About learning English. American Newspaper is typically at a 6th grade reading level. Of course, there are some upper level allusions and words, (I remember seeing machavallian in the newspaper once.) but for the most part, the typical American needs to be in 6th grade in order to read the newspaper.

and for others... just saying one person can do something doesn't mean all others can do the same thing. Thats called a testimonial fallacy. If one person who graduated from HArvard can't find a job, it dosen't mean all people who graduate from harvard can't find a job.

I'm learning so much about argument logic from this thread!

So azndoofus makes his long-awaited return!

Care to comment on the last 8 pages of bickering we've done in an effort to answer your question?

>>As for English, I'll like to argue that acquiring new pronunciations
>>is not as easy as just reading the papers.

I think this point merits further discussion. I think you would be suprised how many words the typical native English speaker "knows", that he has never heard out loud. Often they won't even be aware of it, until one day they hear it spoken and they say "oh, is THAT how you pronounce it?", to which the other person usually replies "I'm not sure, how do you pronounce it? Your guess is as good as mine". This happens to me frequently.

Obviously this doesn't apply to common, everyday words, but I have acquired a lot of specialised vocabulary over the years that I may not have ever heard. That doesn't change the fact that I know those words though - I can read them, write them, understand them, and I could use them in a conversation and they would be understood, even if I pronounced them slightly wrong, and I would understand them if they were said to me in a conversation and pronounced slightly different to how I expected.

This is a key difference between English and Japanese (and presumably Japanese and Chinese, if Chinese readings are as regular and predictable as people say). The ability to just "pick up" new vocabulary while reading, without ever needing to check a dictionary (or with a person) the meaning or pronounciation of the word.

Oh, and for the record, I've never met a native English speaker who would EVER consult a dictionary to see how a word is pronounced.

NickT Wrote:>>As for English, I'll like to argue that acquiring new pronunciations
>>is not as easy as just reading the papers.

Oh, and for the record, I've never met a native English speaker who would EVER consult a dictionary to see how a word is pronounced.

My point on acquiring new pronunciations was more for non-native English speakers. Besides, I think you have pretty much nailed it yourself when you said:

NickT Wrote:Often they won't even be aware of it, until one day they hear it spoken and they say "oh, is THAT how you pronounce it?", to which the other person usually replies "I'm not sure, how do you pronounce it? Your guess is as good as mine". This happens to me frequently.

I wouldn't count that as picking up pronunciations (i.e. correct) from newspapers especially when you said it happened frequently?

Native English speakers can pick up pronunciations from reading with ease because they live in an environment where they are totally immersed in the English language. If their pronunciation is incorrect, constant feedback from the surroundings will eventually clean them up; which is basically the key of AJATT. I'm pretty sure you can't have master English pronunciations with just reading of papers alone.

Nonetheless, we've gone off topic. I'll hold my peace for this argument. I'm interested in what TS has to say as well

English is a quirky language. I think that often the "correct" pronunciation of a word is at times arbitrary. People will correct each other endlessly, but who's to say.....these things change over time and by location. I can't speak for Chinese, but the phonetic Japanese sure makes things efficient. I can imagine a person could learn to speak Japanese via reading, much more easily than a person attempting the same with English. I can often hear a word in Japanese and type it in Hiragana, convert it into kanji, and see that I am correct. I'm still a terrible speller in my own language though!

I still think the pronunciation of 'suffice' is wrong.
suff+ice..
i do
suff+"iss"

That's just because you're wrong

~J

For native speakers, some level of mispronunciation can be a sign of high literacy -- people are encountering a lot of words while reading that aren't so common in spoken language, and adding them to their repertoire. Of course lots of English words have multiple correct pronunciations -- they vary between US and Canada and Britain (and probably Australia too, never lived there). .... jaguar, schedule, laboratory, advertisement, garage and of course the old standbys tomato potato

There is also the more general issue that the culture of English dictionaries is to describe, not prescribe, so when a new pronunciation emerges, it gets added to the dictionary pretty promptly as a new variation. This contrasts with languages like French or German where language czars (sometimes they even have official government positions!) attempt to preserve and proscribe.

>> I wouldn't count that as picking up pronunciations (i.e. correct) from newspapers >> especially when you said it happened frequently?

