Saturday, December 13, 2008

Reviews of various languages of the world- an asian's perspective.

(every photo is resizeable, if you think some of them are getting in yourway, just make them thumbnails.)TESTING (DRAFT) 草稿:
see http://blog.sina.com.cn/naldchow for the chinese version

arabic: if joining together or not is a crucial way to distinguish a letter, how fast can that be?


for the certificates, use a 4 x3 table to put them all together, easier to be looked at.


Reviews of various languages of the world

- an Hong Kong Asian's perspective.

(as featured in the Jan 2000 issue of the British Mensa newsletter)
Note: This page was proudly featured in the Jan '00 issue of British Mensa language newsletter. The club of people with high IQ of 148+ (which was about to remove me from their list coz of delayed payment of membership fee . OK... my cheque is on the way, though I think we Chinese have paid the Brits enough during the Opium war. just joking ;-) How I learnt 12 languages from around the world's languages institutes for the past 10 years. I can't recall since when I began to get a kick outta languages, now apart from Chinese (Cantonese, Sichuanese, ChiuChow and Mandarin) and English, I can speak pretty good Japanese, Français, Español, understandable Korean & Thai and tolerable German. I have also studied aboard Hungarian, Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese, Indonesian and ...even Mongolian. Come on! You can not think of a language more useless than Mongolian, Can you? but I spent one month in Ulan Bataar for learning just that, I guess that's why since 2006 my friends began to call me language freak, haha.



Before I give you my reviews, let me tell you why I am qualified to talk about language.
Here is a list of the countries where I attended a language institue to learn the languages:

1995-98: Hong Kong University Language Centres: 3 years of French/Français, 1 year of Spanish/Español 1 month of Swedish/Svenska
summer 1997: l'université de Bourgogne, Dijon France


2001 Tokyo Japanese language インターカルト日本語学校

spring 2002 learnt 3 months of Korean at 연세대학교 어학당

2003-04 Thailand Bangkok: studied several times the language of Thai

2004 winter Egypt, Cairo: learnt 2 months of Arabic in ili



2004 summer Russia: Moscow State University Московского государственного университета имени М.В.Ломоносова (МГУ)



2005 Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnamese In Saigon (Truong Đai hoc Khoa hoc Xã hoi và Nhân văn)



2006 Indonesia Jakarta: Indonesian


2006 Mongolia Ulan Batoor: learnt Mongolian for more than a month

2007 stayed mainly in shenzhen due to the electronic product export business that I do

20xx plan for the future, I intend to study Turkish together with Uyghur, heard that they are very similar.


How Language learning become part of my life:
People often ask why I spent so much time and capital travelling and learning languages, but it is actually from travelling and languages that I learnt I got my money. After graduation I got my first job in an Indian watch company in Hong Kong which asked for Spanish-speaking people to handle their business expansion in South America, although after 3 months, they cancelled the project, but I did get my first job by typing the word Spanish in an Recruitment page. Then 5 days after resignation, I got another watch company asking for French speaking people for their expansion to Europe, and I got the job, though I left after one year to start my own business, but I did go to Swiss, Germany, France and Spain and did use my languages well. And then I started my own internet sales business and I sold stuff to Japan through the internet, at that time I couldn't even speak one single Japanese sentence, but with some guess work, as Japanese are using chinese character, i managed to get thru , months later, I flew to Tokyo to learnt Japanese for 3 months and did the business there through the internet. Then, being the speaker of 5 languages and 4 dialects give me enough motivation and incentive to learn more and experience more. In this age of internet, one can remote control the business from everywhere, and after my frustration of two decades, I was finally glad that i was born at the right time and right place. I think the power and usefulness of language has not been fully realized in this internet age, especially when combined with industrial sourcing and networking, I was surprised myself how i can just get money from Japanese and use only a fraction of that to buy items for them from American websites and post them in Japanese websites. I can also sell Japanese stuff to Europe by the same token. These days, I live in the manufacturing capital of the world- Shenzhen (the brother of Obama is also here :) . I see people from around the world coming here sourcing for electronic products, I have spoken with them in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai and even Mongolian.

Although I find it pretty hard for me to learn certain languages... like Swedish and German, whose grammar is difficult and whose speaker are too good at English to leave me any chance of practice with them, or Arabic which I have the hardest time so far, but i believe I have something to share about langauge learning and cultural differences, that's why here I am here to open a blog about this.

The following are my rating for the languages that I know based on my personal limited knowledge of the following language and "narrow mind", don't be offended if I said something stupid about your mother tongue or if you hold a different view. it's done just for fun!!!



LANGUAGE REVIEWS & RATING (out of 5*) BY NALD CHOW:


