I have been casually learning Japanese for a few months in preparation for a trip this summer. One advantage I have over other English-speaking learners is my advanced knowledge of Korean, the...
Because of the unique dissociation between the written word and the way it is pronounced, Japanese is not only harder to learn, but it's also more malleable and richer in a way that cannot be imitated. It's an extra dimension of language and a happy historical accident.
I have been casually learning Japanese for a few months in preparation for a trip this summer. One advantage I have over other English-speaking learners is my advanced knowledge of Korean, the language most similar to Japanese. The author correctly notes the features of Japanese that are unique, even when compared to modern Korean. How he can enjoy these "features" is a mystery to me!
Centuries ago, Korean used to have the same problems: lots of shoehorning of pure Korean words into Chinese characters. But through a series of reforms, Korean is now commonly written with a very logical alphabet. As I learn Japanese, I am frustrated by the points the author celebrates, and I thank the inventor of the Korean alphabet for having made my ancestral language much more sensible!
Unfortunately Japan has a much higher literacy rate than Korea did when it redid its writing system so the chance of a similar reformation is basically none. It would require unthinkable political...
Unfortunately Japan has a much higher literacy rate than Korea did when it redid its writing system so the chance of a similar reformation is basically none. It would require unthinkable political power to change it now.
Would it? I thought Japanese schools teach romaji. It wouldn't be that hard to just switch to the Latin alphabet. Just require teaching starting in 2025, all signs to include romaji by 2030, all...
Would it? I thought Japanese schools teach romaji. It wouldn't be that hard to just switch to the Latin alphabet. Just require teaching starting in 2025, all signs to include romaji by 2030, all government forms to be in romaji by 2035, etc, etc, etc.
Not to mention that they could just require the use of katakana instead of kanji.
Can you imagine what the nationalists would say? "USA is trying to assert their power over us, just as they did in WWII. They think their writing system is superior, but we won't let them erase...
Can you imagine what the nationalists would say? "USA is trying to assert their power over us, just as they did in WWII. They think their writing system is superior, but we won't let them erase our Japanese culture!"
I googled online discussions on this topic, and let's just say, even in English, there are a lot of impassioned conservative voices saying how the existing system is fine, even superior, to any alternative.
Picture the reaction you would see in your own country if they required everyone to switch from the Latin alphabet to katakana. Edit: come to think of it, even a spelling reform of English to make...
Picture the reaction you would see in your own country if they required everyone to switch from the Latin alphabet to katakana.
Edit: come to think of it, even a spelling reform of English to make it phonetic within the existing Latin alphabet is unthinkable, let alone switching to a whole other writing system
The change I'm envisioning is a move to kana-for-everything, not romaji which would be an even harder change to sell (with no major benefits for the Japanese language). But with the high literacy...
The change I'm envisioning is a move to kana-for-everything, not romaji which would be an even harder change to sell (with no major benefits for the Japanese language).
But with the high literacy rates kanji are seen as part of the culture/national identity at this point. It would be like the UK government making a new official spelling system for English, but worse.
With the insane amount of homophones Japanese has, trying to divorce the language from the kanji the words originate from would be immensely difficult and would benefit no one except for outsiders...
With the insane amount of homophones Japanese has, trying to divorce the language from the kanji the words originate from would be immensely difficult and would benefit no one except for outsiders trying to learn Japanese as a second language.
Korean and spoken Japanese have the same thing with homophones. They're not a huge problem in practice. The cultural value and current dominance of kanji is the only major blocker.
Korean and spoken Japanese have the same thing with homophones. They're not a huge problem in practice.
The cultural value and current dominance of kanji is the only major blocker.
Chinese and Japanese are enormously different spoken languages. Except for a large number of words imported directly into Japanese (but evolved to sound quite unlike the originals), the two languages have essentially nothing in common. The pronunciation, the grammar, everything is 180° different. A consequence of this is that those Chinese characters, evolved over millennia to fit the Chinese language like a glove, were a bad match for the way the islanders spoke.
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The only solution for those early Japanese scribes, then, was to do a lot of shoehorning. And boy, did they shoehorn.