My point was that it doesn't really matter if you pronounce it "correctly" or not. If you know the word, you know the word, and you can know a word perfectly well from just reading it somewhere.

There are regional differences in pronounciation, and even locally, and even just down to personal preference. Different people in my office pronounce different words in different ways. It really doesn't matter that much, as it is pretty much all mutally intelligible to any fluent speaker.

If you mispronounce every single word it is a problem, but if it is just low frequency words its not an issue.

"So azndoofus makes his long-awaited return!

Care to comment on the last 8 pages of bickering we've done in an effort to answer your question?"

I didn't get a solid "answer" but I'm definitely leaning towards the Japanese being more difficult then Chinese to learn.

I've been avoiding the temptation of commenting because I'm pretty ignorant on this subject. Especially when it comes to Japanese. I've spent 4 years studying Chinese in high school. I am now taking Chinese 4 AP. Right now, I can form simple sentences, and recognize over 700 han zi (rough guess). However, even though I can read entire sentences from newspaper articles and so on, I have no idea what it is saying.

I think that comments more on the low quality of highschool foreign language education than it does on the difficulty of Chinese.

This is an anonymous account, and while I feel that I'd like to contribute my own two cents, I'm not looking for an extended discussion. The American State Department for its own purposes have performed their own research into the expected number of hours needed for their average Foreign Service employee to learn a language. Both Chinese and Japanese are categorized into Category 4, for the hardest tier, but Japanese is marked star, to indicate that it tends to require a significantly greater level of time investment to achieve function or fluency. For the State Department's purposes, Chinese requires 2200 classroom hours, with the expectation of equivalent hours spent studying, for a real investment of 4400 classroom hours, for the native English speaker with no background in Asiatic languages. The star mark, I recall somewhere, indicates that the number should be multiplied by 1.5, so that Japanese would require 3300 classroom hours and 6600 total study hours to achieve fluency.

That said, I do think that certain posters on this forum have overstated the relative ease with which they can learn Chinese. Japanese speakers inherently have an advantage over speakers of other languages when it comes to learning Chinese, as the most difficult part of learning Chinese is based on its orthography, and to have partial mastery of Sinograms means that Japanese speakers have a significant leg up.

The difference in difficulty could be described as that between Romance languages and Latin, with Chinese (and the Sinolects) being Romance languages and Japanese being Latin. The vocabulary is in large part cognate, although faux-amis do exist (the Japanese for letter being the Chinese for toilet paper, for instance, although you can easily see the etymology), but Japanese has a significantly more complex grammar, as well as a tendency towards contextual statements (although both Chinese and Japanese can be described as subject predicate languages). The SVO vs SOV thing is also overstated, as Chinese has grammatical forms (the passive construction, for instance, and the 把 ba construction) which use OSV (passive) or SOV (ba construction) forms.

Someone who is fluent in either Japanese or Chinese havs a significant step up on learning the other language due to the Sinograms involved, but the advantage is greater for the Japanese speaker than vice versa.

Fluency targets also vary, for instance, Japanese speakers are similar to the French in that they expect absolute accuracy in pronunciation, grammar, and diction, while many Chinese speakers do not have Mandarin as a first language, and expect significant variation depending on locale (just as say, for English as a non-native speaker, the most difficult aspect of English may be understanding the accents of non-native speakers). The level of Chinese that is necessary for a native speaker to consider you conversant is less than the corresponding level of Japanese. That is something that is important to remember, while you may be more easily perceived as fluent in Chinese compared to your Japanese counterpart, your Chinese could be significantly flawed in pronunciation and diction.

With regards to sinograms, Chinese definitely requires more, but the current HSK standard requires about 2,500 characters for CEFR-C2 equivalent fluency, while the TOP and TOCFL standards in Taiwan require about 3,000 characters. Jo-yo- Kanji requires about 2,000 characters, while with the Jinmeiyo- extension you require about 3,000 characters. For more expanded requirements, Kanji kentei is cited as requiring 6,000 characters, while the PRC Xiandai Hanyu Changyong Zibiao (List of commonly used Chinese characters) uses 2,500 characters on its core list and includes another 1,000 for less frequent usage. The extended Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao uses 7,000 characters, which is slightly higher than the Kanji kentei standard. If you'd like to focus on traditional Chinese, on the other hand, Taiwan uses 11,149 characters on their most comprehensive standard, with about 4,800 characters considered to be in common use.

