中文

Would taking Chinese help with learning Japanese? My college offers classes, but I just want to learn Nipponese.

>>9028494
Absolutely not

>chinese is so retarded that chinese people need to learn a separate notation just to type on a keyboard
>chinese is so retarded that chinese people still cannot find a way to create a dictionary that works
>chinese is so retarded that chinese movies screened in China are still supplemented with subtiles
>chinese is so retarded that the language still uses characters and words from 2000 years ago, resulting in literature that confuses even native population
You are learning a literally meme language

>>9028507
Everything here is true save for one big point; most characters are well over 4000 years old. Pronounciarion had changed quite a bit though.

Also I'd argue that Japanese is WAYYYY more of a meme language than Chinese

Native: English, French
Near-Fluent: German
Proficient: Portuguese, Hebrew
Reading Knowledge: Latin, Russian
Elementary Knowledge: Turkish
Torn on whether to tackle Farsi, Greek or Arabic next

>>9028521
You should learn an Asian language anon, Chinese standing out as the most useful and by far easiest to learn. Watch out though, pronunciation is hard. HARD.

Learn traditional Chinese if you plan on reading historical documents

Simplified if you plan on chatting online and living in china these days

>>9028521
Cool duolingo stats, brah

>>9028477
I am. I have a secret love of ferreting out root words. I love comparing languages, dated languages, the evolution of languages... I've never really told anyone, but I love it. One of my favorite things to do when I'm reading is looking up all the words I don't know. I want to speak Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Gaelic.
Only know English and German, though.

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>I speak two langage
>one of them is English

>>9028548
Judging by your grammar you must be jealous huh?

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>>9028477
What languages do you know?
What is your reason for wanting to learn Chinese?

I am intersted in learning Traditional Chinese also, but I personally put more importance on speaking and to lesse degree writing over reading. I was learning it for about 3 months, but then quit to focus more on Spanish, still interested in Chinese though.

My reasons for learning Chinese is mainly to read Buddhist Mahayana Sutras and Chinese people are the biggest population on Earth so there will always be some Chinese folks to talk to if I am in a random country.

My reason for learning Spanish is cause I fell in love with a Spanish girl, but she rejected ,me like 2 years a go. Despite that I never quit practicing Spanish for no reason, and am actually moving to Spain in less then a year.

Are you(or anyone else) interested in exhanging languages on whatsapp? I am teaching a Chinese dude Spanish, while he teaches me a bit of Chinese. Pretty fun.

>>9028494
Only a little bit in reading, because most of the Hanzi characters are the same. But if you want to learn Japanese just go straight for that.

I also know Dutch, Spanish, and obviously English. I also dabble in Sanskrit and Tibetan once in a while. I took German in highschool 8 years a go, but forgot most of it.

>>9028541
>I love comparing languages, dated languages, the evolution of languages, I've never really told anyone, but I love it

Haha this so much.

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>>9028561
Pretty low on the list, but English and Spanish. After a year of study, I can convey myself through text pretty well. Sucks for me though, because the only input method I know is pic related

>>9028535
What the fuck are you talking about? Anything that is on a computer can be readily interconverted between traditional and simplified. Unless you're talking about physical manuscripts, there's no reason not to just learn simplified.

>>9028539
tell me where Duolingo has Turkish, Hebrew?
fuckn Turkish family + Hebrew school yo

>>9028569
holy shit that must be grueling

>>9028572
Yes they can be converted to each other very easily, but given the option, I choose to learn Traditional at least for now. I'm hoping that since it's just a matter of character changes (馬 一 马)then it'll be easy to learn

>>9028477
op, you just convinced me to go to duolingo. thanks guy

>>9028589
>duolingo
>not searching up youtube videos on how to learn the language for free

>>9028576
https://gyazo.com/df4dfda9159feb91fd9bbfa199c9bb9a

>>9028700
duolingo is free, smartass.
I literally googled "free languages courses online"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e73btaVo868
Cantonese sounds way more attractive than Mandarin, too bad it's spoken by a relatively small number of people

>>9028709
o shit

>>9028507
>>chinese is so retarded that the language still uses characters and words from 2000 years ago, resulting in literature that confuses even native population
What? No, the result is that reasonably educated people can read texts from 2000+ years ago with relatively few explanatory notes. That's not 'retarded', that's awesome.