The Japanese scholars-aristocrats began repurposing the Chinese characters, which they called kanji (for, well, "Chinese characters"). Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.
To a Chinese reader, such words would have looked utterly random, devoid of any coherence or structure. But to a trained Japanese, they translated into familiar words.
Over the centuries those "sound-only" kanji, called man'yougana, evolved into something else entirely. They became simpler, more streamlined, and more standardized. Where the symbols were originally composed of many short strokes, they gradually lost detail and complexity. Where the scribes could choose between a slew of different kanji for any given sound (for instance, the sound pa could be represented by any of 20 characters), later the number of options dwindled and eventually settled to two.
That's how the two syllable-based alphabets in use today, hiragana and katakana, came about (collectively kana). For example, this is how the sound for "i" (pronounced "ee") evolved from two separate kanji into respective kana pronounced exactly the same.
With this new sound-based tool invented by the islanders, finally the Japanese language had a suitably flexible way to write anything one could pronounce. Today full-blown kanji are used for their meaning, while hiragana and katakana are used for sound-based writing and grammar stuff.
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Like most language pairs, there was rarely a one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and Japanese words. Often a single Chinese word or character could merely approximate the meaning of several spoken Japanese words. Each of those local words might have been related to the others, but it carried a different nuance. Even so, for lack of a better solution, often the same kanji was used for all the various meanings.
This had two major effects. First, while in any Chinese language each character is associated with a single way to speak it, in Japanese every kanji can be pronounced in multiple, very different ways. This part is perhaps the biggest bane of Japanese students.
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The second effect of the imperfect match between the written word and the meanings it is associated with is a kind of "chronic looseness" in the conversion of language to and from writing. A Japanese reader isn't expected to correctly pronounce everything. New, unfamiliar words will be opaque to them. In a sense, this is similar to English, only much worse.
In English, the question is usually about the right way to pronounce a vowel or two. As is clear from the example just above, in Japanese, sometimes you don't know if the kanji for life has to be read as "nasu" or "shou". Add to that the huge number of kanji in circulation, and in many cases you have absolutely nothing to work with. If you haven't seen the kanji before, you have zero hints about the right sounds to make.
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There is one problem that arises because of how kanji work: how do you explain which character you're talking about without writing it down?
This happens all the time with people's names. The Japanese like to choose nice and distinctive kanji for their names, even when using common name pronunciations (another instance of dissociation: common name readings on unheard-of kanji choices are all the rage this century). This means that, just by hearing what someone is called, you're usually unable to write it down.
So people have to explain the kanji to you, and they do it by telling you which other well-known words each kanji appears in, or how it is built from simpler components.
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Spoken Japanese is actually rather poor in vocabulary. A lot of its verbs are reused in very different contexts with different meanings that are only related in a very abstract way. Thanks to the unique slap-it-on-and-you're-ready-to-go mindset of Japanese writing, however, the vagueness can be pared down a lot.
There is a surprising number of verbs that have exactly the same pronunciation, but are written with different kanji in different contexts.
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Finally we come to gikun, the most exquisite (ab)use of the rift between written and spoken Japanese. It's based on the clever use of furigana, the little pronunciation marks explained above. Ninety-nine percent of the time, people use furigana as you would expect—plainly indicating the correct dictionary reading of each word. But once you have a tool, who can resist playing with it?
Gikun is the replacement of a kanji's or word's normal pronunciation with something else through furigana. Novelists and manga-ka use it to inject an almost subliminal layer of meaning beyond what is afforded by the words and kanji. It achieves an effect similar to a textual voice over, at the same time as the actual text you're reading.
Something that's interesting in general is the disassociation between phonetics and meaning in written Chinese. Like most know, Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages - although some may...
Something that's interesting in general is the disassociation between phonetics and meaning in written Chinese. Like most know, Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages - although some may not know the extent. Even the grammar is different, it's just masked by the fact that many written works in Cantonese areas are in the Mandarin style. Both use the same written system.
