Re: true or real

"cheche" <cfcflycfcf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There are more than three or four languages in the world. There are a
lot of people who speak more than four languages but still wouldn't
recognise Chinese from Japanese.
????
wouldn't
recognise Chinese from Japanese.
I want to know ,when you listen to Japanese will you take it for
Chinese?

He might have meant that lots of multilingual people who don't know
anything about Far East Asian languages would think that they all sound
the same: indistinguishable streams of sound impossible to differentiate
from each other. And he might also have meant that because the two
languages are written using Chinese characters, lots of multilingual
people wouldn't be able to distinguish the two, especially when looking
at ancient documents written before Japanese started using the hiragana
symbols to indicate past tense, for example, or particles like "wo",
"ni", "de", and "e".

and when you hear Chinese will take it for Japanese?
Because I am a Chinese ,so I know exactly that Chinese is different
from Japanese .But Japanese has some analogy with Chinese because
Japanese comes from Chinese.

Japanese does not come from Chinese. Only Japanese orthography comes from
Chinese. The Japanese borrowed it from China in the 8th century. A great
deal of Japanese academic vocabulary comes from Chinese, just as a great
deal of English academic --- especially scientific --- vocabulary comes
from Greek and Latin. English, however, is neither a Latin nor a Greek
language but a Germanic language: it "comes from" Southern Gothic.

Chinese and Japanese have radically different grammatical structures and
sound systems. Japanese is easy to pronounce because it has, like
Spanish, only 5 pure vowels, and, unlike Chinese, no tones but only a few
words with pitch differences to signal meaning differences; Chinese is
quite difficult because of the tones. Chinese characters are single
syllables, although some of them are quite long because of the
diphthongs, e.g., "miao", but the Japanese (kun) pronunciation of
Japanese-Chinese characters are often two or three mora (Japanese doesn't
use "syllable"), e.g., "inu" ("dog") vs. "go" in Mandarin, and "anata"
(polite "you") vs. "nin" or "ni" in Mandarin.

Sometimes when I heared Spanish or German I will think they are the
same.

Which all goes to prove that you, too, have no ear for languages that you
don't know. You can't distinguish German from Spanish, but I certainly
can, just as I can easily distinguish Chinese from Japanese, French from
Italian, and Dutch from German.

This is interesting!

Only to a neophyte.

--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
Native speaker of American English, posting from Taiwan
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
.

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