Esperanto *****


Spanish **** ½


English ***½

French ***


German **½

Chinese (writing) *½

Chinese (expressiveness) *****

Russian *½


Japanese *

Korean ***½


Arabic
Mongolian
Indonesian
Others


Esperanto (rating *****) Well, if I give Spanish 4 ½, there is no reason i shouldn't give this artificial language a 5, however, I still think it's too European, the inventor should learn something from Chinese, what's the point of retaining concepts like plural, masculine/feminine? Chinese got none! He should also use some other representation for characters like ^c, ^s, ^g...etc. What's on his mind when he wanna make a user friendly language with so many user-unfriendly symbols that never existed before? Anyway, I've joined an Esperanto club and it's a great way to make friends. It's a good social club for linguistic fans, that's the best it can be at this moment. Oh yeah, it's such a great language that unite all nations together that there are different races in my Esperanto class... and when we encountered some difficulty in communication? oh, of course, we use English instead.. hehe. I think Esperanto should be better renamed as "Europeranto", for it's a mixture of only European languages, with no ingredients from other cool languages like Chinese. Note, I said a "mixture" not a "sublimation". Why? coz the inventor seems to just pick the root for the Esperanto words randomly (by throwing dart perhaps?). Here is a good illustration. He picked "JES" for "Yes" in Esperanto, this is definitely the worst choice. If he gave any thought in choosing this most commonly used word, he should have chosen "Si" which is the yes for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, French also use "Si" for Yes in answering negative questions. "Si" is also the Yes in Mandarin... Therefore, if he uses "Si" as the Esperanto "Yes", what happens is that one quarter of the Earth's population -Chinese, plus majority of Europeans and South americans will understand that instantly. but, "JES" is only used in English. It's better to use "Ja" for it's the "Yes" in German, plus it also sounds like the colloquial "yeah" in English. So, from this, you see it's not as good as it set out to be. Anyway, I think perhaps Reforming English is a more practical idea than Esperanto, since what's stupid about Esperanto is that it purposely tries to stay away from any particular European language so as to look neutral, ignoring the fact that it's thousands time more effective to develop and improve on one existing language where lot of people already speak. For more on the Reforming English, see the English section below.

Spanish (rating **** ½ ) Among the languages I know, I think Spanish is the coolest! They write "and" & "or" as "y" & "o", how clever of them to represent the most frequent words with the simplest symbols. It's also very ingenious to cut the redundant subjects in a sentence, and that accent marks é, ú etc are used only when necessary to indicate intonation. The coolest thing about Spanish is its consistency of pronunciation with writing; one can deduce the pronunciation right away from the way a word is written. Also, the idea of using an inverted question ( ¿ ) and exclamation mark ( ¡ ) is great. It signals what the tone of the coming sentence is like, for a questioning and exclamation sentence is entirely different, not just the final word. although it got all the inconvenience of European languages, however, its masculine and feminine save us lot of time in learning new vocabulary, brother is hermano, sister is hermana; son is hijo, daughter is hija...etc. So, unlike Swedish and German where gender is a pain in the ass, it's actually working miracle. Its conjugation with subject (i.e. change of verb form with different subject) is also a convenient as it enable one to drop the subject as the root indicate it already.... Wonderful!

Perhaps it's due to its user-friendliness or its similarity with French, I managed to skip the whole beginner's Spanish and jumped right to the Intermediate level after learning it on my own for just one month. I began converse using very elementary vocabulary and imperfect grammar with my HKU classmate after few weeks, it was so fun since no one else knew what we were talking about and so we could talk about whatever we like.... e.g. Esta chica es muy guapa, or my friend complained to me: "Ella es una puta! esta mañana.......etc". I really had a hard time in figuring out why this cool language was so unpopular in HKU, There were only 2 intermediate classes, Sometimes I was the only one student in one of the classes! They don't know that Spanish is the second most popular Western language after English? don't they know once you can speak Spanish, you will understand Portuguese, Cartalan, Italian...etc. Instead the other HKU students learnt Italian instead... hmmm....

As I said, Spanish can be understood by Italian and Portuguese, however, they seem to get kind of angry when I speak or write Spanish to them. When I'm in Swiss, the Swiss always told me proudly how they can speak 4 languages -English, French, German and Italian.... I sometimes can't help laughing listening to their heavily accented English (worse than mine), I also speak Mandarin, Cantonese, ChiuChow and Sichuan dialects, why don't you count them as languages? In fact Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are more like dialects than distinct languages. English, French and German also looks identical in writing, although the most frequent words are totally different : die, the, la...etc. once mastered serveral tens of these most common words, the rest are just the same. Don't show off! Now, they are using EURO, and Europe is turning into one big country. so, perhaps next time I'm in Swiss, the Swiss will tell me: you know what? I can speak 4 European dialects! English European, French European and German European...etc. then i can proudly answer: So do I! Anyway, although Spanish sounds very good, but at times, it sounds like quarrelling!! Here are some of my Spanish assignments, it's highly loaded with errors, but what else can you expect from a then beginner? war and peace the letters to god, alternative ending when I was little


English (rating *** ½ ) Hmmm, it doesn't have as much conjugation (meaning verbs don't in general change with subjects) as French and Spanish do, much less than German or Russian! The coolest thing about English as a European language is that there is no feminine/muscular forms!!! One single word "the" can replace all those stupid "la, le, el, els, les, los, las, der, die, das, den, det …etc". Also, there isn't any redundant accent mark, e.g., â, é, ñ, ç…etc.. Another great thing about English (as well as Chinese) is that we can put noun before noun without any additional words like of, de, du, de la, di ...etc. which is so common in other European languages. That's why, upon opening any users' manual, you will find that English is always at least 10% shorter than its French equivalent where A B is expressed as B de la A, For there exists no such clean and short way of expressing adjectival nouns in French, Italian or perhaps Spanish. When I do the electronic products export in Shenzhen, I write users' manual from time to time, English version is second in its conciseness only to Chinese, which is good.

