holmes writes:
I am uncertain if I should study Kanji and hope it will help me understand (to some degree) Chinese and S Korean, or if I should just start with Chinese and hope it helps me with the others.
I took Chinese 101 in college. I know nothing of Japanese other than some time spent talking to people taking Japanese 101, so I can't compare the two. But the Chinese language kicked my ass. Hard. And not for lack of effort on my part, if I may be so bold. A few observations on my experiences with Chinese:
*) Spoken language was the hardest part for me. I have two native-Chinese speaking friends, and we would walk all around campus with me saying "Xiexie" again and again and again. And after I'd say it the same way 10 times, Richard would say "your fourth was right, your seventh was awful, the rest were bad" and other helpful things like that. They would sound *exactly* the same to me, but the native speakers heard differences. This also applied to things the native speakers said, I had a hard time understanding them because ma sounds to me like ma which sounds to me like ma which sounds to me like ma. (One of our first 'sentences' in Chinese was "ma ma ma ma" which, when pronounced properly, is a not quite right way to say "Mother scolds the horse?")
*) The Chinese langauge didn't seem to have a grammar. It had constructions: you use this phrase in this manner to indicate this, and you use this phrase in this manner to indicate that. You construct statements like this. Adding this sound (or character, if written) at this point makes it a question. Adding this sound (or character, if written) at this point in this construction makes it plural, but you don't use that sound with this construction over here. Adding this sound (or etc.) makes the whole thing past tense.
When I took German, grammar was one of the first things we learned (tense, case, conjugation, etc). Not so with the Chinese class. As near as I can tell, from talking to Chinese speakers and trying to learn their language, it has no real tense, case, or conjugation. Beyond the addition of measure words -(like ma in the above example: one type of ma turns a statement constructed in a certain manner into a question) I didn't encounter much grammar.
*) The PRC simplified the character set, while the ROC still uses the traditional character set. We learned the simplified form in my class. From looking at the differences in the book, it seemed a lot like the differences between Suetterlin and Latin characters for handwritten German: if you were really familiar with one you could read the other with some effort, if you weren't you were in trouble.
Also, I've been told that Korean is not like Chinese or Japanese at all. It has a 24 character alphabet and creates words and sentences out of them. Hangul was created by Sejong the Great in the 1400's (?) to be readable by the common person, so they didn't have to learn full up Chinese to be able to read. The Japanese tried to eradicate it during their 50 year occupation, replacing it with Japanese. The book _Lost Names_ by Richard Kim has an evocative description of his family apologizing to their ancestors for following the Japanese orders and adopting Japanese names. After the war, as I understand it, Hangul and Korean returned with a vengence (though the ROK and the DPRK use slightly different spelling).
Chris
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