>>9028507
>chinese is so retarded that chinese people still cannot find a way to create a dictionary that works
How do you mean? Chinese dictionaries work alright. Little bit slower, but not terrible.

>>9028507
>Thinking "chinese" is a language and being this smug about it.

You haven't made it to the Greeks, have you?

>>9028582
If you can read either simplified or traditional, you can pick up the other one pretty much automatically when exposed to it.

>>9028507
>chinese people need to learn a separate notation just to type on a keyboard
What do you mean, bruh?

Don't get me wrong, there are ways in which Chinese is straight-up inferior to alphabetic languages, but your reasons are... weird.

>>9028561
>Sutras

So why not Pali and Sanskritfor the sources? Or Japanese, as they actually have a living Buddhist tradition.

>>9028822
Are there non-modern Japanese language sutras? I would have thought they'd just use Chinese sutras, but that's a total guess.

>观自在菩萨行深般若波罗蜜多时照见五蕴皆空度一切苦厄

>>9028738
>Cantonese sounds way more attractive than Mandarin

are you by chance completely deaf?

>>9028842
The japanese adopted the chinese alphabet.

>>9028867
Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. Japan adopted Chinese characters, but often used them in distinct ways (eg rearranging to fit Japanese grammar), plus they added two entirely new syllabaries to write in Japanese.

However educated Japanese in the past could read Classical Chinese, and I'm suspecting they wouldn't bother translating Chinese sutras. On the other hand, lots of words in Chinese sutras are transliterations of Pali, so actually maybe Japanese monks would make their own transliterations.

>>9028797
Not really, it is not as easy as "simplifying radicals". They also change the structure of the character.

It triggers me so bad when people call chinese characters kanji. And while hanzi is technically a more accurate means of referring to it, "chinese characters" just makes more sense

>>9028904
I'm speaking from experience here, so your denial means little. I learned simplified and have had virtually no problems with traditional.

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>>9028867
Daily reminder that kanji =/= chinese meanings. For single Kanji, the meaning will be totally different in Japanese, and for combinations, the meaning will also be completely different from the original Chinese. Don't think the two are compatible

>>9028918
Plus neither is an alphabet

>>9028915
Oh, I figured that it would have been quite an undertaking . At any rate, I prefer traditional

>>9028918
>completely different
That's an exaggeration, I think. I read Chinese and can guess with some accuracy what chunks of Japanese text mean by looking at the kanji. Couldn't do that if they were totally different, though of course there are also plenty of differences.

>>9028477
How are you learning Chinese? I'm literally clueless as to how I should start.

>chinese
>japanese
>korean
>arabic
>urdu
How come the coolest languages are possessed by the shittiest cultures? I'd learn chinese, only why would I ever want to be in a nuclear strike distance from that communist shithole?

>>9028947
not OP but I just realized that I have no idea how I started either

>>9028494
No, Japan even now is pretty xenophobic (probably because the population is too old.)
China is also fairly xenophobic.

The languages are not related in any meaningful way.

They 'share' some characters but there isn't any necessary connection between them as far as I know.

English and Polish both share a (similar) alphabet.
You will not have any easier time learning Polish as an English speaker.
>>9028948
Chinese and Korean are hideous languages.

>>9028948
>China
>not awesome
Pick one.

Also if Communist Parties bring you out in hives there's always Taiwan, which is beautiful.

>>9028960
I love Chinese, but I hate china

>>9028494
Yes. If you learn Chinese you'll have a very significant start on learning the kanji, which would be a big advantage for learning Japanese. Grammatically the languages are totally different, though.

