BWL

I remembered my Japanese language teacher in university, Soeda-sensei who, upon teaching a new kanji would try to explain its etymology or at least the various radicals that make up the character it its entirety.

For example for the character for "house" which is "ie" or 家 (sometimes read as "uchi" but this tends to be written in hiragana nowadays), he would explain that it was made up of two characters; 宀  meaning “roof” and 豕 meaning "pig" or "boar". He would then explain how in ancient China people often raised their pigs indoors and that is why the character for "pig" with a "roof" over it became the word for "house", as pork was and still is an important part of the Chinese diet.

Anyone else has interesting stories to share about learning kanji?

As demanded, I created new subforums for teaching for every individual language. I hope that meets your requests! If not, please let me know!

I am happy you are willing to contribute to make this place even more awesome! Thank you so much for the suggestions.

Thanks for taking our opinions into consideration! It's pretty awesome that you've made this forum a real place for interactions and discussions on language-learning on all levels!

After chatting with a friend from Henan who almost exclusively used 说, it seems that both are accepted usage. The difference is purely dialectal / idiolectal usage. Northern varieties of Mandarin normally used shuo 说 while Southern dialects use jiang 讲. but both are officially accepted with no discrimination. I guess that more central regions like Nanjing would regularly use both in free variation.

This question sound very interesting too!  I have learned that languages have genealogy like human consanguinity relationship does which we call 'family tree'. Learning from this idea of language similarities (or differences) we can assume that some languages sound similarly if they fall below the same language family. However, they sound differently if they aren't.

Languages sound similarly and its so fun and easy to learn  language  if the new language is similar to the first language learned. In the Philippines, the sounds of the English language is similar to the sounds of Tagalog/Filipino but to learn German, Russian or French will be more challenging.

Languages sound differently perhaps will depend on reception of the listeners but for keen observers, the sounds may just be the similar if not the same. The human language has the common vowels and consonant sounds but some combinations of them vary in pronunciation. Here in the Philippines, we have 'ng' consonant combination pronounced as 'nang' like 'sang' in English. 'V' consonant for German language is pronounced as 'f' like in volkswagen.

Whatever it is, the bottomline is that we need to learn the similarities and differences of language when we will try to learn it.

Happy thoughts everyone!

Tagalog was one of the the first languages I learned. I love the "nga" sounds, we use them a lot in Malay and Indonesian as well! I tried to teach a French friend how to pronounce "mga ngisngis" meaning "giggles" or "little grins" and we ended up laughing at his failed attempts! Really while there are some sounds that overlap and are found in most languages, a few unique sounds are limited to specific languages in certain geographical areas for example, or to those languages that belong to the same family.

There are two main groups:

European Spanish and Latin American Spanish.

There are at least 4 types of European Spanish accents:

1) Northern (Aragon and the Basque country)

2)Central or Castillian (this is what most people think of when they talk about European Spanish). Penelope Cruz has this accent.

3)Southern or Andalusian (Antonio Banderas has a very strong Andalusian accent when he speaks Spanish)

4) Canarian (not so commonly heard but because so many immigrants left the Canary Islands during the last 200 years and settled in the Caribbean and Latin American, this dialect has influenced Latin American Spanish a lot)

Now in Latin America there at least 6 types of accents (with many local variations)

1.) Mexican Spanish (most North Americans know this one the best and a parody of the accent can be heard by watching Speedy Gonzales cartoons!)

2.) Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela)

3.) Argentinian, Uruguayan and Paraguayan

4.) Chilean

5.) Andean-Ecuadorian (influenced by Quechua and other native Andean languages)

6.) Central American (Guatemala, Costa Rica etc.)

My favorite is the Argentinian accent.

I was just reading another thread about the significance of idioms in human languages and I was thinking about some of the extremely interesting idioms in Japanese involving body parts.

They are very commonly used but may seem bizarre even to native speakers of Chinese and Korean, their immediate regional neighbors. Unlike English expressions "He kicked the bucket", "he spilled the beans" etc. these idiomatic expressions are used even in formal, written language and have been an essential part of the Japanese linguistic identity for centuries if not millennia.

