Poll: Is Chinese hard to learn?

[talideon]

I guess evolved wasn't quite the right word? What I was trying to say was that they're related, in so far as the writing system anyway. Like you said Japanese borrow many of the words from Chinese so for them they'll have an easier time transitioning, and vise versa. Much more than say from a Latin based language where there are little similarities.

Again, I'm not an linguist so I'm not making any claims. This is purely from my personal experience of the Asian languages mentioned.

No, they're not really related in any sense. Sure, Chinese can be said to have influenced them, but to be related, there has to at least be a common ancestor language. To the best of our knowledge, Japanese and Korean don't share a common ancestor with any of the Sino-Tibetan languages. 'Influenced by' would be a better way of putting what I think you intend than 'related to', which connotes something quite different.

If you'd like a familiar analogy, take Maltese: Maltese is an Afro-Asiatic language. More specifically, it's a Semitic language quite closely related to Arabic (which, like Chinese, really more like a language family than an actual language). Maltese borrows substantial amounts of vocabulary from Italian and English and uses the Latin, but it can in no way be said to be in any way related[1] to either English or Italian, in spite of the great influence both languages have had on Maltese.

[1] That said, there's a hypothetical superfamily of languages called 'Nostratic' which would make Italian and English related to Maltese, but that relationship would be so very distant that the hypothetical Altaic language family I mentioned earlier would make English and Japanese more closely related than English and Maltese! I'm not sure I'm convinced by the evidence for Nostratic.

 

[talideon]

Isn't... the whole... "Just because they share x and y doesn't mean they're related" is kind of like saying "Just because they're related doesn't mean they're related? I mean... You know? Maybe they don't have the same exact roots, but that sounds pretty damn related to me.

No. It's like the difference between sharing actual genetic material with somebody and having somebody as a best friend.

Languages can influence each other without necessarily being closely related. Take, for example, the Balkan Sprachbund. A sprachbund is a group of languages that are not necessarily closely related, which, through contact and cultural exchange, have exchanged features and vocabulary that make them appear more closely related than they truly are. Thus you have languages from very diverse genetic backgrounds--Romance, Slavic, Greek, and Albanian--gaining similar features and vocabulary in spite of the fact that they are less closely related than the presence of such features and vocabulary would lead one to believe from a surface examination.

We know this because we've extensive corpuses of the various languages, and we can see how the languages have changed over time, how they've influenced one another. That's how we know that, even though they share some surface similarities, the likes of Albanian, Serbocroatian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, &c., are not particularly closely related to one another. In fact, they're all as closely related to one another as they are to, say, Swedish or Irish[1].

OT:
I have no idea. Given that English is my second language though, I can tell you that it was the simplest thing on the planet to learn. This is probably because of Russian being hard enough to efficiently use even by those who were born in the country. (It's the one class I always got a B on whilst growing up. So much shame.)

Oh, there are *much* more awkward languages to learn than Russian. Phonologically, it's not that bad, and grammatically it's far from as awkward as it might be. Try Finnish or Estonian if you want more of a challenge in that regard.

Much like any language, if you are forced into an environment where people use it, you'll have to pick up on it sooner or later. Also, all languages have certain advantages. English is extremely flexible in terms of grammar and structure, whereas a lot of Germanic[3] or Eastern European languages are very rigid in terms of grammar. I can rely on myself, in Russian, to create a sentence using newly learned words without being too concerned because of understanding of what revolves around those words, whereas in English, any new word's pronunciation/usage in sentences can be completely off the rails. And, as you say, Mandarin may have some advantages, too. Context is king.

[1] In fact, if you want an object lesson in how much a group of languages can differ from the norm, take a look at the Celtic languages[2]. They're the ones that differ the most from the Indo-European norm, much more so than even the likes of Farsi and Hindi, which, in spite of their separation, are much less alien to, say, an Anglophone or Francophone, than the Celtic languages are.

[2] And believe me, I know. Irish is my second language (and it's to my eternal shame that it's not my first), so I'm familiar enough with the language to know how different it is from the Indo-European norm. Linguistics is also one of my great loves, and Irish lead me towards that.

