The Best Language for a Journalist?

Parent Cafe
41

<p>Oh, TheDad, that's worse than the common faux pas of English speakers saying "I'm pregant" instead of "I'm full in French." Pesky literal translations...</p>

<p>So how long do the FSI guys say it takes to learn Swahili? I'd try to teach myself every summer my parents were in Tanzania, but all I can say is "Tafadali nilete cococola moja na barafu." I wonder how badly I've mangled that? (Please bring me a coca cola with ice.) My recollection was that there were a zillion ways to form plurals -one criteria being how many legs an object had.</p>

42

<p>Nice, TheDad. I like that.</p>

<p>Mathmom, my sister spent a few months in Kenya, and she learned enough Swahili just through casual interaction (no language study) for normal conversations. I think some of what she learned was a part of an entire "slang" language--I'm blanking on the name of it. Of course, she wasn't trying to learn formal grammar, so she wasn't caught up in trying to learn it. Though everyone could speak English, most of the time people spoke Swahili or an indigenous language. Since she was living and working full time with native people (who could also speak English), it's not surprising she was able to pick some of it up.</p>

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<p>I'm sure it's much easier if you are surrounded by people who are speaking Swahili to each other. The embassy environment is not particularly conducive to learning the local language.</p>

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<p>The list is interesting. English is in the same family as German, so it's interesting how it is easier to learn Spanish (because of the Latin influence) than German.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
The embassy environment is not particularly conducive to learning the local language.

[/quote]
I'm sure that's true!</p>

46

<p>I take Arabic...it's quite difficult, but immensely rewarding.</p>

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<p>Ran into this booby trap today when trying to say that I like dry wine:</p>

<p>sz</p>

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<p>Chinese is by far more difficult to learn than Japanese. Japanese is merely a simplified version of Chinese so it is extremely easy to master even for someone with limited Chinese ability. There are thousands upon thousands of characters and phrases you must learn if you take Chinese, but while an extremely well-educated Japanese person would also know many characters, most of the time only like a few hundred is widely used. </p>

<p>Speaking it is also much easier. Each Chinese syllable has 4 different sounds. Like you can say ta 4 ways, but in Japanese it is just ta. The "difficulty" probably comes from the fact it appears like there are 3 different writing systems in Japanese while there is only 1 writing system in Chinese. The "3" Japanese writing systems are actually just simplifications of the Chinese language. There is hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are actually just the Chinese phonetic symbols used to show how to pronouce words. The only difference is that the Japanese use hiragana for native japaense words and katakana for foreign words. That is extremely easy for a native Chinese speaker to learn. Kanji is basically just Chinese words except with a slightly different pronunciation. That is just a joke since to have a working vocabulary of kanji (300 or so) is very easy for a Chinese speaker (generally know at least 5000 if fluent). </p>

<p>The point is, if you want an easy asian language, take japanese or korean. The complexity of Chinese is mindboggling and basically the language contains everything you need to learn all the other languages easily and far far more since it is also by far the oldest language out of the 3. Korean and Japanese are new languages like just a few centuries old.</p>

<p>Richard Brecht
Deputy Director, National Foreign Language Center</p>

<p>I seriously feel that if he said Japanese is easier to learn than Chinese, he should not be in his position. There is just so much more blunt memorization necessary for Chinese than Japanese and the nice part about Japanese is that spelling is very easy. In English, things are not always spelled the way it is pronouced. But in Japanese, if you say yakitori, it will always be yakitori on the paper. But in Englihs "pizza" is not spelled peetsa. If you are an english speaker, take japanese, you will have a much easier time learning the language, and the grammar is rather mechanical and straightforward. Chinese has too many intricacies since it is the root language. Japaense is a simplification. Since when did a simplification be harder to learn than the original? This is coming from someone who passed teh japanese proficiency test level 2 with only rare practice outside of my highschool class after 3 years of starting the language. Chinese, I have been studying on and off for my entire life, lived in china for a few years, but still my chinese is only about the level of my japanese (middle school level).</p>

49

<p>haha makes me proud to be Japanese.</p>

<p>Japanese is definitely not a simplification of Chinese. The languages are VERY different, and Chinese is an extremely difficult language to learn for Japanese people as well. Even more so than learning English because we have so much more exposure to English. </p>