However the pronunciation is difficult, there are for example 3 ways of pronouncing the letter "a" as in "apple", "father" & "date". I think that's bad for new learners. What's ironic is that, their bad way of writing and inconsistency with pronunciation is taken as a way to test their students' IQ in the form of something like SAT, I would rather they use their energy on something else and simply reform the English writing (see womex in google) to make it looks what it sounds. There is ABSOLUTELY no point in memorizing how a word exactly look like on a book, a student who can spell "rhythm" is a good one, the one who writes "rythem" is a bad one. Actually, it was the ancestors of English who made a mistake, not us, why can't we just reform the English spelling to make it consistent? I see this a tremendous waste of brain energy which can be used in more meaningful way than in this activities which is just like memorizing telephone book. By the time you finish reading this whole page, you'll probably begin to suspect, as I do, that the better a language is, the lazier its speakers are, that's why in general Japanese, German-speaking countries (and perhaps English too) are hardworking and rich while Latin American countries more "life-enjoying". Is this also the logic behind SAT? To use the language as a brain twister? Someone is proposing reforming the English language, making it easier and the pronunciation & spelling more consistent. It's a good idea, but I think there are still some imperfections in the following scheme, The following is an email I forwarded to a French gentlemen, inside brackets are some of my thoughts and comments. (please search for WOMEX in google)

French (rating *** ) For me, French is cool when spoken by native French girls, and unlike Spanish which when spoken is like quarreling, it's so graceful and this is the only plus for French. But when spoken by guys, it's like a chain of murmur.

It's inconsistency in spelling and pronunciation isn't any better than English, its word is also unnecessarily longer than that of English. to convert a verb into an adverb, english just add -ly afterwards, French(and spanish) add ment afterwards.

Another bad thing about French is it's clumsiness. When I ask "what do you do?" , in French it's "Qu'est ce que tu fais" (what is it that you do?) Ridiculous!!! In Spanish it's simple "¿ Que haces ? ". In addition, I also don't like the way French is written, for we never pronounce the ending of a word, that's why I know of native French who wrote words like "sommes" as "somment" without knowing that they are wrong. Hey, who thought of writing French this way? Why was he so "smart" in adding some silent unpronounced letters at the end of most words? What was on the first French writers' mind? It's just stupid. Also, there exists something called liason meaning the last consonant - which isn't pronounced on it's own - of the previous word is pronounced with the syllable of the next word. and that they fuse "de" with "le" to form "du" and similarly "au" and "aux" are also produced. This implies you can't even speak correctly if you can't write!! Here is something I found really really weird when I first learnt French: the number 97 is written in French as "quatre vignt dix sept" meaning " 4 times 20 plus 10 plus 7 " . 70 is written as "soixante dix" meaning sixty plus ten. Well I really don't know what to think of this. I find it very "user-unfriendly". it's like crazy!!! However, on the other hand, let's see this way, if a French kid can count to 97, this implies he can already do multiplication and addition!!! I wonder if French/Québecois are better in Maths? (And I seem to vaguely recall from this and that theorem in high school that lot of the mathematicians are French: L'hospital, de moivre), If so, why don't they write "100" as 9 to the power 2 plus 400 square root minus absolute -1 plus 23 divided by infinite? :-) i.e. [9 ² + \400 - -1 + 23 / ¤¤] After learning it for 3 years in an interest & non credit counting course in Hong Kong University and toped almost every single test/exam, I still think this is at most an OK language, it's been vastly overrated. I'm very puzzled when people keep saying it's the most beautiful language in the world. (btw. I was very disappointed at Paris – the supposedly most romantic city in the world summer 97). Very often you just hear them murmuring a chain of choking "vou", "que" and "voir" sounds. If you know what's good about it, let me know.

( here is a french poem I wrote in Dijon France 1997) (link broken, to be uploaded later)

German (rating **½) Well, Nazis and Hitler did a lot of harm to the reputation of Germany, as a Hong Kong Chinese kid, when i think about Germany, my mind couldn't help showing image of those crap (I'm sorry, it was not my fault). I only decided to learn German when I have mastered enough French and Spanish. I still remember a funny story about German language. One time in 1997 I was in Switzerland, in a JungFrau mountain hostel... when I was about to leave that hostel for lunch, being a guy with bad sense of orientation. I copied the name of the hostel so that I can ask people on my way back. Fortunately I didn't need to ask anyone... for I just found out months later that the word I copied wasn't the name of the hostel. It's "Willkommen" (which means "Welcome" in English). haha Anyway, German looks really bad, I just don't know why there can be so many consecutive consonants in a word(consonants like pf which are never together in english) and so many long words in a sentence(worse still, the verb is always at the end of the sentence, you have to free up a free memory lot in your brain so that when you are done speaking with every word in that extra-long sentence, you still can remember what verb you have to spit out. ) and so many long sentence in a paragraph. It really function as a brain twister for all German, no wonder they called themselves the smartest people on Earth.

It's also very inconvenient to use capital letter for every noun, it was OK at the time when we just wrote, but now with typing, does it mean we have to hold the SHIFT key every time we type a noun? For this, German are very similar to Japanese, in the mind of Japanese, nouns must be represented by Kanji(Chinese characters), if Chinese doesn't have equivalent words for that, Japanese invent their own Kanji. (e.g. the word for kite is a Japanese-invented Kanji). I guess German people are also very visual, that's why they choose to capitalize all the nouns to make it stand out more in their mind.