In general, written Chinese has little to do with the phonetics of the writing system. There are hints, as most compound characters are phonetic-semantic compounds. But with the passing of time, many of those no longer make any sense on their own. Nor is it all that consistent. 完了 = wanle, 了解 = liaojie. So 了's pronunciation just depends on what's around it (not a context free grammar, I suppose).
This makes learning it a bitch, but does have some interesting properties. Someone who can read chinese can read everything from 600s Tang dyansty poems, to Heian era Japanese poems, to local Fujianese literature, to standarin modern Mandarin, to limited modern Japanese (I can mostly get the gist of the insurance brochure that came with a lens I bought in Japan, for instance, because it's so Kanji heavy).
This wouldn't be possible in a phonetic language. You can't read Beowulf if you know modern English, because the sounds are completely different. A mandarin speaker today would pronounce a Tang dynasty poem completely different than a contemporary 600s reader, but because the language is divorced from phonetics, that's doesn't impede your understanding of it.
I think you're downplaying the differences between Classical/Literary Chinese and modern Mandarin -- there are pretty big grammar differences and semantics there! Someone who's fluent in modern...
I think you're downplaying the differences between Classical/Literary Chinese and modern Mandarin -- there are pretty big grammar differences and semantics there! Someone who's fluent in modern Mandarin but has had zero education on how to read Classical Chinese is not going to understand as much as you imply. The use of hanzi does make it easier for the characters whose meanings have not changed, but it doesn't make reading it trivial -- it's more similar to a modern English speaker reading Chaucer.
Which is entirely doable by a modern English speaker without much assistance. They'll struggle, but they can do it, and most of the barrier is just needing to read things phonetically (and in ways...
it's more similar to a modern English speaker reading Chaucer.
Which is entirely doable by a modern English speaker without much assistance. They'll struggle, but they can do it, and most of the barrier is just needing to read things phonetically (and in ways that modern speakers probably wouldn't choose to use even though those letters still do make those sounds -- there's a lot of Y as a vowel where we'd use I today, for example) because spelling wasn't standardized yet. Whereas actual Old English, like Beowulf, is completely unintelligible, especially in written form. You'd have an easier time getting the gist as a native German speaker than a native English speaker.
And it's Beowulf that's comparably old to the Classical Chinese texts we're discussing, not Chaucer.
You are correct in what you say about Beowulf in this comment. I thought the original comment made it seem too much like Classical Chinese is easily intelligible by anyone who can read hanzi,...
You are correct in what you say about Beowulf in this comment. I thought the original comment made it seem too much like Classical Chinese is easily intelligible by anyone who can read hanzi, which is not accurate. As a result, I decided to make a comparison that I think better reflected the amount of intelligibility Classical Chinese has for someone who speaks modern Mandarin, and thus I brought up Chaucer.
You absolutely underestimate how hard it is for a modern English speaker to read Chaucer without training and/or extensive footnotes -- they absolutely can't just "read things phonetically" to get the gist. Yes, there's plenty of words that you'll recognize, but changes in grammar and semantics since then will inevitably leave a speaker of modern English unable to understand large portions of the text unless accompanied by extensive footnotes or education in how to read texts like this. Modern English speakers generally need education and/or footnotes to understand even Shakespeare's work, and his work is written in language far closer to what we speak and write today than Chaucer.
You're exaggerating. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer are taught in high school literature classes. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is Middle English that's effectively unintelligible to modern...
You're exaggerating. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer are taught in high school literature classes. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is Middle English that's effectively unintelligible to modern speakers, but Chaucer was later and spoke a dialect that was more directly ancestral to modern English. Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur is also relatively intelligible despite being Middle English, although that one is such a door stopper it's not taught in high school.
High school literature classes are what we call "education" -- the guidance of a teacher is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to understand these texts. We actually read Sir Gawain and the...
High school literature classes are what we call "education" -- the guidance of a teacher is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to understand these texts. We actually read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my high school lit class too! The point is that if you hand one of these texts to a literate but not well-read modern English speaker, they will absolutely not fully understand the text. They'll be able to glean a lot from the vocab they recognize along with some educated guesses, but they'll also miss a lot. Even an above-average high schooler absolutely needs guidance from their teacher and/or footnotes to glean huge portions of the meaning of even something as modern as Shakespeare. One's ability to understand these texts as a modern English speaker relies on knowing, at minimum, a lot of higher-level vocab, and that's something that's generally only acquired through formal education or very avid reading of English literature.