Also, they're both very hard languages and take years of work. If you want to learn Japanese, you should really just... learn Japanese.

>>9028954
Do you actually know either Chinese or Japanese, anon? No offence, but your post kind of reads like a wall of wrong information. Chinese and Japanese sharing characters is absolutely nothing like English and Polish sharing letters, because characters are not letters.

>>9028983
Not him, but it is weird; for instance "私" in Japanese means "me" or "I", while in Chinese it means "private, personal".

That's the extent of their relationships, the characters are only vaguely related in meaning

Pleb here. Been wanting to learn a second language for a while now. I started with Russian, but I'd like to get some input on what you guys would consider most worthy of my time. Russian is cool (love the culture), but I'm not sure how useful it'll be. I want to learn something that is both marketable and close enough to English (grammatically/phonetically) to make learning easier.

>>9028998
You're picking out one example there and saying 'that's the extent of their relationships'. There are a lot of other examples where the words are identical (or the Japanese characters are written in a slightly different but understandable way). They definitely don't map one-to-one, but there's a lot of shared ground. And the 'alphabet' thing is a basic misunderstanding of what characters are.

>>9029005
>marketable
Spanish if you're murrikan, french/german if you're western yurop. As a russian myself, I'd have loved to encourage you to continue your russian studies, but in terms of business it's down the list since NATO is still being tsundere about trade.

>>9028822
I am a Vajrayana(Tibetan) Buddhist. Learning Sanskrit to able to read the Sutras would take decades, its not worth it that much. Would probably be better to learn Tibetan then, or Chinese. Some Tibetan Sutras where originally in Chinese.
Also many Sanskrit Sutras have been lost and only the Chinese or Tibetan ones are left over.
Nor would I be able to communicate to anyone in Sanskrit since its practically a dead language. I only know basic Sanskrit to be able to understand all the mantras and the terminology.

I am not interested in Japanese Buddhist traditions. Zen came from China anyway. And Chang (Chinese Zen) teachings is practically already included into the Kangyur (Tibetan Buddhist Canon)

>>9029018
That's what I'm trying to convey. Characters between languages often have vague similarities in... tone for lack of a better word. Again, 好 in Japanese means "to like" while in Chinese it means "good, well". The tone (that's a crude way of expressing what I want to convey, sorry) is somewhat similar

>>9028983
No, but I'm trying to elaborate a point to him.

Don't learn a language to learn a language, especially not a language that is the furthest possible (I think) from one's native language.

Stop being pissy, if he spends a decade learning Chinese at most he'll skip learning romaji. They still aren't related, so the extent that learning Chinese will aid you in learning Japanese is a familiarity with one set of characters.
>>9029005
Try learning an artificial language first.
>>9029018
I didn't call them an alphabet, I said knowing one alphabet will not help one learn a language with a related alphabet.
How is it absurd to say it is also true that learning Chinese characters will not help one learn the Japanese language?

>>9029039
That's not just a 'vague similarity'. In Classical Chinese you can use 好 as a verb meaning 'to like'- and it's still used that way in specific phrases.

The Japanese use of these words often literally comes directly from Chinese. You're hugely underestimating the amount of shared meaning.

>>9029037
Sanskrit isn't dead. There are a few thousand native speakers in India.

I've been learning Sanskrit for a few years now (although I'm no Buddhist); it's quite easily the hardest language I've ever seen. I used to think Ancient Greek was hard, but Sanskrit is in another league.

Keep practising.

>>9029058
>How is it absurd to say it is also true that learning Chinese characters will not help one learn the Japanese language?

Because characters are WORDS, not letters, anon. 'Example: North' in Chinese is 北. 'North' in Japanese is 北. Pronunciation is different, but if you've learnt to read it in one language you'll recognise it in the other.

>>9029039
猫

>>9029095
That's simplified chinese

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Why won't the japanese just do what koreans did and abandon stupid fucking kanji that don't even fit their language structure? Or just straight-up romanize the language, instead of being prideful cunts? Less and less japanese people can write in kanji anyway, so why continue sucking the sino cock?