Apart from accent mark and standard English alphabets, there are also some weird symbols like "B" ? I'm not alone in this, Mark Twain got the same idea in the article "the awful German language". Isn't this why the French at Alsace Lorraine felt so sad when they were forced to learn German? (The Last Lesson - La derniere leçon) Another thing which I find interesting about German is how it just "argues" with English in every way, I had a hard time in memorising the meaning of many German words, e.g. German "hell" means "bright" in English, how can a Hell be bright? German "gift" means "poison" in English, can you think of another pair at a further extreme? German "schnell" means fast, so, a snail is fast? Schnell-->Snail---> Snow--> Slow = Fast?? German "fast" again means something else. I don't know why neighboring country can develop words whose language are close cousins with exactly the opposite meanings. French for example got words like "but" meaning goal in English, but it's not as confusing as the German. It's still puzzling why German speaking people always speak better English than others.

Chinese (rating *½ for the writing system) This is my mother tongue and is honored as the most difficult language in the world. In Europe, when people are talking about something difficult, they say "it's the Chinese". I am blessed to have this complicated and varied language as my mother tongue. Even so, I , whose Chinese is good enough, still now bump into words that I've never met before if I read some older and more traditional stuff. The good thing about Chinese is that there's hardly any tense or conjugate of verbs, the words can be noun, verb and adjective at the same time without much change in it's form). the Pinyin system of Chinese is also simple and got hardly any exception and make full use of 26 letters. However, one has to write so many strokes to write a word. Also, the so written word got hardly anything to do with its pronunciation (nor it's meaning for most of the words!!). I think it's due to its difficulty that there are so many illiterate in China. (I doubt if there can possibly be any in Spain where speaking means reading- but then again is this how the Latin American earn their reputation of being "lazy"? or should I say, life enjoying?) I therefore find simplified Chinese a great leap (though it's sometimes humiliating, for example, the Japanese learnt Chinese from us and changed its look due to mistake, but later we actually copied back some of the Japanese words as the simplified Chinese words. errr...). I find it completely pointless in representing pronunciation with so many meaningless strokes. What's funny is that a lot of modern people nowadays like to explore the "true " meaning of the words by analyzing its structure which is just the result of a limitation in pronunciation representation, (similar but much worse than Westerners searching for the true meaning from Latin Dictionaries). For me it's just like saying WIFE = Wash, Iron….etc. Well, For the first 100 years, Chinese language might be excellent and adequate for expressing terms like sun, moon, field, water, drought, flood…etc. but as we are moving into Computer age, any attempt to make Chinese be applied to express computer terms like bytes, ram or rom other than pure pronunciation representation will be futile. It's probably because of the complexity of Chinese that 99% of Westerners don't even think of learning it at all. (but most Europeans are trilingual and some Americans understand some Spanish). It's funny to notice how they make fun of the Chinatown English, and at the very same time they can't even speak one damn word in Chinese. I hope one day the Chinese language can be put into museum and dead as the Latin language. Only then can we enjoy efficiency. I do believe Chinese language has held back China from advancement in science and technology to some extent. Just imagine the resources used in educating people how to read and how to type!!!

(editted 2008: Well, I am just joking with what I wrote, now I realize that what I wrote won't function even as a joke. Now, the speed of typing in Chinese can surpass any other language thanks to the various computer input system. Chinese writing really sucks in the times of typewriter, even Japanese and Korean can be typed, but never Chinese; However, in the times of computer input, Chinese really kicks ass!! )

Chinese(***** for the ancient Chinese and the poem thing) Although I think it's written system is crappy, and had someone invented the phonetic system such as the Romanization or Latin 5000 years ago, the written system we use won't exist at all. They are good for decoration like the Roman numberals I, II, III, IV..XX, MM...etc. The system is cool for some words such as 1, 2, 3, sun, moon...etc which is symbolic, simple and convey the meaning well, however, for more complicated ideas, it's just a second grade phonetic system using words with similar sounds which make us write many strokes. However, what's really cool and unique about Chinese is that it got hardly any limitation on words, we don't have rigid rules on word orders, tense, word form, a single character can be noun, adjective, adverb and verb without change, it's so flexible! Also, unlike the Japanese language, can convey the most complicated meaning with minimum syllable, this is a favorite poem of mine with just 28 words (and hence 28 sounds) which convey some meaning that might take 200 English sounds (not words) to do the same: (search for renmiantaohua in google.)
Chinese word is so expressive that you can see it from the translation of the names of the movies. Take two classics as an example: Casablanca is just called Casablanca everywhere on Earth, even in Japanese and Korean. In Hong Kong it is translated as bukfeidipying 北非谍影(which means "Shadow of Spies in North Africa"). Gone with the Wind was translated in mainland China as Piao, this one word alone already signifys going with the wind. In Hong Kong, Gone with the Wind was translated as LuenSaiGaiYan 乱世佳人, which means "Graceful Lady in the times of chaos". The ratio of meaning to syllable is simply amazing. Human society use all kind of symbols for traffics and instructions. As a picture is worth a thousand words, therefore, i think Chinese characters have been under-used in the international world.
Isn't it amazing? I myself never know any other language which can do the same! Chinese language isn't very scientific coz each character got lot of meaning and thus not exact enough. That's why it's so romantic and everyone can get different state of mind from the same poems and the combination of words, It's like one can paint with Chinese pictographic words by simply putting them together in a poem. The combination is virtually infinite, submit to practically no rule of grammar and thus leave lot of rooms for one's imagination and creativity, perhaps unlike in English where Shakespeare has to create words to write? What's pity is that only someone with a very good Chinese foundation (meaning Chinese people) can appreciate this, so, foreigners can complain how difficult it is.