For the record, I guarantee you Chinese high schoolers are also reading works written in Classical Chinese in their literature courses. So I stand by the comparison.
A high school education is kind of a baseline for literacy, though. Of course someone who's barely literate won't be able to do it. And the point wasn't even about the difficulty, it was that our...
A high school education is kind of a baseline for literacy, though. Of course someone who's barely literate won't be able to do it.
And the point wasn't even about the difficulty, it was that our cutoff for a modern speaker to struggle through an old text is the later end of Middle English, while Chinese is similarly difficult going another half millennium or so back, instead of completely unintelligible.
A high school education is absolutely not a baseline for literacy. High school literature classes aren't teaching people how to read to the extent that anyone who hasn't taken one is "barely...
A high school education is absolutely not a baseline for literacy. High school literature classes aren't teaching people how to read to the extent that anyone who hasn't taken one is "barely literate". The average 6th grader is able to read well enough that it's an insult to call them "barely literate".
It is cool that Chinese characters can allow for meaning to be gleaned from a text despite it being written in a different language -- sometimes even over large timespans (if you modernize texts written in older forms of the characters, but that's a separate issue). I don't dispute that. But claiming that a literate Chinese person with no education on how to read Classical Chinese could pick up a text in Classical Chinese and easily understand it is wrong. It's almost as wrong as claiming they could do the same with a text written in Japanese.
I majored in Chinese in college, and we had a separate class on Classical Chinese because it is sufficiently different that what we learned in our normal Chinese reading classes that it basically requires learning from scratch. Perhaps a well-educated Chinese speaker who knew lots of formal vocabulary in modern Mandarin that's more similar to the Classical forms would have a slightly easier time, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a text written with the same script in a different language. Hanzi definitely makes it more recognizable to a modern Chinese person than a phonetic representation would, but it does not make reading such a text easy because the grammar and semantics are still sufficiently different.
That is an absolutely insane take. The average 6th grader cannot read on the level expected of an adult. Stopping an education at the 6th grade is an easy way to a life of poverty and crime in...
A high school education is absolutely not a baseline for literacy. High school literature classes aren't teaching people how to read to the extent that anyone who hasn't taken one is "barely literate". The average 6th grader is able to read well enough that it's an insult to call them "barely literate".
That is an absolutely insane take. The average 6th grader cannot read on the level expected of an adult. Stopping an education at the 6th grade is an easy way to a life of poverty and crime in large part because of how stunted your literacy is. It cuts off so many avenues of employment it's not even funny, and makes it easier for the unscrupulous to exploit you.
Majoring in Chinese as a non-native speaker is not the same as going through school as a native speaker. You didn't spend your entire life immersed in the language, and you didn't have twelve years of school taught in it before even starting on that college major. Native speakers do. And it's well known that early written English becomes unintelligible to native speakers unusually early because invasions by and contact with vikings and, later, the Normans changed the language quite a bit over the course of the medieval period, while Chinese intelligibility goes unusually far back. Not as far as, for example, Icelandic, but still unusually far. It's more than just muddling through by recognizing the ideographs. The fact that you even had a class on Classical Chinese should tell you as much. English majors do not get similar classes on Old English. That's more of a thing for history majors in a very narrow part of the field.
Not quite? I just searched UT's catalog since I saw a headline about UT, but I'm sure it isn't rare. Respectfully, I think you and @sparksbet have been talking past each other for a bit now. Might...
The fact that you even had a class on Classical Chinese should tell you as much. English majors do not get similar classes on Old English. That's more of a thing for history majors in a very narrow part of the field.
Not quite?
E 326K. The Literature of the Middle Ages in Translation.
Romances, chronicles, legends, tales, and plays by English, Celtic, and Continental writers. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.
E 326L. Survey of Middle English Language and Literature.
Language and literature from 1100 to 1500. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.
E 364M. History of the English Language.