[3] English is a Germanic language. It's just that it underwent some pretty radical changes during the Middle English and Early Modern English periods due to contact with Old Norse, Norman French, and a variety of other languages, which forced a kind of... creolisation on the language. Unfortunately, that was just as the printing press was invented, which is why the language's spelling system(s) are so ill-suited to it.

 

[BeeGeenie]

No really, they're completely unrelated. Japanese just borrowed Chinese writing and some vocab, kind of like how English borrowed vocabulary from pretty much every language on the planet.

I guess I'm missing how that makes the languages unrelated. English is still the weird cousin of pretty much every European language ever. It -is- related to a lot of them in that sense. That's like saying French or Italian "borrowed" from Latin. :L

Or how Cyrillic letters were adapted from the Romans, because religion and shit.

Oh well. Guess I'm just looking at it a bit side-ways.

True, English is related to to all those indo-european languages, so maybe that was a bad example.
That's what makes the comparison so difficult. English has lots of related languages and lots of historic written evidence that links them; Japanese, not so much. As Talideon mentioned, we're not even sure if it's related to Korean.

I wouldn't expect anyone that didn't have a background in linguistic anthropology to know that, so I think Talideon may have come across a bit harsh.

 

[talideon]

I have read all posts so far, learned a bit too. Maybe Mandarin's "simple" grammar can make it quite hard with so much homonyms. A little morphological grammar seems preferred by most European posters, but then again it is relative;

'Grammar' is quite a distinct concept from 'phonology'. Mandarin has so many homonyms because of sound changes. Besides, context is everything: if homonyms were really a massive problem for speakers of Sinitic languages, that vocabulary would've been supplanted by something less ambiguous. Languages don't end up going all "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" in any meaningful sense: they always compensate in some manner because those who use them want to understand and be understood.

a Thai told me Chinese is easier for himself because there are tones in Thai and both do not case, inflect, or use tense.

Not surprising given Thai is a Sino-Tibetan language, really.

But the characters are hard for everyone though and Chinese has many modal particles for things.

I'm going to assume you're referring to particles rather than 'modal particles' specifically, because the latter are a subset of the other. Particles in Sinitic languages serve the very same purpose as inflections and affixes in languages where those are pervasive.

Interesting thing about Mandarin: while it's an isolating language right now (and the writing system reinforces this in subtle ways), it's turning into an agglutinative language. It's a cycle all languages go through: eventually Mandarin particles will become affected in not-so-subtle ways by the words they're affixed to and the language will become more inflexional.

 

[talideon]

I can safely say that the Chinese's grammar is near-enough nonexistent. All you need to do is learn the words and characters, and boom, you know Chinese.

You would be wrong if you were to think Mandarin has next to no grammar. You're committing an error of analysis. I think you might be confusing the fact that Mandarin (like English, interestingly enough) is not a strongly inflecting language. That makes Mandarin morphologically simple, not grammatically simple. Instead, like English, Chinese pushes its essential complexity from the structure of its words (its morphology) onto the structure of its phrases and sentences (its syntax). Thus, like English, it sacrifices the use of inflections for a more rigid word order.

There are *very* few grammatically simple languages; no language allows you to form words and sentences in whatever form or order you like. Expressing complex thoughts requires structure, and languages have to represent this structure somehow. Chinese and English lean heavily on word order and particles of various kinds for this structure, whereas some languages refer on complicated morphology to serve the same purpose. This doesn't imply that either is any more grammatically simple than the other, however.

 

[talideon]

I guess I'm missing how that makes the languages unrelated.

You're confusing influence with relatedness. Chinese influenced Japanese, but neither are related.

English is still the weird cousin of pretty much every European language ever.

In Indo-European terms, English really isn't all that weird. In fact, it's essentially just a morphologically simple Standard Indo-European language from the Germanic family that just happens to have liberally borrowed an awful lot of words from Latin, Greek, French, and a bunch of other unsuspecting languages.

But in Indo-European terms, English isn't even slightly odd.

It -is- related to a lot of them in that sense.

It's distantly related to practically every language on the continent, but it's still just a Germanic language that happens to borrow a lot of vocabulary. That counts as influence rather than a real genetic relationship.