Russian (* ½) I've been thinking of German as the worst European language until I came across Russian Autumn 1999. I'm really curious as to the source of Russian, I used to get an impression of Russia as an old established empire. However, it seems that their language is just like Korean, which was planned and adopted artificially from other languages during a period of time. Its geographic location is more Asia than Europe, is this why the Western world used to consider her as an outsider? You can see this in its language. First, its alphabets are so difficult; many letters look as if they are from the children's game of "completing the pattern in one trip without your pen leaving the paper". If they adopt the alphabet from Greek, why not learn the whole thing? why can't they simply adopt the Latin letters? If it's just plain different (like Korean vs. Greek), it's understandable. However, it look as if it's purposely devised to be a spy's code to confuse speaker of languages of the Latin origin. For many latin alphabet like "h", N, K & R are written exactly reversed or inverted. This is not it yet, Check this out: Russian reversed R is the english Yo, russian Y is english oo , Russian P is english R, English P is russian , another russian is russian L, english I is russian N, english N is russian H, English H is Russian X, English X is russian C, Mandarin C is Russian "," the invented "h" or Y-looking Russian letter is the English "CH" and most puzzling of all, Spanish "i" sound is written as "bi" in Russian... woooo....%) What do you think of the above spy code? I never know that those stuff depicted in James Bond movies are all true, Russians are all spy and devise their language as some kind of spy code to confuse the Western world. By doing this, they make their language easier to be learnt by communist Chinese who only need to start from scratch, than by the capitalist Westerners who need to unlearn their own mother tongue first and then start from zero while enduring the interference from the 1st tongue.

Well, USSR used to be a great friend of China, I really like to home stay there for sight seeing and business alike. but I'm not sure if I'll remain sane if I cramp this language into my head, it's like learning addition in one school and went to another one to learn mathematics where 2 is 3, 9 is 7, 4 is 0, 1 = 61 and + is x. I wrote the above before I officially learnt Russian in Moscow State University 2004.

Now, I have had 40 days of systematic Russian language training in Moscow. I am getting used to read Russian alphabets now. This did help me a lot when I learnt Mongolian the year 2006