Same as ~Linguistics 364M~. Development of sounds, forms, and vocabulary of the English language from its origins to the present. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.
E 364P. Old English.
An introduction to Old English with sufficient grammar for a reading knowledge of Old English texts. A course in language, not in linguistics. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. Prerequisite: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.
I just searched UT's catalog since I saw a headline about UT, but I'm sure it isn't rare.
Respectfully, I think you and @sparksbet have been talking past each other for a bit now. Might be time to agree to disagree?
Hard agree. Classical Chinese - basically anything pre written vernacular... introduced in the early 20th century - is almost unintelligible if you haven't specifically learned how to read it. You...
Hard agree. Classical Chinese - basically anything pre written vernacular... introduced in the early 20th century - is almost unintelligible if you haven't specifically learned how to read it. You essentially had an archaic written language that didn't evolve much as the spoken language moved at a much faster pace (and was inherently more diverse). The analogy is almost like spoken romance languages vs Latin being used in official written documents.
Yeah, I don't want to act like the hanzi don't contribute anything to readability, I can recognize characters in Japanese text that help me out and my Chinese isn't even that good. But there's a...
Yeah, I don't want to act like the hanzi don't contribute anything to readability, I can recognize characters in Japanese text that help me out and my Chinese isn't even that good. But there's a reason there was a huge push to write vernacular Chinese at the turn of the century -- writing in Classical Chinese is extremely different from written or especially spoken Mandarin! It's something that has to be taught.
The regularity of Mandarin blows my mind. When you have grammatical agreement it isn’t the gender B.S. from French and German but how the “of” in a construction “<number> of <noun>” depends on if...
The regularity of Mandarin blows my mind. When you have grammatical agreement it isn’t the gender B.S. from French and German but how the “of” in a construction “<number> of <noun>” depends on if the noun is something long and thin, flat, or such. It feels to me like an artificial language such as
This is a common misconception about Mandarin tbh. It's true that when you start learning it's a huge relief to not have to deal with tense or case or other conjugation. But it has lots of...
This is a common misconception about Mandarin tbh. It's true that when you start learning it's a huge relief to not have to deal with tense or case or other conjugation. But it has lots of complexity and difficult grammar; it's just stuff that's less obvious when you're starting out. Learning to speak Mandarin well enough to make sentences that sound natural is hard, and often the reasons it sounds unnatural are harder to explain to you than using the wrong conjugation would be in a language that has those. There are massive books just on how the sentence-final particle 了 is used.
Also trust me measure words are not quite as easy as they seem from the outside. There are a lot of them and they're not all as sensible and predictable as the ones based on an object's shape, unfortunately.
Minor quibble Not true, about 20% of Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations. These are the 多音字 (duō yīnzì). Far less irritating than Japanese though, where probably close to all...
Minor quibble
This had two major effects. First, while in any Chinese language each character is associated with a single way to speak it, in Japanese every kanji can be pronounced in multiple, very different ways.
Not true, about 20% of Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations. These are the 多音字 (duō yīnzì). Far less irritating than Japanese though, where probably close to all characters have multiple pronunciations.
That said I am amazed at how much comprehension I can get by running Chinese text through the unihan database and showing the readings next to each character. I know I miss a lot but with the...
That said I am amazed at how much comprehension I can get by running Chinese text through the unihan database and showing the readings next to each character. I know I miss a lot but with the assistance I am doing as well at “reading a language I don’t know” as I’ve done for Spanish, Dutch, Czech, etc.
To be fair, the vast majority of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations are much smaller differences than you'll see between Japanese readings. Most of them iirc are just tone changes.
To be fair, the vast majority of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations are much smaller differences than you'll see between Japanese readings. Most of them iirc are just tone changes.
Man, I wish I could put the entire world on pause for a few years so I could just dive in and teach myself Japanese. It's such a beautiful language, and I would love to further immerse myself in...
Man, I wish I could put the entire world on pause for a few years so I could just dive in and teach myself Japanese. It's such a beautiful language, and I would love to further immerse myself in their culture and media. As a film buff, to be able to watch old Japanese flicks without subtitles would be an absolute dream. I just don't have the bandwidth or resources to learn it properly.