<p>Only 300 kanjis needed? ha! That's what you learn at 1st grade level (literally) To be able to function properly as a Japanese person, you'll need to at least be at a 6th grade level. To do business, you'd need to be at 9th grade level. I don't know the numbers for these but I think it was about 3000. And I'm not too sure about this but I don't think Chinese has multiple ways to read a kanji the way that Japanese does.</p>

<p>It is true tho that katakana and hiragana are just simplifications tho. They're what make Japanese bearable for Japanese people. I'm serious. They were made so that more people could learn how to read and write.</p>

<p>I think the main problem with Japanese is that even for a native speaker, it can be difficult to know how to use the language correctly in every occaiion. There's a lot of rules that are societally based, and so you have to learn it through being in that society. And then there's masculine words and feminine words, and very few teachers seem to teach their students which is which, esp. because the lines are hazy and dependent on context. And Japanese is a language where a lot is not said and is just assumed.</p>

<p>But that's not to say that it's impossible to learn Japanese in a short time. My Japanese teacher tells me that during WWII there was a program in Univ. of Chicago (not exactly sure if it was Chicago...) that would put students in Japanese in a completely Japanese environment for half a year so that by the end of it, they'd be indistinguishable from a native Japanese person.</p>

<p>btw if anybody is thinking of learning Japanese, I'd highly advise this book:
The Japanese Mind
ISBN-10: 0804832951
ISBN-13: 978-0804832953
(dunno why it has 2 ISBN #s...)
I take IB A2 Japanese, and the kind of stuff my teacher points out about Japan are explained really well in this book. I think it does it better than my teacher :P</p>

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<p>Chinese, most definitely.</p>

51

<p>Id have to say japanese, the grammer, conjugations, and respect levels can get very hard that even japanese don't always know where to use it. And alot of times things are said that aren't meant or things are often left up to interpretation.</p>

52

<p>Koker said above, re: Japanese, "...even for a native speaker, it can be difficult to know how to use the language correctly in every occasion. There's a lot of rules that are societally based, and so you have to learn it through being in that society."</p>

<p>It caused me to remember my friend who went to Japan to learn Japanese. After an early sad incident, she had to go to police to report her bike was stolen, but she forgot the vocabulary to say "stolen." So she carefully replaced it with, "I gave my bicycle to a thief." </p>

<p>The police were incredulous and began talking about "these Americans, they do the oddest things, why would you give a bicycle to a thief..." so it took a while to all get on track.</p>

53

<p>
[quote]
Chinese is by far more difficult to learn than Japanese. Japanese is merely a simplified version of Chinese so it is extremely easy to master even for someone with limited Chinese ability. There are thousands upon thousands of characters and phrases you must learn if you take Chinese, but while an extremely well-educated Japanese person would also know many characters, most of the time only like a few hundred is widely used.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The only person I know who I hold as qualified to comment on this is a caucasian who studied Asian history at Berkeley and got his doctorate at Harvard. He learned both languages very well, and he said to me that while at first Chinese is more daunting 'cause it's so foreign to a westerner, over time the complex grammar of Japanese actually makes it the harder of the two.</p>

<p>Now, I respect that you have a strong opinion on the subject. But you've done nothing in your statement to qualify your opinion. And as such I reject it. I know Chinese and I always thought Japanese seemed a lot more accessible because of the phonetic elements you talk about. But I can only guess. I defer to people who know more. I am not as yet convinced you know more.</p>

<p>There are more than 55,000 Chinese characters, as I understand it. But getting to 5,000 gets you to functional fluency, from what I understand.</p>

<p>The relative number of Kanji that a Japanese person does or doesn't need to learn is only a part of what makes his language harder or easier than Chinese. As another posted noted, the grammars are very different. And by the way, Chinese grammar is like baby grammar in my opinion.</p>

54

<p>if you want to write area specific journalism, pick one that pertains to that area. If you want one that makes you sound intelligent, pick latin. My dad took latin for 5 years, and it helps him a lot. If someone asks him for a definition of a word, and he doesnt know, he can often figure it out by the latin root that corresponds with the root of the english word. So it really helps with english.</p>

55

<p>
[quote]
My dad took latin for 5 years, and it helps him a lot. If someone asks him for a definition of a word, and he doesnt know, he can often figure it out by the latin root that corresponds with the root of the english word.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Interesting feedback. Out of curiosity, BIGTWIX, is your Dad an academic or a lawyer? Please let me know.</p>