For usage cases, of course, Chinese by itself is probably a more useful language, given the vast number of speakers, the ability to "fake" CEFR A1-or A2-equivalent functionality in Japanese through Kanji usage, and is also easier to learn. However, if you're interested in both languages, learning Japanese first will save you time if you aim to achieve fluency in both languages, due to the more beneficial overlap from Japanese to Chinese. Chinese mastery is not without its own benefits, however, as you will likely be familiar with generally obscure Kanji that the vast majority of Japanese speakers will not recognize.

While we're at it, may I ask a question? I'm finishing up with my Chinese in the next few months, and I'm interested in picking up Japanese for Mishima, Murakami (both, although I'm getting tired of the Wind-up Chronicle guy), Abe Ko-bo-, and O-e. I notice a lot of complaints about various readings for Japanese, and one thing I'm curious about is this. In Chinese, a mistake many native speakers and language learners make is to assume that the character is primary, when it is not. Dictionaries in Chinese are called "cidian", or word references, while "zidian" (character references) tend to feature character etymologies and variants. In Japanese, to get around the multiple readings issue, might it not be more correct to assume that the reading is primary, not the word? That's to recognize kanji in Japanese as homographs, instead of being the word itself or an unique depiction of a word.

For word learning in Chinese, the annotation is orthography, pronunciation, meaning, then usage, with grammatical notes featured under usage. I'm wondering if the Japanese equivalent should then instead be pronunciation (kana, with pitch accent included), orthography, meaning, then usage.

On the face of it, Mandarin Chinese would be slightly easier, because of the absence of multiple readings. But, for me at least, it's Japanese culture that makes it easy to learn the language.

So I guess the answer is...depends who's doing the learning, what methods they are using, what are they learning it for, etc.

According to official numbers I've seen, for members of the US military studying foreign languages as a professional requirement, Chinese has been the slightly easier one. Japanese was the most difficult language to master out of all languages studied by US military personnel.

Anon485 Wrote:With regards to sinograms, Chinese definitely requires more, but the current HSK standard requires about 2,500 characters for CEFR-C2 equivalent fluency, while the TOP and TOCFL standards in Taiwan require about 3,000 characters.

HSK 6 just isn't anywhere near CEFR C2 fluency. I know that Hanban says it is; I think that Hanban is wrong, and if you look around online you'll see many fluent Chinese speakers rating HSK 6 at around a B1-B2 level in terms of the CEFR.

The standards for CEFR C2 are:

Quote:Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read.
Can summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation.
Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations.

I know about 10,000 words and about 3200 hanzi, and I'm truthfully nowhere near a point where I can understand virtually everything with ease.

Fillanzea: actually, I'm more inclined to bash CEFR C2 standards than the HSK. If you look at other languages covered under CEFR, their C2 equivalent usually has 5000 words (lemmas) as equivalent to C2. However, if you look at experiences of ESL teachers in English, 8000 words minimum is considered necessary to be fluent in English, and 14,000 words comprise the average vocabulary size of a college student.

So, it's not the Hanban cutting corners (although they definitely reduced the difficulty level from old HSK Advanced) to make Chinese look easier for Westerners, it's the Hanban cutting corners to make Chinese equivalent to standards for other languages taught to foreigners.

If you do want to go with that, of course, you can just go claim that fluency in Chinese requires 7000 Hanzi or the entire Tongyong Hanzi syllabus, rate each Japanese Kanji at the data density equivalent (the RTK community does care about information theory as an adjunct to memorization, right?) of two Chinese sinograms (considering that Japanese Kanjis have multiple readings, probably averaging out at around 2.5, along with additional information required to understand when to do Kun'yomi vs On'yomi or additional readings for the word), you end up with Chinese having a total data load higher than Japanese.

However, the JLPT N1 certificate is also ranked as not equivalent to native-language fluency, so by extension let's just go assume that, independent of linguistic difficulties, JLPT N1 and HSK6 (at 5,000 words and 2,500 characters) certify a roughly equivalent level of fluency.