My husband has been learning Japanese for several years now. We watch streaming television with Japanese audio. He listens to jpop. He swears by anki flash cards and language exchange practice....
My husband has been learning Japanese for several years now. We watch streaming television with Japanese audio. He listens to jpop. He swears by anki flash cards and language exchange practice. But it's a significant hobby and he travels to Japan semi frequently
I have been casually learning Japanese for a few months in preparation for a trip this summer. One advantage I have over other English-speaking learners is my advanced knowledge of Korean, the language most similar to Japanese. The author correctly notes the features of Japanese that are unique, even when compared to modern Korean. How he can enjoy these "features" is a mystery to me!
Centuries ago, Korean used to have the same problems: lots of shoehorning of pure Korean words into Chinese characters. But through a series of reforms, Korean is now commonly written with a very logical alphabet. As I learn Japanese, I am frustrated by the points the author celebrates, and I thank the inventor of the Korean alphabet for having made my ancestral language much more sensible!
Unfortunately Japan has a much higher literacy rate than Korea did when it redid its writing system so the chance of a similar reformation is basically none. It would require unthinkable political power to change it now.
Would it? I thought Japanese schools teach romaji. It wouldn't be that hard to just switch to the Latin alphabet. Just require teaching starting in 2025, all signs to include romaji by 2030, all government forms to be in romaji by 2035, etc, etc, etc.
Not to mention that they could just require the use of katakana instead of kanji.
Can you imagine what the nationalists would say? "USA is trying to assert their power over us, just as they did in WWII. They think their writing system is superior, but we won't let them erase our Japanese culture!"
I googled online discussions on this topic, and let's just say, even in English, there are a lot of impassioned conservative voices saying how the existing system is fine, even superior, to any alternative.
Picture the reaction you would see in your own country if they required everyone to switch from the Latin alphabet to katakana.
Edit: come to think of it, even a spelling reform of English to make it phonetic within the existing Latin alphabet is unthinkable, let alone switching to a whole other writing system
The change I'm envisioning is a move to kana-for-everything, not romaji which would be an even harder change to sell (with no major benefits for the Japanese language).
But with the high literacy rates kanji are seen as part of the culture/national identity at this point. It would be like the UK government making a new official spelling system for English, but worse.
With the insane amount of homophones Japanese has, trying to divorce the language from the kanji the words originate from would be immensely difficult and would benefit no one except for outsiders trying to learn Japanese as a second language.
Korean and spoken Japanese have the same thing with homophones. They're not a huge problem in practice.
The cultural value and current dominance of kanji is the only major blocker.
From the blog post:
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Something that's interesting in general is the disassociation between phonetics and meaning in written Chinese. Like most know, Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages - although some may not know the extent. Even the grammar is different, it's just masked by the fact that many written works in Cantonese areas are in the Mandarin style. Both use the same written system.
In general, written Chinese has little to do with the phonetics of the writing system. There are hints, as most compound characters are phonetic-semantic compounds. But with the passing of time, many of those no longer make any sense on their own. Nor is it all that consistent. 完了 = wanle, 了解 = liaojie. So 了's pronunciation just depends on what's around it (not a context free grammar, I suppose).
This makes learning it a bitch, but does have some interesting properties. Someone who can read chinese can read everything from 600s Tang dyansty poems, to Heian era Japanese poems, to local Fujianese literature, to standarin modern Mandarin, to limited modern Japanese (I can mostly get the gist of the insurance brochure that came with a lens I bought in Japan, for instance, because it's so Kanji heavy).
This wouldn't be possible in a phonetic language. You can't read Beowulf if you know modern English, because the sounds are completely different. A mandarin speaker today would pronounce a Tang dynasty poem completely different than a contemporary 600s reader, but because the language is divorced from phonetics, that's doesn't impede your understanding of it.
I think you're downplaying the differences between Classical/Literary Chinese and modern Mandarin -- there are pretty big grammar differences and semantics there! Someone who's fluent in modern Mandarin but has had zero education on how to read Classical Chinese is not going to understand as much as you imply. The use of hanzi does make it easier for the characters whose meanings have not changed, but it doesn't make reading it trivial -- it's more similar to a modern English speaker reading Chaucer.