Japanese (½) (2003, I will give it **** for the writing system) (Winter 2003: I have lived in Tokyo for a total of over 14 months, and I really got to love Japan, the place and its people, despite lot of unpleasant incidents here. What is being written here was written by me couple of years ago before coming to Japan-now my 2nd home. I think with all the problems in the world, understanding is the key, imagine Bush went to Islamic world and lived for 14months, lot of the tension would have been solved. Here is what I wrote before coming to Japan (a little biased because of historical stuff):) Sorry, but it's probably the worst language that I've ever known to exist in the civilized world. The King of Copy **- the Japanese - who copies everything and manages to make improvement on it - copied the Chinese language. However, this time, they only manage to give birth to the worst language ever known. I don't know why they still use Chinese Kanji for their writing system instead of the Romanisation after those invasion and Westernization, perhaps due to the common mistake of taking complexity for good... Just take any Chinese classic poems, you'll probably get like 10 times as many sounds in Japanese to convey the same meaning, it's so clumsy. Take "have you eaten?" as an example, there are only 3 words in Chinese "Zhi Guo Ma?", but they use like 10 words in Japanese."ta be ta ko to a ri ma su ka?" It's just common sense that the more often a word is used, the shorter it should be, that's why the shortest words in any language is always la, le, the, of, it, for...etc. the word "I" is definitely one of the most used in any language and therefore should be the shortest, English it's "I", in French it's "Je", in Spanish it's "Yo", in German it's "Ich", in Swedish it's "Jag"...etc. All got practically just one sound. And guess what is "I" in Japanese? it's Wa-Ta-Shi! I don't know what were on the mind of the ancient Japanese when they can practically call themselves watashi from day to day without feeling tired. The French got impatient and call professeur "prof", le faculty "fac". but the Japanese can actually call themselves watashi, and call you anata everyday! (Dec 99) I've been looking for months to see if there is any merit in this pathetic language, finally, I seem to find one from a book I read which states that Japanese is a natural form of note taking, with just a rough glance, you can know the key point of the article, why is it so? because they use 3 kinds of fonts, Kanji (for nouns), "lower case" (for preposition and unimportant words) & upper case (for Foreign words), all adopted from Chinese characters but look very different, and therefore, enable them to glance thru the passage and grasp the meaning quick, However, this kind of advantage dilute as they adopt so many foreign words, They use upper case for country names like France, American, this is OK and perhaps a better way of translation than Chinese. Yet, now, I think they have gone too far in importing directly even the most common words like "market", "table"... I don't think they didn't even have table until they came across the Englishman?
(updated July 2001)Well, I have just been back from a 3-month Japanese course in Tokyo. Now, I guess I can manage basic Japanese conversion with my crappy Japanese. This language sounds really good and soft and even cute when spoken by Japanese girls. The same 20 year-old girl might sound 30 if she is speaking German on the phone. 28 if she is speaking Spanish; 25, Korean; 23 for English, 20y/o speaking Mandarin(<--my mother tongue, I know I am biased); 16 years old if she speaks French, and only 8 years old when she speaks Japanese! Ahhhh, Kawaiiii yo!! Gomen NE!!! **Yes, they are really the King of Copy, they copy everything from elsewhere and make improvement on it, it's not surprising to find Chinese fictions like "The Romance of 3 Kingdoms" "Water Margin" and even anti-Japanese Bruce Lee movies more popular in Japan than in Hong Kong here. Lot of their languages is a combination of various Chinese and Western languages... (yet their English is surprisingly bad). Once an acquaintance of mine returned from Japan and told that a Japanese there expressed his surprise at my friend's ability to use Chopsticks. Oh Gosh, you Japanese , please give me a break, the very word of Chopsticks in Japanese is from Chinese, Chopsticks actually went there from China. You know?! Despite all, I guess I still appreciate a bit their love for learning, however, what's bad about learning too much is that one can always just be the second, that's why they were second to China a thousand years ago in culture, now second to US in economics, Anyway, these days I got more opportunity to meet some Japanese in person, I find out that most of (almost all of) them are pretty nice, polite and humble, much better person than some stupid and arrogant American... After my 3- month stay, I really met a lot of nice and polite Japanese. I remember how I asked direction from a guy (street cleaner) on the street, after getting the note from me, he reflected for seconds and then gave me a 90 degree bow and apologized " I am really sorry, I don't know" . hahaha.... Although some of the history issue remain in the way, but overall, they appear to be very nice and civilized. Now, I have really got to love Japan. !!!Now, if you ask me again, I would like to say Japanese language also got its merit, as it is so graceful and tender when spoken by girls, and it is a very good form of note taking, just by a glance people can grasp the meaning of the whole page. (Sorry, but only people in the Chinese culture circle can enjoy this, It will take westerners forever to learn all the Chinese characters.) 22Nov2000 was my first formal Korean lesson in Hong Kong However, learnt nothing but alphabets for 3 months. It was kinda waste of time. I decided to do something about it during my trip to Tokyo 2001 April-June. From my previous experience of French-learning in France, I found out that learning from youngsters (especially young GALS) is far more effecient than from teachers. As no French will learn French with foreigners in University. I ended up making a lot of friends from Spain and so, After that, my French didn't improve much, but interest in Spanish grow and when I return to HK, I manage to jump right into intermediate Spanish class, while my French get worse and worse. So, before I went to the Japanese school in Tokyo, I knew that 70% of the classmates are Koreans, so along did I bring some Korean textbooks with me. They were all very nice and taught me Korean while correcting my exercises during recess. So, in 2002, I will be in Korea learning Japanese from my classmates!! While Eskimos have over 40 words for the term "snow", Chinese have over 10 words as the English equivalent of "uncle". (buo is the big brother of father, shu is the little brother of father, then, we have other words for brothers of mother, husbands of the sisters of your father, husbands of the sisters of your mother, husband of the cousins of one's parents....etc). When I first knew that Korean even make distinction between the big brother of a girl (called obba) and the big brother of a boy (addressed as hyongnim), i thought Korean might be an even more "precise" language than Chinese, as nowadays, it is kind of sad to find that Japan and Korea are more Chinese than China in terms of the abundance of traditional Confucius ideas of respecting the elders, be kind and polite. (by the way, Canada is more communist than China in term of social welfare and stuff.), therefore, this lead me to think that perhaps Korea might have even more names for one's relatives. I was disappointed to know that, however... while they distinguish between the elder brother (and sister) of a male sibling and a female sibling, they actually use the SAME word "tongsheng" for BOTH little sister and little brother, to distinguish it, one has to say male tongsheng or female tongsheng. this is so funny for me. Korea was proudly known as the "little China" in the history before the western colonizers turned Asia into