>>9029103
:)

>>9029005
If you live in America, Spanish would be a good choice. It's quite easy for English speakers, as are most Romance languages, and it's pretty useful/marketable.

>>9028998

Anything as direct as "I", given Japanese prediliction for being indirect and polite would indeed be "private", as in personal, the problem is in the secondary translation to the very direct and informal English. If you read Japanese who are poor at English referring to themselves, they do so as "That one", or "this one".

Most literate Chinese and Japanese can infer the meaning of characters in the other language, even though some have developed a slightly different meaning, and that the Chinese use a modernised set of characters, and the Japanese have additional syllabaries. And of course, that aside from the Chinese characters, the languages have nothing whatsoever in common.

>>9028954
Japanese are not at all xenophobic, both Japanese and Chinese love foreign cultures. Both have had imposed isolation from above, but if you actually meet people from either country they are very much the opposite of phobic.

>>9029109
Because Kanji is very important to reading Japanese. Also Japanese has 2 alphabets

>>9029115
>And of course, that aside from the Chinese characters, the languages have nothing whatsoever in common.

Japanese has an incredible amount of Chinese loanwords too...

>>9029121
>Because Kanji is very important to reading Japanese
I think anon's suggesting it doesn't need to be- ie they could replace every character with hiragana. Maybe that's not possible though- I guess there could be too many homophones or something?

>>9029135
That's one reason, I'm not too sure about it though, but I think it also has a lot to do with reading speed

>>9029109
Why don't the fucking English modernise their fucking spelling to how words are pronounced?

And why don't filthy imperials start using the fucking metric system like rational human beans.

Neither would do fuck all to their cultural history, since Americans don't have one, and Brit-tards can't read fucking Shakespeare anyway.

Meanwhile, the Japanese can laugh their asses off whenever lame ass white imperialists waltz in and pretend to know their language, when they can't even "spell" like a second grader, and the Chinese can post decrees in "official language" and everyone can read it in their own local language and dialect and pretend they are all one culture.

>>9029127
True, every Kanji has a Tang era Chinese reading, which would be loan-words, but that would be like saying persons from England and France can speak Lating together, given that French is modern day Latin, and the English have borrowed plenty of French words after.

Except if the two languages had no grammatical familiarity and were from different language groups.

>草泥馬
肏你媽
>河蟹
和諧

only language where something like this is possible

>>9029177
Like what?

>>9029190
google grass mud horse

>>9029149
Because english is superior
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiVs05yq9-o

>>9029177
Eh, they're just puns really. Chinese just has vastly, vastly greater scope for them...

>>9029196
Googled. It's a silly homophone wordplay. Are you implying it doesn't exist in other languages?

>>9029213
only language where it's possible to that degree.

>>9029198
Terrible video. Why can't languages with more phonetic orthographies have similarly recognizable words? Fucking Anglos.

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>>9029062
Interesting. Why are you learning Sanskrit? Are you also learning Hindi with it together?
Do you think that Sanskrit developed independly or that it has evolved out of other languages? Some say it already existed before ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian. Whats your opinion on this, or you remain neutral?

And yhea its extremely difficult. I am proud of you, that you are keeping at it for so long.

>few thousend
That's about ~0.00004% of the current world population. Practically dead to me, but its awesome there are still native speakers. There are likely a lot more who can read it though.
In comparison even my own native language(Dutch) is spoken by only ~0.235% of the world populaton.

>>9029085
Still no reason, I see.
>>9029149
Even ESL can read Shakespeare. Natives should hopefully be able to read Chaucer (most other Middle English is out of the question though.)

>>9029229
Ok, but what practical function does it serve? If anything, it showcases how badly designed chingchong really is

>>9029198
Sorry but he's a retard, and obviously proving the whole point of what I was saying.