Which is entirely doable by a modern English speaker without much assistance. They'll struggle, but they can do it, and most of the barrier is just needing to read things phonetically (and in ways that modern speakers probably wouldn't choose to use even though those letters still do make those sounds -- there's a lot of Y as a vowel where we'd use I today, for example) because spelling wasn't standardized yet. Whereas actual Old English, like Beowulf, is completely unintelligible, especially in written form. You'd have an easier time getting the gist as a native German speaker than a native English speaker.
And it's Beowulf that's comparably old to the Classical Chinese texts we're discussing, not Chaucer.
You are correct in what you say about Beowulf in this comment. I thought the original comment made it seem too much like Classical Chinese is easily intelligible by anyone who can read hanzi, which is not accurate. As a result, I decided to make a comparison that I think better reflected the amount of intelligibility Classical Chinese has for someone who speaks modern Mandarin, and thus I brought up Chaucer.
You absolutely underestimate how hard it is for a modern English speaker to read Chaucer without training and/or extensive footnotes -- they absolutely can't just "read things phonetically" to get the gist. Yes, there's plenty of words that you'll recognize, but changes in grammar and semantics since then will inevitably leave a speaker of modern English unable to understand large portions of the text unless accompanied by extensive footnotes or education in how to read texts like this. Modern English speakers generally need education and/or footnotes to understand even Shakespeare's work, and his work is written in language far closer to what we speak and write today than Chaucer.
You're exaggerating. Both Shakespeare and Chaucer are taught in high school literature classes. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is Middle English that's effectively unintelligible to modern speakers, but Chaucer was later and spoke a dialect that was more directly ancestral to modern English. Thomas Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur is also relatively intelligible despite being Middle English, although that one is such a door stopper it's not taught in high school.
High school literature classes are what we call "education" -- the guidance of a teacher is exactly the sort of thing that's needed to understand these texts. We actually read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my high school lit class too! The point is that if you hand one of these texts to a literate but not well-read modern English speaker, they will absolutely not fully understand the text. They'll be able to glean a lot from the vocab they recognize along with some educated guesses, but they'll also miss a lot. Even an above-average high schooler absolutely needs guidance from their teacher and/or footnotes to glean huge portions of the meaning of even something as modern as Shakespeare. One's ability to understand these texts as a modern English speaker relies on knowing, at minimum, a lot of higher-level vocab, and that's something that's generally only acquired through formal education or very avid reading of English literature.
For the record, I guarantee you Chinese high schoolers are also reading works written in Classical Chinese in their literature courses. So I stand by the comparison.
A high school education is kind of a baseline for literacy, though. Of course someone who's barely literate won't be able to do it.
And the point wasn't even about the difficulty, it was that our cutoff for a modern speaker to struggle through an old text is the later end of Middle English, while Chinese is similarly difficult going another half millennium or so back, instead of completely unintelligible.
A high school education is absolutely not a baseline for literacy. High school literature classes aren't teaching people how to read to the extent that anyone who hasn't taken one is "barely literate". The average 6th grader is able to read well enough that it's an insult to call them "barely literate".
It is cool that Chinese characters can allow for meaning to be gleaned from a text despite it being written in a different language -- sometimes even over large timespans (if you modernize texts written in older forms of the characters, but that's a separate issue). I don't dispute that. But claiming that a literate Chinese person with no education on how to read Classical Chinese could pick up a text in Classical Chinese and easily understand it is wrong. It's almost as wrong as claiming they could do the same with a text written in Japanese.
I majored in Chinese in college, and we had a separate class on Classical Chinese because it is sufficiently different that what we learned in our normal Chinese reading classes that it basically requires learning from scratch. Perhaps a well-educated Chinese speaker who knew lots of formal vocabulary in modern Mandarin that's more similar to the Classical forms would have a slightly easier time, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a text written with the same script in a different language. Hanzi definitely makes it more recognizable to a modern Chinese person than a phonetic representation would, but it does not make reading such a text easy because the grammar and semantics are still sufficiently different.