their Disneyland. That's why Chinese words have always been in use in Korea despite the later invention of hangul -the most scientific symbols in the world. After WWII, they try to get as far from the influence of China as possible (at times, more so than in Japan). When the Chinese tourists visit Korea, they can read what's written in palaces, temples ...etc. but the Korean tour guide are usually clueless. I once knew a Korean Seoul University graduate who can't even read the Chinese characters for Koryo (which is an alternative name for Korea). My advice to the Korea government is that they should teach more Chinese characters instead of forcing a 3rd language on all the highschoolers. Anyway, the good thing about the Korean is its writing system. It has been crowned the most scientific writing system in the world, the alphabets were all invented according to the shape of the pronunciation organs: tongue,teeth, mouth, throat...etc. This writing system was really cool hundreds of years ago when the Koreans and Japanese are still using the Chinese characters to record their language. Koreans hangul can simplify the Chinese words by over 80% in stroke and ink. With only about 40 alphabets, it is indefinitely easier to be learnt than the Chinese language, especially in a time when education was limited to but a few privileged. OK, enough about the plus, here come the minus. perhaps I am not very used to it, but this writing system seems just so writing-unfriendly. Just because it is so simple, if you put the dot or stroke in a slightly different location, you got a different word. So, even if you write, the words always look as if it was printed. unlike English, Chinese or Japanese where you can write the whole sentence in just one or two stroke. If you see someone writing with his pen hitting and leaving the paper 5times per second, you know he is writing Korean. (It's funny to notice how arabic looks exactly the opposite, for arabic, even if it's printed, it has to look as if it's handwritten. I can imagine the frustration of Korean learning arabic.) Another thing is about the removal of Chinese characters from their language. Japanese also tried to limit the use of Chinese words in their language, however, what Koreans did was almost a 100% removal. however, although, students weren't taught much about Chinese words, but you can keep spotting them in scattering in newspaper (if Chinese words are not used, confusion might result), in some older and formal books and documents, in the historic monuments (funny that sometimes Chinese tourists can understand what is written inside the temple while the Korean tourist guy knows none). Moreover, 70% of the Korean vocabulary are of Chinese origins, some got identical pronunciation when written in hangul, but not so when written in Chinese. Unlike the past, nowadays, with free education and the high availability of paper, book, computer...etc. It took just as much trouble for a Chinese kid to learn Chinese and Korean kid to learn Hangeul. If they make Chinese characters an integral part of Korean again (just like what the Japanese are doing now), this will increase the abundance of Korean language. In a technologic era like this one, there isn't much point to simplify your own language which just make it easier for foreigners to learn, while all kids are genius in learning the mother language, you don't need to worry much about it. You know, Hangul was originally made to look like the square Chinese characters, it is supposed to go along with it. I think writing Korean with a mixture of Chinese characters is better and more effective. Although Korean and Japanese share almost identical grammar, the pronunciation is so different. Sometimes, Korean might sound like quarreling while Japanese sounds like cute little kids asking for lollipop. Korean, just like French, also got something called "liason", I therefore find Korean words the most difficult to be pronounced. while reading Korean text to my Korean classmates, instead of speaking them sentence by sentence, I need to utter them word group by word group, as the ending consonant will fuse with the beginning word of the next word to form a new pronunciation of its own. As mentioned, Korean and Japanese share an almost identical grammar, just like its clumsy cousins, sometimes it can't be being very unnecessarily long. In some cases, even longer than its Japanese counterpart. For example, "can't do it" is just "dekinai" in Japanese, but in Korean it's "hal su obsoyo", which literally means " the mean of doing it doesn't exist". Thai (**) I was in Thailand for the second time 2004 January for 2 weeks, Spoken Thai is quite easy for a Chinese to pick up, just with some imagination and observation, one can notice that some of the words are from the same origin, though it might not be as obvious as Portuguese vs Spanish, but it is like how English resembles Spanish or French. As a member of Sino-Tibetan language family, it got the easiest possible grammar , masculine, feminine, plurals, and preposition are absent. words and emotional are differentiated by different tones, it doesn't sound as good as Chinese though. There is something unique about Thai, we have masculine and feminine in lot of languages, but Thai got a different kind of masculine/feminine system, the 'I' for men are Pom, and that for Women is 'Dichan'... Men ends the sentence with Krap, and Women end it with Ka, perhaps necessary in a place with some transsexual :). However, I think the writing system is the most complicated and confusing one, many letters might look similar to one another, but they have nothing to do with each other, and by combining the vowels together, you can got a vowel which very often got nothing to do with its components, plus, unlike every other language, the vowel doesn't always follow the consonant, it can be above, below, omitted! i.e. nowhere (for 'o' sometimes), before, after the consonant, to make it worse, they don't separate words, they use space as full stop between sentences only. (to use the previous sentence as an example, imagine there is no space between the words, it will be like theyusespaceasfullstopbetweensentencesonly; and then omit the 'o', put 'a' after the consonant, write e as a combination of i and u , put before and after the consonant in the word, double ee as ua), it will be like ithyuiusuispcuasafullstpibtwuanuiiisntncuuusnly; It does look confusing for foreigners to learn right? and I have not put them above and below the consonant (which got other letters that look similar but pronunciation is totally unrelated, unlike arabic, if they look similar, they also pronounced a bit similarly)! and this is how i spent 50% of my time trying to put the vowel back into 'right' order before i can read any sentence, before I finally surrendered. To make it worse, I learnt a set of alphabet in Tokyo before going to Bangkok, and on my first days in Bangkok, I was so confused and wondered if I was really reading Thai from the various signs and boards around, for the set of fonts that i learnt starts with a tiny circle, the direction and orientation of the circle is crucial in telling which letter it is referring to, i was taken aback gazing at all those fonts without circle, we also have this in English, for example, A looks differently in A, a, and a.It did recall my experience in primary school one staring at the exam paper and wonder for a second if 'a' is really the 'a'I learnt. However, just imagine my frustration when most of the 44 Thai alphabet got this 'problem'. I will definitely go back to Thailand to learn more, though it is really difficult, they got nice smiling people and nice weather in 'winter' , perhaps because they didn't experience as much problem in last century as other Asians did, it proudly remains as the only country without being colonized. God bless them. Arabic(**½) (THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE SO FAR, REVIEW LATER) a and a means Mongolian(*) All of my friends know that I had a passion for languages, until the day when they were told that I was gonna learn Mongolian in