But anyway, what you do is the same. Once you learn to read, you don't spell anymore, you recognize patterns, even stupid, insensible Chaucerite collections of random symbols that mean what you've been taught they mean. And some of them you can even, sorta, kinda, use to tell what someone is saying, in French, or in Italian, or Mexican, or whatever.

But the Chinese already do this with pinyin, except "Chinese" languages aren't the same, so if you speak mandarin in a business setting, etc, you do the western style dictionary crap with pinyin and get the character that corresponds, and if you are in a literature setting you look up the first part of the character, and you find the character you want, because you have internalized a lot of characters and meanings. Which is what you do if you are a literate person, anyway.

Now, given your response, I'm sure you are of the american mindset that we need to achieve maximum efficiency (or just a troll, natch), but any actual literate person would go for explicit complexity any day.

>>9029283
>any actual literate person would go for explicit complexity
English is the most complex, elegant, and expressive language in the world as of today.
No, I'm not an english native

>>9029260
>what practical function does it serve?

This is /lit/, what practical function does reading serve? None. It is an excersice in intelligence and pleasure.

>>9029250
>Even ESL can read Shakespeare.

Sorry, but no to both this and Chaucer. Sure, some educated ESL can, but most native English speakers can't read either.

>>9029293
I am not saying anything bad about English, I love the English language and English literature. But claiming that anything is the "most" of any random soft indeterminate set of values anything is just silly jingoistic nonsense.

>>9029309
>most native speakers can't read either
Nonsense, the only real opponent to comprehension is irregular or out-of-use vocabulary.

That's not really an issue.

>>9029149
>English has definite spelling
ESL-kun...

>>9028477

>I am able to read with a relatively high comprehension rate while not even being able to speak a word of it

This is the exact opposite of my experience. While I get that reading is essentially a game of charades, the spoken language is actually possible to learn without losing years of life.

I've even started learning German just to prove I can learn languages, and it's easy as shit comparatively speaking. I've already learned how to make words with a similar alphabet, so I'm prepared so to speak. With Chinese you learn not only the spoken language, but also the written language at the same time, when it should be separate, one after the other.

A kind of funny thing happens to me when I think of words. I see the letters spelled out in front of me. But when I think of chinese words I'll either see the useless pinyin, or I'll see a semblance of a character, and I shit you not, the strokes fall over like a badly built stonehenge into a pile and I can't put them back together. I can remember an alphabetic word after seeing it only a few times, but I can write a character 1000 times and still forget it the next day. Could I have Chinese dyslexia? Is my phonetic aphasia actually compensating for learning disorder?

Language learning is silly. Unless you do it for a specific goal (moving to a different country, business), it's a huge waste of time with little pay off, completely unnecessary in a world where thousands of language experts translate everything into every language anyway. I also find the idea that reading a work of literature in it's original tongue somehow will grant you better insight beyond silly stylistic choices to be delusional. Language is just a set of words and rules that govern them. There's nothing intellectual or enlightening about it, you studies one as an infant, billions of others did the same.

>>9029243
> Why are you learning Sanskrit?
Just a hobby really. I've studied a few languages, like Latin, Greek, Arabic, etc.

> Are you also learning Hindi with it together?
No. Sanskrit is really my first adventure into Indo-Aryan languages. It's hard as fuck, so I wish I had started with Hindi.

> Do you think that Sanskrit developed independly or that it has evolved out of other languages?
I think all languages have evolved out of something, in Sanskrit's case this was proto-Indo-Aryan, which had a common ancestor with Avestan and thus Persian.

If you look on Youtube, there are many videos (albeit bad ones) of Indian Sanskrit lessons. Some are fairly interesting.

>>9029442
I kind of agree, it's definitely over-glorified at /lit/. I still don't regret to learning Japanese to a high level because it was fairly fun to learn it through all the weeb entertainment, and Japanese is actually quite a different and fascinating language with a different kind of thinking from English. Kanji are cool and there's lot of genuinely difficult to translate expressions, modes of speech etc. On the other hand I CBA to learn another European language, they probably translate pretty well to each other anyway. I also kind of regret wasting time learning Chinese because the lack of interesting material to read (and don't tell me to read any of the ancient stuff, that's Classical Chinese and a different language basically).