Some common ones:

頭が切れる (Atama ga kireru) - to be smart (One's head can cut)

頭が下がる (Atama ga sagaru) - to respect (One's head hangs downwards)

頭が古い (Atama ga furui) - to be old-fashioned (One's head is old)

頭に血が上る (Atama ni chi ga noboru) - to get excited (Blood goes up to one's head)

頭が固い (Atama ga katai) - to be stubborn (One's head is hard)

There are hundreds more of these fabulous expressions!

Lakoff and Johnson's book is fantastic. If we want to accept that idioms and metaphors are a fundamental mechanism of the human mind then all it takes is to compare the infinitely rich collection of metaphors from all the diverse languages in the world.

The sheer brilliance and creativity of idioms used by various unrelated languages is mind-boggling. For example there is a Native Athapaskan language spoken in Alaska (I forget which one but I think it could be be either Ahtna or Dena'ina) where the traditional way to say "He has a birthmark" is literally translated as "A ghost slapped him". How's that for creativity?

The Japanese say of a person who has many friends or is well-connnected, "Kao ga hiroi" which literally means "He has a wide face" while the French say "Il a le bras long" (He has the long arm).

Idioms often reveal the peculiarities of the culture in which they evolved. They are true masterpieces of centuries of human thought.

I remember Zeitgeist. Also, Weltschmerz seems to be becoming an increasingly common part of psychologists' and philosophers' vocabulary, even among English speaking ones.

I never liked the word "gunk". It sounds just as disgusting as what it is supposed to mean and to represent. The sound symbolism in this word is really effective to represent something wet, sticky and disgusting.

It's definitely an American versus British convention. I spent my formative years in Malaysia and the English we learned was definitely very strongly based on UK pronunciations and spellings. Even now, Malaysians never pronounce "can't" in the American way (rhyming with "scant") but always according to RP pronunciations.

We definitely spell "cancelled" with two "Ls".

Absolutely! When I was teaching Malay to adult native speakers of French and German, I always emphasized two things, why I called the kinaesthetic way of learning and the context-related.

By kinaesthetic I mean when I tell the student to sit down, I use the Malay word for "sit" and told them to repeat the action several times and keep repeating the same verb over and over again such that their brain develops this hair-trigger response to associate the act of sitting with "duduk", the Malay word for "to sit". I then make the students take part in role-playing (ordering a meal at a restaurant, making a phone call, switching on the computer, etc.) with all the necessary words (I start with single words and then gradually move on to more complex sentences as they improve) to accompany the actions.

Another method is to teach full sentences (with real world applications) rather than making the students memorize word lists. By learning full sentences, not  only do they get to apply what they learn , but they find it easier to remember the meanings and specific connected usages of words and phrases.

I used to like learning Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin. They were developed with real world languages as inspiration (apparently mainly Finnish for Quenya and Gaelic for Sindarin). I liked the sound of Quenya and thought the agglutinative structure was really like that of a real language and not a fantasy creation.

I also love the elegant Tengwar script that Tolkien developed for his Elven languages. My favorite however, is the beautiful vertical Sarati script. According to Tolkien's mythology, Sarati was invented by the Elf Rúmil. It has an elegant look, usually written vertically like the Classical Mongolian script. It could also apparently be written in boustrophedon style, alternating from left-to-right to right-to-left from line to line.

Catalan is a language on it's own. In medieval times it used to be very close to Provencal, the literary language of Southern France and the renowned troubadours.

In the last century or so, the various regional languages in Spain especially Catalan and Galician or Gallego have come under strong Castillian influence and many among the young only know Castillian Spanish, especially in major cities.

Speaking Spanish would be the best option, as almost everyone will understand you. In areas like Valencia, which happens to be officially bilingual, Spanish seems to have become the main language and even native Valencian children speak more Spanish than Valencian (a dialect of Catalan, but claimed by Valencian purists to be a separate language).

This is a really cute and adorable way to learn. Perfect for kids (and the young at heart). I think while pinyin and the bopomofo is essential to get a firm grasp of Mandarin phonetics at the initial stage, there will come a stage when memorizing hanzi will be more critical.