That's like saying French or Italian "borrowed" from Latin. :L

Actually, no. It's completely different. French and Italian are actual descendents of Latin.

Or how Cyrillic letters were adapted from the Romans, because religion and shit.

Incorrect. The Cyrillic alphabet is a descendent of the Greek uncial script, with influence from the earlier Glagolitic alphabet, which was something of a Frankenstein's monster of an alphabet mainly descended from the Greek and Coptic alphabets. The Latin alphabet, on the other hand, is a modified version of the Euboean/Attic variant of the Greek alphabet. The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets share a common ancestor, but are not directly related. Moreover, the Latin alphabet came about through migration and trade between what is now Greece and Italy, not through the spread of religion.

 

[Belaam]

LoL. look at all the D.L.I. alum. I was there in 1996. Vietnamese for about a month, then they told me I was tone deaf and needed to switch to a non-tonal language and I took Spanish as I already knew some.

I heard a lot about how Chinese and Arabic were among the tougher languages to learn, but that may have just been from a base language of English. Chinese and Vietnamese are very similar in being monosyllabic tonal languages with similar grammar, so I assume going from one to the other there wouldn't be that hard.

 

[Ferisar]

I'm not going to quote you, talideon, mostly because there's so much to respond to XP But I enjoyed the mini-lecture regardless. Good read. I actually never knew about the Cyrillic/Greek thing, I just heard what I stated in passing somewhere and kind of assumed it to be reality (should never do that).

I appreciate the widened perspective, though. I can see why it would be a bit irritating for someone to assume influence and relation to be the exact same. I think I was just trying to use "related" in a broader term than the word itself would allow.

Oh, and I know Russian isn't as bad as some other languages, I just found that learning English was hilariously simple in comparison. I hate my native tongue sometimes. (Probably for more cultural reasons rather than anything actually related to the language itself)

Side-note: I meant to use "weird" and "borrowed" extremely loosely. I don't actually find English to be that weird of a cousin of anything, and the latter was meant to be used in jest x) Either way, good catch on a bad analogy.

This thread is fun. I'm learning all kinds of interesting linguistic junk thanks to everyone. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

... (Now how to make this thread about sexism...)

 

[LAGG]

Your first foreign language is usually the hardest, from there on the others are all pretty easy.

 

[Goulashsoup]

I read everything so far and learned a lot, thanks to talideon too. Can leave this now.

 

[Emanuele Ciriachi]

Yes, but you have to admit it could be worse with European style grammar and all. I do think English isn't the easiest language, maybe for us we think it is but Afrikaans is even simpler, and indonesian is even more simpler, and chinese except the tones, signs,modal particles, and aspect is simpler. English is not the hardest language like they joke in the US but it is not the easiest compared to every language with more than 1 million speakers.

One thai I know said he found Chinese very easy since he already used tones in Thai and didn't have to use European style grammar which he said English has that we think it has very little of. Thai is like chinese in that you do not decline or conjugate, even more simple morphologically than English. No grammatical gender but you talk differently based on gender and use different pronouns and greetings.

Well, from my perspective I already understand European grammar - as an Italian I studied Latin in high school for 5 years - and while indeed difficult, it was easily learned during my early years. With this background, adapting to English and French was easy. You have a point though, Chinese (Mandarin) with its nearly non-existent grammar is easy on this department.

You are right about thai - while Chinese has 4 pronunciation for every vowel, thai has 5. My wife is from Sichuan, a bit more south and I would have had even more trouble...

 

[lechat]

as someone who is studying both mandarin and spanish i can honestly say anyone who speaks a latin based language and does not have a fairly good memory is gonna have a hard time learning mandarin

 

[Joccaren]

Yes and no. Harder than Italian for me, but if I were to actually try I could remember it.
Its not so much the grammar, the tones, or the syntax that f***s people up, its the symbols and characters. Memorising them... Hell no. Pinyin? Yeah, easy. Tones? If I payed any attention it was fine. Characters? ... Could, should, would, but... no. Not so easy.

 

[Hawkeye21]

Now, if only somebody thought about compiling a short comparative table on different languages... Wait a minute

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/index.html

 

[Angie7F]

I speak Japanese and English fluently, and learnt a bit of French, Italian, German and Mandarin.
I found it easier to learn the Latin based languages than Mandarin even though I use kanji n Japanese.
But Indonesian probably was the easiest for me.