56

<p>Regarding Japanese being non tonal-I was amazed, after learning a certain amount of rudimentary Japanese, to learn that there are tonal elements that influence meaning. Wikipedia calls this pitch accenting. </p>

<p>From Wikipedia, on tonal/pitch accent "The Japanese language does not have tone, but does have pitch accent, so that 雨 </p>

57

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&lt;/a>
a lot more ppl speak English than 500M</p>

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<p>BTW I'm a 3rd year Latin student
next year I'll be taking AP Latin (Vegil?) and
my first year of Chinese--it's the first time it has been offered at my school since I've been there
we also are going to have Greek next year
whatever the case, English is still the worl'd lingua franca when it comes to commerce and the internet. However, as we already know, the more you are able to communicate with people, the better--message: learn all the languages you can!</p>

59

<p>Wow, did Brecht really say that about Japanese? What's the source?</p>

<p>
[quote]
Chinese is by far more difficult to learn than Japanese. Japanese is merely a simplified version of Chinese so it is extremely easy to master even for someone with limited Chinese ability. There are thousands upon thousands of characters and phrases you must learn if you take Chinese, but while an extremely well-educated Japanese person would also know many characters, most of the time only like a few hundred is widely used.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I just can't believe Brecht would say this. You definitely need more than a few hundred characters in daily life. </p>

<p>
[quote]
The "3" Japanese writing systems are actually just simplifications of the Chinese language. There is hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana are actually just the Chinese phonetic symbols used to show how to pronouce words. The only difference is that the Japanese use hiragana for native japaense words and katakana for foreign words. That is extremely easy for a native Chinese speaker to learn. Kanji is basically just Chinese words except with a slightly different pronunciation. That is just a joke since to have a working vocabulary of kanji (300 or so) is very easy for a Chinese speaker (generally know at least 5000 if fluent).

[/quote]
</p>

<p>No no no no no no no. Kana were developed IN JAPAN. Like Hangul, they were completely of their home country's design. Good Lord, this is so off.</p>

<p>And a working vocabulary in Japan is more like 2000 joyo kanji. </p>

<p>Seriously guys, where'd you dig this up?</p>

60

<p>UCLAri: I think that entire post by FastMEd was all his and he only threw in Brecht's name and title to say that he was way off.</p>

<p>Since it caused confusion before, I am hereby re-quoting Brecht again. And by the way, I don't know whether what he says is accurate or not -- I just got it off the internet and did a cut and paste job. But I was using it to bolster my sense that Japanese is harder for the reason I said in two or three of my posts ago about my friend from Berkeley and Harvard.</p>

<p>One point, though: my roommate in grad school used to flash Kanji at me, and invariably I knew their meaning because of</p>

<p>
[Quote]
What is the most difficult language to learn?
Richard Brecht
Deputy Director, National Foreign Language Center</p>

<p>Japanese is without question the most daunting language for a native English speaker to tackle, according to Brecht. "I would like to learn Japanese but I don't have enough time in my lifetime. That's very depressing," says the linguist, whose center is based at Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He notes that the State Department allows its students three times as long to learn Japanese as it does languages like Spanish or French.</p>

<p>As Brecht explains it, the challenge with Japanese is threefold. First, there's the fact that the Japanese written code is different from the spoken code. "Therefore, you can't learn to speak the language by learning to read it," and vice versa. What's more, there are three different writing systems to master. The kanji system uses characters borrowed from Chinese. Users need to learn 10,000 to 15,000 of these characters through rote memorization; there are no mnemonic devices to help. Written Japanese also makes use of two syllabary systems: kata-kana for loan words and emphasis, and hira-gana for spelling suffixes and grammatical particles.</p>

<p>Get beyond that and you're faced with a culture that, says Brecht, is "truly foreign for most Americans." With many languages, students start by learning introductions (Comment-allez vous? Trs bien, merci, et vous?) "But with Japanese, you can't even begin to do that with lesson one because of the social distinctions involved in making introductions," says Brecht. Age, social status, gender--"all these sociological factors make it so complicated that introductions can't be the first lesson," he notes.</p>

<p>Finally, there's the issue of grammar. In English syntax, grammar is right branching. We set a topic and then comment upon it: "I saw the man who was sitting on the red chair, which was sitting beside the door." Japanese syntax is left branching-- "totally contrary to our approach," says Brecht. Thus, the sentence above becomes something along the lines of: "I saw the red, which was the chair, which was....." You get the idea.

[/quote]
</p>