all 11 comments

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (9 children)

Interesting they ranked Japan the highest. I've seen similar rankings by the military, and they consistently rate Russian, Arabic, and Chinese at the very top. (coming from English, same as the infographic)

Japanese has a partial-phonetic alphabet, so that makes things easier than Chinese. Maybe it's that Japanese has more of a consistent subtlety to it to sound like a native speaker, which can be hard to master. I've heard that for foreigners this small level of intonation and inflection can be almost impossible to master, even after a decade of immersion.

[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

Once you handwave away the characters (that's a big handwave!) Chinese isn't actually that difficult. It's SVO and most characters have a single pronunciation. Japanese grammar is devilishly difficult and every character may have 5 pronunciations. However there are only 2000 characters in Japanese and 10,000 in Chinese.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I think it's actually the opposite. I know about 1200 Chinese characters. The thing with Japanese is that the grammar is very formulaic so once you master that you're good. But Chinese has a random patchwork quilt of grammar that isn't as logical or consistent as Japanese, and that's the real hard part imo.

[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Oh, really? Hah! Didn't know you were into Chinese. For work, or personal enrichment?

Try the Chinese Grammar Wiki, it's tremendously helpful. https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar Chinese grammar does get more difficult at the end, when you have to sound like an educated person. But the dirty little secret is that most Chinese people aren't that good at Chinese. A lot of them suck at it, frankly. That's what happens when most of your population didn't make it past 9th grade.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

For fun, I started studying it after I lived there for a while. I'm also learning traditional and simplified simultaneously, which doesn't make things any easier.

But the dirty little secret is that most Chinese people aren't that good at Chinese. A lot of them suck at it, frankly.

Heh that's funny, I could believe it. And I agree I can get to a passable level, but sounding educated and articulate in Chinese is another decade of work. I have trouble remembering the tones too. I can pronounce them fine, but I have trouble retaining them despite my best efforts, unlike the written characters which I can remember fairly easily. So I can actually read Chinese a lot easier than listen to it, which I guess is opposite from normal for most Chinese learners.

[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It helps a lot if you don't think of them as separate "tones" but rather completely different phonemes. That's how Chinese think of it, they would never confuse a second tone word with a fourth tone one.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I know, I try to think of it like putting emphasis on the right syllable in English. If you emphasize the wrong syllable it sounds so very wrong. But this hasn't really "clicked" yet for me in a deep way. I think I just need more practice.

[–]magnora7 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

[–]Chipit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah, John Pasden used to be the man, back in the blog era. But nobody goes for Classical Chinese except bonafide scholars. And the idioms are greatly overrated. It's just something that certain learners focus on for their "bling" value. They just want to look clever, which you already get plenty of being able to put two words together in Chinese.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree about the Classical Chinese, it's not important really. But I'd say the idioms are important to fluency in modern Chinese. But it depends on how many idioms you include... there are a lot that are completely unused in the mainstream for hundreds of years. They collect their chengyu like pokemon cards

[–]BillionDollarEgg3 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This graph to me says its just another one of those shitty things that goes viral on reddit and the people who made this graphic they do not really know or speak the langauges. Japanese is very easy to speak, there is also so much material out there from movies to tv documentary, from chats, to Japan tv shows. It would be easy to speak Japanese in a neutral way but to sound like a native and use honorifics, how to talk down to others, talk up to others, when to address people by their title and again you have regional dialects, the Osaka-Ben OOookini comapred to the typical arigato from a store keeper in Tokyo.

I would find Chinese a little more difficult to Japanese speaking, the dialects in China feel and sound and structure totally different to each other, Mandarin, Wu (Shanghainese), Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, and Yue and not to mention the overseas diaspora and ex-Pats and the fact Cantonese from Guangzhou (Canton) seems like a totally seperate langauge and sounds more like maybe Thai or Vietnamese, simplified Chinese might be the easier to read but Japanese with its 4 alpabets would be close to the level of reading and writing difficulty, Cantonese seems far more complex as a langauge to write using the old style of Hanzi or kanji. Arabic to me is disgusting, i HATE the sound of it the moaning, hacking, groan, cough hack noises, i guess me regional variations are less worse than others, I would also HATE islam I read some of that Koran or Quran and seen the founder of that shit religion was something like a cross between pedo Epstein and the terrorist bin Laden, maybe its just psychoacoustics why some person just hates say the tones inside a trumpet or a banjo or some instrument and they can't explain why they don't like the instrument. I don't really have anything against the people, Arab atheist are fine, or ex muslims who coverted to another religion but I have little time for the langauge or culture, it would be almost impossible for me to learn Arabic simple reason for me because it tells me its a language of decacy and death, it was once a garden of learning and open ideas and I hate what the region has become over time, I hate Arabic it disgusts me and I can never learn it.

European languages are probably easy once you start another because they will have some Nordic roots or Salvic Balkan or common Latin root which will help one go into another language to learn, i guess the trick here is not to mix them up and again local dialects with each European language.