Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

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jimmy
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby jimmy » Thu Jun 01, 2023 7:27 pm

I am unable these days to move to China unfortunately. So,.. will I restart ?
Why not, in spite of everything...

and in comparison Arabic ,Chinese would probably be way easier option of selection including its tonality property too.
Because Arabic is really complex language in the side of its grammar.

but all in all I am not regret with my selection. :)
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dml130
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby dml130 » Sun Jun 04, 2023 1:19 am

leosmith wrote:
dml130 wrote:would the FSI difficulty rankings look different when considering languages only in their spoken forms?
I consider the 7 pillars of language learning to be listening, reading, conversing, writing, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Does reading and writing a difficult script make the other pillars more difficult? Absolutely. So if you eliminate reading and writing, or use the same script for all languages, would the overall difficulty (time to learn) rankings change? Sure.


Interestingly, it seems Vietnamese did undergo a change in its writing, switching over from a logographic writing system based on Chinese characters used up until the 20th century:

Chữ Nôm

And Mandarin, apparently, had a movement to do the same, although the government eventually put a stop to it:

Latinxua Sin Wenz

I guess in an alternative reality where Vietnamese did not make the switch, and Mandarin did, the difficulty levels might be swapped.
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby dml130 » Mon Jun 05, 2023 4:03 pm

Dragon27 wrote:There's also Arabic at the top there with those East Asian languages. I highly doubt that the Arabic script idiosyncracies (lack of vowels, for instance) make it in any way comparable in difficulty to logograms.


I agree that the script is unlikely to be the reason for the difficulty ranking of Arabic. Especially since other languages like Persian and Urdu also utilize the same basic script.

I'm not sure it's the grammar either, because I would imagine that there are many other languages that rival Arabic in grammar difficulty - within the same language family, I've heard Amharic is similarly difficult in terms of grammar. And there are others outside the Semitic language family that have a similar reputation for difficult grammar, such as Russian, that are nevertheless ranked a level below Arabic in overall difficulty. It would be interesting to know where Maltese is ranked (I haven't been able to find it), because it's arguably an Arab dialect, written in the Latin alphabet, that has been codified as an official language.

So with Arabic, my suspicion is that the reason for its ranking is the "diglossia", since, to learn it to the point of being able to do everything without difficulty - understanding news (MSA), and easily speaking with people on the streets in various Arab countries in their dialects (from Morocco to Sudan to Iraq) - you basically have to learn multiple languages to a high level. Just my humble guess.
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Stephendaedalus1
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby Stephendaedalus1 » Tue Jun 20, 2023 2:46 am

Monty wrote:The difficulty of Japanese lies not in its grammar but in the fact that it is effectively three languages in one.

The writing system by itself is as big as a language.

Then word readings have to be learned separately with different kanjis producing different sounds at different times. Multiply this by 10,000 words and that's another language.

Then finally the core language itself, ie the structures, the grammar, the exceptions.


I guess you have a pretty poor ability to memorise alphabets. There are 48 hiraganas and the same for katakanas. For most languages with latin alphabets, you have not only 30 letters to learn, but their uppercase/lowercase counterparts as well as some diacritics, and then you'd still be a long way, e. g. in english or french, from figuring out how the letters combine phonetically to make sounds, not to forget silent letters. Kanas are pronounced pretty much like they're written, apart from a few silent letters (the "i" in "ei" and "shi", and the silent "su").

Te sheer number of contractions in english and french is far greater than in standard japanese, which doesn't require you to remember much else than when you can omit the letter "i" (and that じゃ means では). French, if any, is three languages in one. It not only has tons of contractions, but two different formal variants, each with their own conjugations, plus the informal language. Ever looked into french liaisons and concatenations, by the way, trying to remember which "h" is mute and which one is aspirated? :x

Having grinded japanese for decades, would love to hear what you think is hard about the grammar.
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby leosmith » Tue Jun 20, 2023 5:34 pm

Stephendaedalus1 wrote:Having grinded japanese for decades, would love to hear what you think is hard about the grammar.
Politeness levels, numbers/counting, は vs が, etc. The nice thing about it is, although it's pretty complicated, most grammar points are applied over wide swaths of the language, forcing you to use most of it over and over again. So it's a steep initial learning curve, but once you get over that it feels quite simple.