Edit: excuse me, the JLPT N1 should certify a higher level of Japanese capability than Chinese capability certified by HSK6 based on 8,000 words vs 5,000, but I don't think that you can assume too much from the fact that neither HSK6 nor JLPT N1 fully deliver the goods.

Postscript:

http://ddeubel.edublogs.org/2010/03/16/v...ze-matter/

Here. I think the problem is that people assume C2 or N1 or HSK6 certifications mean that your language ability becomes equivalent to someone of similar education level who is a native speaker in your target language. That's not the case, C2-equivalent certification is only supposed to get you to the point where your level of function is ready for citizenship, but the average citizen in most countries is not a university graduate and is of only average intelligence. You're assuming that your C2-equivalent certification means that your language ability will mean that you'll sound like the BA/BS/MA/MS/PhD you are in your target language, but it only certifies that your linguistic ability is equivalent to an average speaker in that language.

Well, this is sort of off-topic, but I didn't want to make another thread for this.
I haven't studied Chinese, but I'm guessing besides On readings, there's not much correlation between character readings?
For example -
弟 - おとうと (JPN)
弟 - (something) (CHN)
How do you keep the readings from getting mixed up?

build a wall in your head and hope it doesn't fall down.
it helps obvs that the readings are not very similar... chinese has a very different sound and feel from japanese.

I actually have more of a problem with spanish. was fluent in high school, forgot most of it but can still understand it when I hear it.
I will think I am able to respond perfectly to someone and the first word or two will be spanish, followed by straight japanese.
my wall has come down and like post-katrina new orleans I am up to my armpits in a mush of spanish and japanese...

my japanese doesn't have that problem luckily, and comes out no problem... but the spanish is a disaster. it doesn't help that the two strangely overlap almost perfectly re vowel sounds.

dtcamero Wrote:build a wall in your head and hope it doesn't fall down.
it helps obvs that the readings are not very similar... chinese has a very different sound and feel from japanese.

I actually have more of a problem with spanish. was fluent in high school, forgot most of it but can still understand it when I hear it.
I will think I am able to respond perfectly to someone and the first word or two will be spanish, followed by straight japanese.
my wall has come down and like post-katrina new orleans I am up to my armpits in a mush of spanish and japanese...

my japanese doesn't have that problem luckily, and comes out no problem... but the spanish is a disaster. it doesn't help that the two strangely overlap almost perfectly re vowel sounds.

I have a similar problem with Spanish, but my Spanish was never that good in the first place (I didn't have much incentive to use it).

From what I've learned, it's much more the 'hoping the wall doesn't break' than the actual building of it that will do you any good. As best as I know, the brain doesn't really distinguish one language from another when you're trying to retrieve vocabulary as much as it creates context for them, so every possible word is retrieved, leading to longer retrieval times the more languages (or possibly just vocabulary) you know.
Since studying a foreign language with any zeal, I've noticed more and more times where I couldn't think of a word I wanted to use in English. Often times, the words that are lost were temporarily replaced by similar Japanese words, even though I knew they weren't the the words (or even the language) I was trying to use.

As for the original topic, I can't make a strong opinion or statement, since I know little about the Chinese languages, but to me, it seems like Japanese would be easier for a native English speaker at least in pronunciation and sentence parsing. Even though Japanese has pitch accent, it's not as vital as the pitches in Mandarin and can be temporarily ignored (so long as you don't mind sounding like a typical foreigner for a while) in favor of other aspects of the language. As for the sentence parsing, I don't know about Chinese languages, but the typical Japanese script is easy to parse, thanks to the use of the syllabary for most (if not all) grammatical structures. As long as you know the grammar, you can understand the structure of the sentence, even without understanding the vocabulary. I guess this could be said for most languages (if not all of them), but it seems especially easy in Japanese.

Kuzunoha13 Wrote:I'm guessing besides On readings, there's not much correlation between character readings?
For example -
弟 - おとうと (JPN)
弟 - (something) (CHN)
How do you keep the readings from getting mixed up?