That is an absolutely insane take. The average 6th grader cannot read on the level expected of an adult. Stopping an education at the 6th grade is an easy way to a life of poverty and crime in large part because of how stunted your literacy is. It cuts off so many avenues of employment it's not even funny, and makes it easier for the unscrupulous to exploit you.
Majoring in Chinese as a non-native speaker is not the same as going through school as a native speaker. You didn't spend your entire life immersed in the language, and you didn't have twelve years of school taught in it before even starting on that college major. Native speakers do. And it's well known that early written English becomes unintelligible to native speakers unusually early because invasions by and contact with vikings and, later, the Normans changed the language quite a bit over the course of the medieval period, while Chinese intelligibility goes unusually far back. Not as far as, for example, Icelandic, but still unusually far. It's more than just muddling through by recognizing the ideographs. The fact that you even had a class on Classical Chinese should tell you as much. English majors do not get similar classes on Old English. That's more of a thing for history majors in a very narrow part of the field.
Not quite?
I just searched UT's catalog since I saw a headline about UT, but I'm sure it isn't rare.
Respectfully, I think you and @sparksbet have been talking past each other for a bit now. Might be time to agree to disagree?
Hard agree. Classical Chinese - basically anything pre written vernacular... introduced in the early 20th century - is almost unintelligible if you haven't specifically learned how to read it. You essentially had an archaic written language that didn't evolve much as the spoken language moved at a much faster pace (and was inherently more diverse). The analogy is almost like spoken romance languages vs Latin being used in official written documents.
Yeah, I don't want to act like the hanzi don't contribute anything to readability, I can recognize characters in Japanese text that help me out and my Chinese isn't even that good. But there's a reason there was a huge push to write vernacular Chinese at the turn of the century -- writing in Classical Chinese is extremely different from written or especially spoken Mandarin! It's something that has to be taught.
The regularity of Mandarin blows my mind. When you have grammatical agreement it isn’t the gender B.S. from French and German but how the “of” in a construction “<number> of <noun>” depends on if the noun is something long and thin, flat, or such. It feels to me like an artificial language such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
which you might be able to read with some comprehension immediately because it is a cleaned up Latin.
This is a common misconception about Mandarin tbh. It's true that when you start learning it's a huge relief to not have to deal with tense or case or other conjugation. But it has lots of complexity and difficult grammar; it's just stuff that's less obvious when you're starting out. Learning to speak Mandarin well enough to make sentences that sound natural is hard, and often the reasons it sounds unnatural are harder to explain to you than using the wrong conjugation would be in a language that has those. There are massive books just on how the sentence-final particle 了 is used.
Also trust me measure words are not quite as easy as they seem from the outside. There are a lot of them and they're not all as sensible and predictable as the ones based on an object's shape, unfortunately.
Minor quibble
Not true, about 20% of Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations. These are the 多音字 (duō yīnzì). Far less irritating than Japanese though, where probably close to all characters have multiple pronunciations.
Here’s a little article that gives some examples:
https://www.digmandarin.com/duo-yin-zi-polyphones-chinese-characters.html
That said I am amazed at how much comprehension I can get by running Chinese text through the unihan database and showing the readings next to each character. I know I miss a lot but with the assistance I am doing as well at “reading a language I don’t know” as I’ve done for Spanish, Dutch, Czech, etc.
To be fair, the vast majority of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations are much smaller differences than you'll see between Japanese readings. Most of them iirc are just tone changes.
PBS’s NOVA has two episodes about the history of writing and associated technologies.
Man, I wish I could put the entire world on pause for a few years so I could just dive in and teach myself Japanese. It's such a beautiful language, and I would love to further immerse myself in their culture and media. As a film buff, to be able to watch old Japanese flicks without subtitles would be an absolute dream. I just don't have the bandwidth or resources to learn it properly.
My husband has been learning Japanese for several years now. We watch streaming television with Japanese audio. He listens to jpop. He swears by anki flash cards and language exchange practice. But it's a significant hobby and he travels to Japan semi frequently