>>9029341
Sure, in your head, but try talking to anyone of the majority of actual, real English speakers, or ESL who haven't had any liberal college-level education, and that irregular or out-of-use vocabulary actually turns out to be an issue.

Clearly I'm not saying nobody can read Shakespeare or Chaucer, but even native speakers who are able to do so have had classes in either during whichever level of education they have attained.

>>9029442
>it's a huge waste of time with little pay off, completely unnecessary

Fuck off, cunt.

>>9029442
> it's a huge waste of time with little pay off
The 'pay off' is enjoyment. Certain people are amused by learning languages, like others are amused by painting or playing football.

>>9029516
>moving goalposts
fuck off m8

>>9029442
Yeah, it's a hobby with overblown prestige because of a million potential uses that will never be actualized. I still enjoy the fuck out of it: it's nice to be able to read things like verse and sacred texts, which really can't be translated (any Hebrew or Latin speaker can tell you this).

>>9029418
If you haven't noticed, Chinese characters mostly consist of a set group of building block figures arranged and stretched in various ways. Though usually these building blocks are too obliquely related to the meaning of a word to be useful to anyone but academics, knowing them can definitely reduce the effort in learning a given character. 15 lines become three shapes.

>>9029521

You poor little baby.

>>9029527

thank goodness i'm not interested in either language

>>9029564
Hey, yo, those were throwaway examples. Anyway, point is—do you.

>>9029536

Yeah, but there's literally thousands of them. Besides it's meaningless to do it without learning spoken language first. And even though I was relatively good at speaking I could never have the time to practice it, because I had to practice characters all the time. When I see people learn european languages, all they do is talk, and that's their practice. So easy! 好可爱

>>9029260
practical purpose is discussing censored topics with homophones of said purpose. That's what River Crab means

河蟹 - River Crab
和諧 - Harmony (from the communist propaganda which speaks of harmonizing society through censorship)

now search up "river crab wearing three wrist watches"

Is it strange that I kind of have this desire to learn a relatively small or obscure modern language that isn't related to me at all like Romanian and just learn and appreciate more about the people and culture as I learn the language?

>>9029978
Do it

>>9028572
simplified is trash, plebcore. The characters look like ass and you can't read traditional if you learn simplified but you can read simplified if you learn traditional. 簡體字is basically a failed social construct instituted by the PRC to make people to become less intelligent. Think 1984.

你們應該也不會講國語啊
而且你們都是學他媽拼音的啦 學注音比較好
大部分的外國人學中文都說的不太好
發音發得都不會強調

If you're interested in mandarin yoyo chinese is a good place to start. It's paid but a lot of useful info is free. Also just start speaking it. Speaking is so much more important in the long run because you learn the other two parts of the language right along with it. There's probably thousands of Chinese in your city so it's not hard to find someone to practice speaking with.

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Reading dream of the red chamber right now in chinese and it's definitely challenging but the poetry is just uncomparable in the native language. Truly a remarkable novel.

I already know Chinese, but I can count the number of Chinese books I've read with my hands alone. I don't know, something about English books makes them more accessible and the existence of a canon makes it easier to sort the good stuff from the garbage.

I'm thinking of reading some Chinese classics, but I have no idea where to start besides the big 4 and Tao Te Jing which I have no intention of reading.

https://www.thenewslens.com/article/7726

How is this list?

>>9030064
Next time try to write a less useless post.

>>9030007
Any suggestions?

>>9029760
>river crab wearing three wrist watches
interesting.

>>9030115
teach yourself romanian

colloquial romanian

look for old versions from like 1980s

i'm just messing around with some Mandarin flash cards and watching CCTV right now, so i'm not too serious about it...
but how long did it take you Mandarin speakers to be able to understand the tones when spoken quickly?

i can't hear any type of tone unless it's a short slow sentence.