A friend of mine, a French woman who was traveling with some Norwegian friends in the late 80s in Northern China. They all spoke very basic Mandarin and when they tried to communicate with the locals, there were inevitable mishaps in communication and despite knowing that my friends were not fluent in Mandarin, the locals (shop owners, bus drivers etc.) kept trying to write Chinese characters on pieces of paper or traced them with a finger in the air in an attempt to communicate. The usage of Hanzi is so ubiquitous and omnipresent in Chinese culture that the Chinese even think that foreigners will understand their meanings!

I do agree that there are many resources online, some free and some not that are readily available for language learners. For a language like Chinese that is radically different from European languages ,it is essential that learners hear the words and pronunciations. This is to allow them to familiarize themselves  with the different tones and pronunciations (I have American friends who kept mixing up the z, zh, j, q, c and ch sounds in Mandarin, although acceptable in South China, is considered incorrect in Beijing and the rest of the Mandarin-speaking areas).

I was wondering if Germans still learn how to read and write in that heavy Gothic-looking Fraktur alphabet that was common in German-speaking countries until the early 20th century?

I mean are there people who still study and learn it for artistic and historical reasons?

You can learn a lot about how a people perceive their language by knowing that they even have an "ugliest word of the year" !

I think that in German, due to the agglutinative nature of the nouns, you could end up with a limitless number of words and word combinations! It just seems to be what's the most fashionable or en vogue word at the moment that gets everyone's attention.

I started learning English when I was around 5 years old. It is a compulsory subject in kindergartens in Malaysia and almost all children will learn at least some English in their kindergarten years. I think we are fortunate to be exposed to the language at such an early age.

The differences I see between Malaysia and neighboring Thailand are huge. In Thailand, students learn English in elementary school but the syllabus is very basic and really of no practical use. As a result most Thai students never master English unlike Malaysians who use it as a second language. Early and concise education is the key.

I never really mastered the use of the elevated keigo in Japanese. Once my cousin was in Japan and happened to ask a Buddhist nun the way to a particular shrine in the Kyoto area. She told him something and kept asking "Go-zonji desu ka? Go-zonji desu ka?".

He was a bit confused and (hours later, after managing to locate the shrine) asked me if I knew what this meant .I told him "Go-zonji desu ka?" is the keigo or honorific/elevated form of "Shitte imasu ka?".

Here, "go-zonji da" is used as a repectful way of asking if you know or are familiar with someone or something.

Anyone else have any other examples of keigo usage in real life?

Most people are aware of the existence of various dialects in China. While Americans know Mandarin and Cantonese, there are in fact many, many more dialects in China that are so different from both Mandarin and Cantonese, the locals in these areas have to actually learn standard Mandarin Chinese like a foreign language. There are even some areas where to this day, Mandarin is not commonly spoken and visitors might be met with amused looks when they try communicating in Mandarin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese

The article above from Wikipedia, with the accompanying map provides a clear dialect map of modern China. There are 7 major dialect division, with hundreds of local variants. Yes you read correctly, HUNDREDS of local variants.

Today, I'll write a little about my native dialect, which is called Min (闽). The Min dialects are the main dialects spoken in Fujian, Taiwan and eastern Guangdong. There are at least 9 local variations (yes, 9) each with many local subdialects and accents - so a person speaking the same Min dialect variant from two nearby villages might have totally different accents but can still understand each other (more or less). The 9 variants are completely UNINTELLIGIBLE. They're as different as English and Dutch and German. The local village variants are however as different as say, Irish English and Southern Californian, which means they are similar enough to be understandable yet will sound very weird when compared to each other.

My family came from an area called Zhangzhou, 漳州. I speak Southern Min or Minnanhua  閩南語. There are 4 local accents of Minnanhua; , Xiamen 廈門, Quanzhou 泉州, Zhangzhou, 漳州 and Taiwanese. Put one person from each of these 4 regions together in a room and ask them to not talk to each other in Mandarin; they will speak in Minnanhua. Imagine a posh Englishman, an Australian from the outback, a Scotsman from the Highlands and a West Virginian hill-billy trying to communicate with each other. That's how they will sound like to each other!

Now a few interesting facts about (my local variant) of Minnanhua.