(1) Could someone corroborate Richard Sears' rough estimate is that "80% of kanji is pronounced similar to... the Chinese"? I think he is referring to Mandarin there, so what about Fujianese, Cantonese, Shanghaiese? I expect there would be a lot of partial Japanese--Mandarin pronunciation matches, since the onyomi came over to Japan over hundreds of years and then evolved separately, so that 80% (or any single number you come up with) might conceal much variability.

(2) Someone will probably mention Khatzumoto's approach to trilingualism: laddering. Learn your third language in your second language. (Hope I get there soon.)

aldebrn Wrote:(2) Someone will probably mention Khatzumoto's approach to trilingualism: laddering. Learn your third language in your second language. (Hope I get there soon.)

I have never read that, but I´m using something like that jaja, I used spanish (my native langage) to learn english, and now I´m using English to learn Japanese, but just because Japanese Textbooks in english are better than the few ones in spanish.

aldebrn Wrote:(2) Someone will probably mention Khatzumoto's approach to trilingualism: laddering. Learn your third language in your second language. (Hope I get there soon.)

Sounds like a very dangerous plan to me due to the huge interference you'll create between Japanese&Chinese. Here's what the guy who wrote 'supermemo', an anki equivalent, and did quite some research on srs has to say:
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm

Quote:11. Combat interference
When you learn about similar things you often confuse them. For example, you may have problems distinguishing between the meanings of the words historic and historical. This will even be more visible if you memorize lots of numbers, e.g. optimum dosages of drugs in pharmacotherapy. If knowledge of one item makes it harder to remember another item, we have a case of memory interference. You can often remember an item for years with straight excellent grades until ... you memorize another item that makes it nearly impossible to remember either! For example, if you learn geography and you memorize that the country located between Venezuela, Suriname and Brazil is Guyana, you are likely to easily recall this fact for years with just a couple of repetitions. However, once you add similar items asking about the location of all these countries, and French Guyana, and Colombia and more, you will suddenly notice strong memory interference and you may experience unexpected forgetting. In simple terms: you will get confused about what is what.

Interference is probably the single greatest cause of forgetting in collections of an experienced user of SuperMemo. You can never be sure when it strikes, and the only hermetic procedure against it is to detect and eliminate. In other words, in many cases it may be impossible to predict interference at the moment of formulating knowledge. Interference can also occur between remotely related items like Guyana, Guyard and Guyenne, as well as Guyana, kayman and ... aspirin. It may work differently for you and for your colleague. It very hard to predict.

Still you should do your best to prevent interference before it takes its toll. This will make your learning process less stressful and mentally bearable.

It's not that I'm against laddering per se. Heck, I'd guess that most Westerners learning Japanese to an advanced level have no choice but to do so using mainly English, if it's their native language or not. However, with this particular language pairing I have very strong doubts about its effectiveness.

Personally I'm no big fan of laddering, but I'm sure there are benifits to learning Chinese with Japanese grammar explanations and a more relaxed approach to the characters, since the Japanese already know a fair amount of them.

Whatever language you use for definitions in Anki probably doesn't matter that much. However, laddering shouldn't limit your Japanese if you're at a B2 level or higher, and Chinese and Japanese doesn't have as much in common as for instance French and Spanish.

honestly the sound of chinese is so crazy different from japanese that i don't think that confusing readings will be a problem. the only thing that might be an issue is that (for heisig) the chinese and japanese keywords are sometimes different...

I did RtK 1+3 over 4 years ago and don't even use the keywords anymore for most kanji, just go straight to a vocab example or 2 when i want the meaning of a kanji character. so except for the rare one that i haven't used at all yet, I don't need heisig for japanese anymore. that leaves my brain fresh to relearn all new heisig keywords for those characters as they appear in chinese...

-----
I'll say somethings else as a postscript... I think after japanese, doing strict RtH is a missed opportunity. by this point you have the machinery in your head to effortlessly match keywords for the remaining hanzi you don't know.
What is more useful in my opinion, is to get a deck with readings and audio and do a RtK1+2 ish thing simultaneously.

after RtK, strict RtH is so easy it's like riding a bike downhill with your pedals just spinning in air. Better to use that time to study readings and focus on teaching yourself correct pronounciation.
Chinese only has one reading for most characters so if you've done RtH1&2 and know the readings, you've got half the work done already!