilling online, and why do they deserve death for their actions?

>>17352946
Don't let your underminer put you down bro

>>17347673
But Chinese people are both genetically and culturally incapable of any level of creativity, so there's no point in reading CN lit? Also 99% of JP translations are beyond horrible.

>>17347646
>japanese
KEK

>>17352946
>>17354034
/pol/tards are subhuman

>>17348596
>and that's a good thing
I hope you get your organs harvested and your family rounded up and shot

>>17354079
That's gonna be a tough one to sell while contributing to a sinophile thead.

>>17354034
>Also 99% of JP translations are beyond horrible.
Source?

>>17354346
he's right. you might as well not bother with translations of japanese books, they butcher everything that makes them worth reading in the first place.
i mean this is true for any translation to an extent of course, but japanese being so far removed from english plus the quality of available translators being much lower than for other languages makes translated works a disaster almost every time.

>>17354079
Seethe more, shill

>tfw never going to china
>tfw even if i do in future will be too old to make anything of it

What is a good textbook/workbook for learning Mandarin Chinese? I speak only English.

Learning Japanese was the best decision of my life honestly. Unending amount of good media. But it depends on your tastes I guess, I read literature but also the occasional manga and stuff. It's great for contemporary books especially, I probably wouldn't learn it for just a few classics if you're literally not interested in anything else.

This anon >>17347673 is very wrong btw. Not even 1/100 of good stuff is translated and the few translated things are not even remotely comparable to the original due to the translations sucking so bad.

Chinese to read 三体.
Japanese to read the translation of 三体.

>>17355032
Duolingo.

>>17355032
>>17357409 is right. Start with duolingo and Rosetta Stone. There's actually a lot of good info on there (and the former is free).

>>17351330
yeah, if your L1 is Korean you have some serious advantages for picking up both Japanese and Chinese. it's really cool how the languages can be so similar and so different at times. it's also always fascinated me how we don't have a great understanding about the formation of Old Korean and some things about language evolution in East Asia just might be lost to time.

>>17351428
classical chinese is pretty much a different language. you may recognize some/most of the characters, but they will be used in ways that are really unfamiliar. i only took one class on 古代汉语 several years ago, as it wasn't my main focus. i really liked it though, and it definitely changed the way that i look at modern chinese. i remember using the Hanban textbook for it, and it was okay. not sure if there are better resources.

and yeah, there are some great apps/flashcard decks out there, but definitely spend time learning characters with pen and paper. keep a notebook and rewrite those fuckers daily. it's essential. also, if you really like chinese, it won't be hard and should be enjoyable. characters are fucking cool.

>>17348596
Based retard

>>17349511
The characters are literally the same. There are a handful of novel ones and simplifications but why would the radicals be different?

>>17352222
It's kinda like steroids. Just knowing it won't help you unless you are competent in other areas as chinese people are super judgemental. I would say open some LLC or something that way you can say you are a business owner and Chinese people may cut you in on some good deals.

>>17347646
You could learn both honestly.

>>17348590
and take classes on gender identity right?

Neither Mandarin nor Japanese are the same as their classical forms but learning either might require a certain amount of knowledge of the modern forms. It seems China has a more substantial literary heritage though.

>>17358020
Have you taken the pain to learn two by-gone languages yourself?

>>17351138
bump

>>17354034
retarded bait

>>17351138
>RtK for handwriting
As good as any other radical-based method.
The difficult part isn't how to write the characters, as there are a limited number of radicals with fixed stroke order that make up every character.
It's remembering how each character you want to write is structured, and that's where the mnemonics come to help.

>>17357813
Any speaker of a CJK language will have an advantage for learning other CJK languages.

>>17347646
I know chinese, and some amount of korean and a small amount of japanese, i've lived in both china and korea

Chinese:
>it's not difficult to learn per se (unless it's classical chinese) but it's really grindy and will take lots of time
>probably the hardest to speak well out of all of them, this will take lots of practice too
>Chinese really open up if you can speak Chinese, and obviously it's a big country with lots to see
>Chinese pop culture is basically starting to become developed, with places like bilibili, and that one fanfiction site i forgot the name of

The way I learned chinese was basically following the hsk word list, and whatever random text i found online, and repeatedly copying the characters over and over again, and i did that for a couple years, and i guess watching dramas too, i've been learning for 3 years around and now i can read most shit

alot of people seem to be anal about learning how to write characters, but there's no better way to memorize them really, writing is more important for chinese than for basically every other language