>>9030064
nice translator. you know it sticks out like a sore thumb right?

>>9030212
old versions of what?

>I cannot wait to learn chinese and enjoy all that government-regulated media, and government regulated literature!

>>9030241
I don't think there's any point to learning to pick out tones in speech- just learn the words -including- the tones, and listen for them. In connected speech you get tone sandhi (tones can change when strung together) and not all words are emphasised, so some sound more or less toneless.

Does Latin have any interesting fiction works to keep me busy? I only know of Virgil and Ovidius (well I guess in their delusional antique ways they thought they were writing history). I don't want to learn the language only to realise that I'm stuck with Cicero's autistic correspondence and catholic Jesus fanfiction forever

>>9030275
those are books i just named

汝等皆非人哉。

太令人失望了,伪君子们。

>>9028576
I think he's accusing you of only having a "duolingo knowledge" of most of those languages (i.e. only know a few words and tourist sentences in them)

>>9030837
狂妄自大绝非君子之道,请兄弟自反

>>9030938
孤只为真小人,不曾自称梅兰竹菊之辈。

>>9031023
呜呼哀哉,世道人心如是也,真君子何在?

>>9029177
Chinese puns are literally the worst. Imagine seeing puns in every single news title. It's fucking cancerous. t.Taiwanese

>>9028918
kanji on yomi readings are pretty much chinese loan words
Alot of kun yomi readings keep the meaning from chinese but have a different sound
When the japanese use the kanji for phonetic value only and not the character meaning is where the languages split

>>9028494
learning kanji/hanzi is like learning a language unto itself. kanji is ~85% the same as traditional, 10% simplified and the rest all 3 sets have differences

so learning chinese may help you with the characters but not much else

>>9028918
Stop talking shit you have no idea about. The meanings could be very different at times (e.g. 勉強, 青) but they are often very similar across the languages (e.g. 曖昧, 巨大).

>>9028477
I'm focusing on learning French, Spanish and Korean now.

Also interested in German, Russian, Chinese and ancient languages.

>>9028947
>>9028953

I've been self-studying chinese by myself, heres what I think you should keep in mind:
Mandarin is hard because of the tones and the chinese characters. Orally it takes quite a while to get used to separating the tones when you hear them. Writing down and memorizing pinyin words drives me crazy, and the 2 character compounds benefit from character knowledge

It is hard to get a good vocab in chinese without the characters because the characters are the building blocks of the language. To read anything you need to know alot of words, because a chinese paragraph just looks like a wall of symbols, and you have to be able to tell where the particles are. Most texts that aren't aimed at kids don't have gaps in between hanzi. some important particles are 有 也 是 很 把


heres some of the most important grammatical ideas
Simple chinese sentance (Subject-Verb-Object)
Complex chinese sentance
verb-object
complement of degree
complement of result
complement of direction
ba-structure (dealing with direct object)
shi-de structure(emphasing who what where when of a past event)
ma: yes or no question
shenme: content question(who what when where)
le particle: change of state
measure word.everytime you state a quantity of something you need a MW
classifers: 这那哪
topic-comment sentences

Beyond those grammar ideas are the kinds of structures that give the sentance more depth like
because.... so then
not only... but
which you just have to drill so you know them when you see them


if you want to learn how to read chinese learn the traditional, because the simplifcation process is inconsistent. learning the characters will take a while.
a good website is "chinese grammar wiki" which gives you grammar points by level (A1,A2,....)
'chinese line dictionary' lets you enter words and gives you example sentances
there's plenty of online websites that allow you to enter text and get out vocab tables

if you wanna pay for a website yoyo chinese gives you a good fundmental understanding of the grammar but is devoid of the grammar structures
most textbooks are related to the HSK levels. Intro book is level 1, Book 2 is HSK2 ,...