With some languages, like Thai and Mandarin, the initial learning is very simple; it feels like you get 80% of the grammar by doing next to nothing. But that last 20% is made up of tons of tiny grammar points that are used for much smaller parts of the language. It can take a long time to assimilate these. So the argument could be made that these "simple grammar languages" in some ways have harder grammar than "hard grammar languages". This is one of the reasons why I think it's not very meaningful to use grammar to rank language difficulty. That plus the fact that it's just not the main time draw for learning a language.
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby Stephendaedalus1 » Wed Jun 21, 2023 1:11 am

Monty wrote:
Stephendaedalus1 wrote:I guess you have a pretty poor ability to memorise alphabets. There are 48 hiraganas and the same for katakanas. For most languages with latin alphabets, you have not only 30 letters to learn, but their uppercase/lowercase counterparts as well as some diacritics, and then you'd still be a long way...
...
Having grinded japanese for decades, would love to hear what you think is hard about the grammar.


Who's been grinding with Japanese for decades? You? And yet you haven't heard of kanji? You think the writing system consists of just hiragana and katakana?

Admit it: you are a chatbot.


I admit I forgot to talk about about the 90s. Were one to study japanese in the late 90s, like me, one would have to look up each kanji individually from a dictionary, after counting the strokes. Today, it's no longer an issue. Thanks, technology.
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby Monty » Wed Jun 21, 2023 12:36 pm

Stephendaedalus1 wrote:
I admit I forgot to talk about about the 90s. Were one to study japanese in the late 90s, like me, one would have to look up each kanji individually from a dictionary, after counting the strokes. Today, it's no longer an issue. Thanks, technology.


Are you for real? So after "decades of grinding Japanese" you're still illiterate because you can't read kanji? Is that what you're saying?

And you have the nerve to come here and tell me "you have a pretty poor ability to memorise alphabets"? Are you quite alright?
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 21, 2023 7:04 pm

Stephendaedalus1 wrote:Having grinded japanese for decades, would love to hear what you think is hard about the grammar.


It's just so completely alien. With closely related languages like French or German, you can pretty much say things the same way you would in English with only minor differences, but Japanese is utterly different in every way. Even basic stuff like figuring out who is doing what in a sentence is a challenge. Also, a lot of things are just expressed completely differently than they would be in western languages.
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby golyplot » Wed Jun 21, 2023 7:10 pm

As another data point, here were my scores when I recently took the N3 JLPT practice test:

* Kanji and vocabulary: 30/33
* Grammar: 14/23
* Reading: 16/16
* Listening: 19/27

Grammar has always been by far the hardest section of the practice JLPT tests, every time I've taken one over the years, and I really wish I knew a good way to study for it. So far, I've been hoping to pick up grammar by immersion, but that only works a little.
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Stephendaedalus1
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Re: Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

Postby Stephendaedalus1 » Wed Jun 21, 2023 7:53 pm

Monty wrote:
Stephendaedalus1 wrote:Are you for real? So after "decades of grinding Japanese" you're still illiterate because you can't read kanji? Is that what you're saying?

And you have the nerve to come here and tell me "you have a pretty poor ability to memorise alphabets"? Are you quite alright?

Of the first decade taking regular classes, I managed to forget almost everything by taking a big break. Reading was more fluent than now, however I probably was too young to understand such abstraction, or the teachers weren't inclined to explain a lot of the grammar (ie. hundreds of lessons and not even knowing how to use the te-form in various senses). Learned more during a year watching youtube videos than in a decade taking classes.
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