Ulanbatoor. They then began to call me language freak. I used to joke about what I decided to learn this way:"You can not think of a language more useless than Mongolian" You know how one language seem to import foreign word letter by letter for objects or concepts that never existed in one's country before. Mongolians seem to have used the Mongolian tent too much that they don't even have their own word for "window". As I learnt Korean before, that's why when the teacher told me that in Mongolian, window in chonho. I was surprised that they even use Sino-Korean word chuanghu as a loan word for window! I know Microsoft exported windows all over the word, didn't know that China also exported windows to Mongolia hundreds of years ago. Anyway, I guess our windows are more stable and crash less. haha :D Vietnamese(*) We all have different standard for beauty. In Asia, we prefer similar difference in the judgement of beauty seem to exist for the (female?)voice of a language. Westerners seem to consider the female voice in speaking Vietnamese as voices from heaven; while the Chinese friends that i know of don't consider Vietnamese a beautiful language at all. Indonesian (****) Others(Swedish, Hungarian, Italian & Portuguese ...etc) I SPEAK JUST ENOUGH OF 12 LANGUAGES! TOO MUCH LANGUAGE IS USELESS CHINESE 1800 WORDS, DIMINISHING RETURN IT WILL REQUIRE MORE AND MORE TIME, GETTING MORE AND MORE DIFFICULT IT WILL BE USED LESS AND LESS IT'S ALL ABOUT KNOWING WHERE TO CUT THE INVESTMENT. BUSINESS AND MAKE FRIENDS FOR ME 3 MONTHS IS ENOUGH. THRESHOLD IS ABOUT TO COMMUNICATE ABOUT PRETTY BUT IF YOUR INTEREST IS IN ANPHROTHOLOGY OR LITERATURE, STUDY MORE AND MORE. ============= Just as the English - German examples I quoted, these two countries have been enemies for decades. It also can find clues in their languages. In Korean, just similar to English, YE is used as YES, in Japanese IIE (Yie) is te word for NO. From here, you can imagine the kind of conflict they can get. This is absurd when considering ancient Japanese learnt Chinese through the Koreans. Another thing, Korean NE means YES, but Russian NE means NO!! From this language-war pattern, I would forcast the next war will be found between Shanghaiese and Arabians, because the Shanghaiese word for "I, me, myself" is "Ala". Just imagine the Arabians hearing all Shanghaiese calling themselves "Allah"! FINAL WORDS ON LANGUAGE: You see how ridiculous languages are sometimes? They teacher deduced marks from you when your way of writing deviate from the standard way of writing even you are making yourself perfectly clear. However, when enough people make the same mistake (Japanese learning Chinese words) or when the authority decides to change it (reforming English, simplifying Chinese back in 50s, highland German...etc), they become the norm and people has to stick to it. Chinese learning Japanese now all have to write now their twisted erroneous Kanji. People also keep complaining about the Chinese language level of the HongKongist, this happens because the language HongKongists speak - Cantonese- has never been officially recognized. Once we invent the Hong Kong words and writing system and give it official status. The Chinese language level of the students here will shoot up immediately overnight! Just like what happened to the Japanese language a thousand years ago, when they worshipped the Chinese languages and only recognize that as formal, all the alphabet was considered unofficial. Until last century, they begam copied the model set by those colonists: invasion and turning China a Disneyland for them, they began to drive out all the Chinese teachers from Qing Dynasty and of course, by doing this, they need to learn no more and their language level shooted up over night! (by the way, those ex-colonists are now complaining about the human right and the Tibet treatment of China. hahahaha...:~D ) Someone might think I equate simplicity with excellence while rating the languages. Well, since they are merely tool for communication, what else should count besides simplicity and clarity? I do think language is nothing but a mere mean of communication. I think Hong Kong Education Department is really a mess in spending millions of money and turn out so many English illiterate after decade of education, seriously, the education do more harm than good, a lot of students here have been trained for years to fear English, when they speak something like "I went to school tomorrow" or "I have a brothers" or "I break-ed the window", The teachers, who are themselves clueless, will interrupt and correct them with the correct pronunciation, tense, plural form...etc. ,not realising that native speakers' children made the same mistake e.g. I go-ed to school yesterday. Therefore, they treat language as some code instead of a mean for communication, after 6 years of primary school, they are conditioned to think for minutes before they utter a single word. Why Indians and Singaporean speak much better English than HKist? simply because they accept fault in their English (some of them speak faulty English for whole life, that's another extreme, but so what? at least they got a solid foundation, they can brush up the language later). I'm serious in thinking that if we just hire some untrained English-speaking beggars from abroad and paying them twice as much (still a small sum) to simply speak with the kindergarten or primary school students. and after 3 years, pay them the airticket and send them back and here stops the whole English education and let them develop the rest, their language will be thousand times better and we spent less than 1 tenth of the resources which would have been used in teaching them for 2 decades. Children learn everything slower than adult who got better capacity for logic thinking... all except one thing: language. Adults are scientists in learning language, while kids are artists in feeling language.Why do we do the opposite when it comes to language teaching? We force grammartical rules on children, when we grow up and can't get rid of our accent, the society then has all kind of native speaker teachers ready for the adults(presumably because of their greater spending power.) You know, with enough patience we can turn just any kid into septa-lingual? That's why I am seriously considering the possibility of opening a Seven-language baby care centre. (one native nanny who speak a different language a day for the babies. more on another blog. hehe) I don't know why they were thinking in hiring only qualified language teacher with a linguistic bachelor or master degree in teaching language. Do the Americans all grow up with linguistic professors in their neighborhood? if not, then can those HK kids taught by "qualified" English teacher speak better English than those grow up in the ghetto? (correct spelling? I don't care!) COMING SOON: Swedish: I learnt it for one month at Hong Kong University, but I've forgotten most of it... I'll write something when I pick it up again. I'm still working on the following(though I rated some of the following above, I can't understand them without a dictionary), hope I don't need to concentrate on just one to master the basic: German, Japanese, Russian, Korean, After my being able to use them for daily conservation on the net and gain fluency like my French and Spanish, I'll try the following (i got books /tapes in my room's library:) Hindi (since I worked for an Indian com before), Indonesia, Vietnamese, Hungarian, (know someone from there thru the net, but couldn't buy any Hungarian book in the bookstore here, if you got some old unwanted book, please give them to me, I'll pay for postage and give you some book in return) COMING SOON: Untranslatable Jokes (Language joke), If you know any jokes that's not translatable(i.e involves some word play), please send that to me. Thanks! WANTED: 1) translation of this page to some other languages. 2)The above language speaker to help me in publications and other language related activities. 3) link exchange if you also run a language/ culture related page. ©Nald Chow 1998-2000, All Rights Reserved.