 

[unindexedsearchengine]

I can safely say that the Chinese's grammar is near-enough nonexistent. All you need to do is learn the words and characters, and boom, you know Chinese.

You would be wrong if you were to think Mandarin has next to no grammar. You're committing an error of analysis. I think you might be confusing the fact that Mandarin (like English, interestingly enough) is not a strongly inflecting language. That makes Mandarin morphologically simple, not grammatically simple. Instead, like English, Chinese pushes its essential complexity from the structure of its words (its morphology) onto the structure of its phrases and sentences (its syntax). Thus, like English, it sacrifices the use of inflections for a more rigid word order.

There are *very* few grammatically simple languages; no language allows you to form words and sentences in whatever form or order you like. Expressing complex thoughts requires structure, and languages have to represent this structure somehow. Chinese and English lean heavily on word order and particles of various kinds for this structure, whereas some languages refer on complicated morphology to serve the same purpose. This doesn't imply that either is any more grammatically simple than the other, however.

I absolutely accept my error, and see that I have worded it incorrectly. You're correction is much appreciated.
What I meant so say, that it barely has nay grammar that needs learning. Most of it is astonishingly simple, and once you know the words, you need only apply a bit of common sense and you can speak the language in an understandable, if not in a particularly classy, fashion.

I am, of course, only conveying opinions formed through personal experience.

 

[6urk17s]

What about Russian? Russians sound fuck awesome.

Ehh, not hard. I have to learn it at school, but because for the first few grades I had a pretty bad teacher who wasn't really strict, I slacked and didn't learn anything. The hardest part is grammar, but in a way it is similar to Latvian, so its not that big of a problem.

Most mistakes come from the alphabet, which is upside down and inside out, so because of that, it has messed with in a way that now, I have ended up writing Cyrillic words with Latin letter and vice verse.
For example, writing words like Variety like "Baruemy"(B in cyrillic is v, u is I and lowercase m in handwriting is T), or
Words like Партий(Not a real word, just Party written cyrillic for demonstration purposes) as Рагтий(Ragty).

It does tick me off when I see people trying to be hip and Communist by trying to write english words with cyrillic, like ОРЯЗСC, because anyone who understand cyrillic just sees "Orjazss".

Something you have to adjust to.

 

[Chemical Alia]

LoL. look at all the D.L.I. alum. I was there in 1996. Vietnamese for about a month, then they told me I was tone deaf and needed to switch to a non-tonal language and I took Spanish as I already knew some.

I heard a lot about how Chinese and Arabic were among the tougher languages to learn, but that may have just been from a base language of English. Chinese and Vietnamese are very similar in being monosyllabic tonal languages with similar grammar, so I assume going from one to the other there wouldn't be that hard.

I thought I was GOING to be a Spanish linguist, since I had studied that hardcore for like five years in school. Also, that's really weird that they kicked you out after a month. The tones used in Chines and Vietnamese aren't like musical tones at all, it's just a set of inflections that words have. It's really just a matter of practice with recognizing them and context plays a big part. You probably just weren't catching up as fast as everyone else, but seriously, being "tone deaf" is no handicap that prevents anyone from learning a tonal language.

Also, it's a common misconception that Chinese and Vietnamese are monosyllabic languages. Many words are formed from multiple characters and compound words are used quite extensively. I guess that assumption came about because Chinese character usually have their own meaning, but if you tried to read Chinese charater-by-character you'd end up with gibberish. I would be sitting in front of my electriciy brain and not my computer.

 

[Goulashsoup]

I also want to ask a quick question that I now throw into this thread. Is English a creole? It was mixed with Norman-French heavily, but Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese have up to 50% chinese borrowed vocabulary and people do not think they are creoles, yet English and Afrikaans are sometimes thought of as such. Farsi is also heavily simplified in grammar and borrowed many Arabic words. It's like the line between a dialect and language; the line between a creole and non-creole with heavy borrowings has not been established too. Also who thinks making a logographic system just for European languages sounds like a fun idea? It'd be a secret code only native speakers know themselves.