Korean:
>There's a way inconsistencies with Hangeul, but overall it's easy to learn
>that's everything that's easy about korean, everything else is really fucking difficult
>grammar is really difficult, especially during casual speech
>spoken korean is very different from written korean, they often shorten words or have more colloquial ways of saying something that you don't learn from books
>Vocab is largely chinese based, so it's easier if you know chinese, but imo more difficult to memorize than hanzi
>the people are more closed off and insular, the country is pretty small, and alot of it was bombed so there's less history left compared to other east asian nations

Japanese:
>I don't know alot, but if you know basic japanese grammar, katakana and hiragana, and hanzi you can read a suprising amount of stuff

>>17360916
>There are some inconsistencies with Hangeul, but overall it's easy to learn

i guess i can't speak english lmao

>>17360811
>mnemonics
mnemonics are for faggots

just write down the character and imprint it in your memory, and of course learn radicals and stroke order

>>17354034
older chinese lit is pretty based, the ccp censors alot of the avant garde stuff now though

>>17355032
>>17357409
>>17357421
cringe
duolingo is for faggots
the only way to do it is to straight up jump into chinese media and follow hsk word lists

>>17357891
yeah the most confusing part is that in classical chinese, common characters can mean something completely different, it's definitely something you have to study through textbooks

i remember reading that, in the older chinese texts around the warring states period, people actually wrote in their own dialect kinda, so the grammar varies alot between major texts, to the point where chinese are still debating what some of them meant to this day

>>17360966
Mnemonics have their uses, be it for easily confused characters or annoyingly complex ones.
>still using a Japanese mnemonic to write 憂鬱

What do you want to read?
Isekai LNs or Xianxia/Wuxia novels?
This will answer your question.

I feel no passion for the Chinese language and its culture does not appeal to me. However, considering the direction the world is heading into I feel guilty over not learning it. Is it really worth it?

>>17358020
Yeah, that's my plan right now. I'm gonna start with japanese because I already have a basis for it and then I'll learn Classical/Literary Chinese for reading the precious literature of Old China. I just hope this ordeal takes less than 10 years to accomplish. Either way it will be quite a journey.

>>17347646
That is not even a question, Mandarin bro. China has more and better literature. In addition the language is incredibly useful. Love them or hate them China is the largest economy in the world and is still growing. USA is fading, not gone mind you, but I wouldn't bet on them. I'm European btw.
The only reason to learn Japanese nowadays is if you are a weeaboo, yeah, I said it.

>>17362366
You sound like you are more interested in China anyway so I don't know why this is a question.
Also, Mandarin is also more useful throughout the world, nobody speaks Japanese except in Japan. I mean Mandarin is not a lingua franca, but you'll get more use out of it internationally, especially around Asia.

>>17347646
Japanese is probably more useful for delving into things like Buddhist studies since they have a more extant tradition.

You should probably bother to learn traditional Chinese characters since it'll probably make you literate in simplified but the same might not necessarily be true of the reverse.

>>17362478
Are traditional characters the ones used in classical chinese?

if you plan to use the languages for just reading/translating written word, it might make sense to do chinese, as a lot of the difficulties that come with chinese are exclusively spoken (tones, difficult consonants and vowels, etc)

>>17363379
The characters currently in use in Taiwan/HK/Macao are commonly called "Traditional Characters"

>>17347646
Mandarin => Classical Chinese => Japanese
Just learn them all.

Theres no reason to learn Japanese in terms of an academic angle unless you REAAALLLLLLYY care about it and even then, their literature is very lackluster and you have the problem that mandarin has but even worse because theres even less resources for old Japanese than Traditional chinese if you want to actually read any old texts. Go with mandarin or traditional chinese if you really want to read old texts immediately

>>17364730
I wouldn't say Mishima, Kawabata, Oe, Soseki, Endo etc are lackluster.

japanese

>>17365615
why

>>17347869
>Chinese diaspora
they don't speak mandarin they speak cantonese. same writing, extremely different pronunciation.

bump

>>17347754
you're worse than me and I'm learning for 1.5 years. I'm an ESL too

>>17366032
If you learn Chinese you can only talk to Chinks. Imagine the horror.

>>17367958
Yes, imagine...