"integrated chinese" textbook series are pretty good, but you need to buy a work book, CD,text ,... for each level

>>9028572
但繁體 字 比 較。 美。 觀

>>9029442
Let me guess, you only know one language, right? Because if you knew two and you had tried to read two different translation of the same work you would have realized how bad translations usually are, and how little of the original they carry over. A lot of authors are reportedly horrified when they first read their own work translated in another language they know. Borges was so much surprised when someone translated his works in English well that he made him legally co-author of them (that is why his heirs are now forcing an inferior translation on the market, so they don't have to share profits).

>>9031147
what is the name of the co-author borges translator ?

>>9031147
Borges was obsessed with languages, so obviously he'd go full autism over the most minor of details. I mean, he wrote a story in which he basically claimed that even two identical scripts can have different meanings if they're written by different people.
I speak 3 languages, and can read some latin, and no, I don't see much different between varying languages, other than some petty "it's not literally what it says" non-problems. Feel free to go uppity on me, idgaf

>>9031345
>I speak 3 languages
And what those languages are?

>>9028507
Anon is objectively right.

Chinese languages are shit.

>>9031358
Natively german, also english and russian

>>9028519
>japanese
>meme language

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>>9029062
I speak Sanskrit. I am learning it daily. Picked it up five years ago and stopped studying for few years. I have resumed learning now, I'm trying to write essays and poems in it. Pretty fun. Pic related, it's the dictionary I've been using.

>>9029243
It's easier to learn Sanskrit if you learn Hindi too because your Hindi help you catch up the basic quickly. Remember to learn the Sudh-Hindi (Pure Hindi) not Hindustani or Urdu/Hindi which is Hindi infused with Persian/Arabic words.

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>>9029198
>Chinese can post decrees in "official language" and everyone can read it in their own local language and dialect and pretend they are all one culture.

Care to elaborate on this? I'm very interested but don't know shit about Chinese? So, is the written language same but pronunciation based on region is different?

>>9031345
Out of curiosity, how did you happen to learn 2 living languages and get a reading knowledge of a dead one if you think they are so useless? Were you forced in school?

>>9031345
You think learning languages is silly but you learned LATIN?

>>9032029
>>9032068
Calm down baka. I never really 'studied' languages, I simply absorbed them in time (in the same way babbys learn their first language), english from the vast amount of american media and the Internet, and russian from my mother.
As for latin, I enjoy it for purely supercifial reasons, I think it's a pretty language. And my working knowledge is shit, even after several years. I love reading Vulgate out loud when no one's around.

Are there any entertaining and not too difficult books on Chinese history - in Chinese? My Mandarin's kinda rusty now and I always struggled to find interesting stuff to read (wasn't a problem with Japanese). I've read some novels in the past - Ni Kuang's books were easy to read, rather banal pulp fiction but the challenge level was exactly right.

>>9031706
Chinese characters have a syntactic and / or semantic meaning and a pronunciation
The semantic meaning remains the same regardless of dialect or language using the characters, meaning everyone can understand the general gist of a written text. A japanese early 20th century asianist rebel by the name of miyazaki toten was of great help to sun yat sen's revolutionary league. Seeing as he didn't speak Chinese and sun yat sen didn't speak Japanese, they communicated in written characters and understood eachother more or less without issues.

>>9031706
Yes, basically. When you get to really distinct dialects like Cantonese there are actual grammatical differences and significant vocabulary differences, but even then there isn't much 'Cantonese writing'- things are written in standard Chinese and people pronounce the characters in their own way.

This also works across time- pronunciation changed through history, so a time-travelling modern Chinese speaker might well not be able to understand what Tang Dynasty people were saying, but would have a pretty good comprehension of a lot of written stuff.

Same happened with Japan and China- Japanese scholars and monks visiting China had 'brush conversations' through writing with Chinese scholars- despite the fact that the spoken languages were mutually unintelligible, they could both read and understand the same characters (obviously the fact that the Japanese learned Classical Chinese grammar was also important)