Minnanhua and the Wu dialect group (the dialects of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Suzhou) are the only Chinese dialects that have voiced stops - that's the b,d,g and j sounds just like in English, not like in Mandarin. The word for "No" in my dialect is "Bo" pronounced exactly like the French "beau". It is not pronounced as in Mandarin.

There are between 6-8 tones (depending on the local variant) and they have tone sandhi. meaning that the tones change (yes, they CHANGE) when the words occur alone or in a phrase. I will go into this later.

Also, many words have two forms - a literary form (like the onyomi in Japanese, used in phrases, literary words, some formal names, technical words and fixed Classical Chinese expressions) and the colloquial form (like the Japanese kunyomi - used when the characters are spoken in isolation)

Some common words (compare them with Mandarin and Cantonese just to see how different they are). I will not transcribe the tones because Chinese dialects (except Cantonese) are not normally written down so most people have no idea how to transcribe non-Mandarin tones!

Numbers:

1- tsit (colloquial) , it (literary)

2- noh (colloquial), ji (literary)

3- sa

4- si

5- go

6- lak

7- chhit

8- peh

9- kau

10- tsap

An example of sentence structure:

English: He cannot see.

Minnan: i khòaⁿ bē tioh (伊看未著)

Mandarin: tā kàn bù dào (他看不到)

(Yes, even the word for "he" is different!).

The pronouns (I've put the Mandarin forms in brackets so you can make comparisons) are:

I - Goa (Wo)

You - Li (Ni)

He/she/it - I (Ta)

We - Goan or Lan - this is used in an exclusive and inclusive pronominal way (Wo men)

You all - Lin (Ni men)

They - In (Ta men)

Fish - Hi (Yu)

Dog - Kau (Gou)

Chicken - Ke (Ji)

Water - Tsui (Shui)

Sky - Ti (Tian)

Wind - Hong (Fung)

Man - Ta-po (Nanren)

Woman - Tsa-bo (Nuren)

Son - Hau seh (Erzi)

Daughter - Tsa-bo-kia (Nuer)

I love you - Goa ai li (Wo ai ni)

I want to eat rice - Goa beh tsia png (Wo yao chi fan)

Where is my car? - Goa e tsia ti to-lo? (Wo de zhe zai nar?)

Hello - Li ho (Ni hao)

What is your name? -Li kio sa-mih mia? (Ni jiao shenme ming?)

That's all for now. I'll post some more stuff later.

hi BWL

Wow, you speak so many languages! It's so nice to have you here in the forums! I hope you can even learn more languages here on linguaholic.com or at least improve your skills in some of the languages that you mentioned. I would love to hear about some characteristics of Fujianhua. If you could spread some knowledge about it in the Chinese Forum that would be absolutely amazing.

Absolutely! I would love to share some of my dialect! The thing is, there are 5 or 6 major dialects spoken in Fujian alone (there are apparently even more in Guangzhou and Guangxi - but that's typical in  Southern China). I speak what we call Minnan-hua  (闽南语). It is very different from Minbei (闽北) and Mindong (闽东). Furthermore (yes, take a deep breath...here we go) there are 4 variations of the Minnan dialect. Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Taiwan. All of them are mutually intelligible however.

I speak basically what is the Zhangzhou variant of Minnan as well as the Taiwanese variant (my maternal grandmother was from Taipei, Taiwan). My paternal great-grandparents came from villages around Zhangzhou, Southern Fujian.

I'll go into the specifics of the various dialects in the area as we go along.

French and Hindi are two of my working languages as well! I also love to listen to the sounds of Morisyen Creole! I have no idea what people say normally, so when I happen to meet Mauritians (there are a few families where I currently live), we end up speaking French and / or Hindi.

Bienvenue ! Aapki swaagat hai!

Brian

This is an interesting question. There are languages which are closely related that have very different sounds. Brazilian and European Portuguese, for example sound like totally different languages but are both dialects of Portuguese.

There are sounds that are unique to certain languages that do not exist in others. The Chinese tones, the  guttural sounds of Arabic, the retroflex sounds in Indian languages and the "Ll" sound in Welsh. These require specific types of articulations that make them sound unique to speakers of other languages. So yes, different languages sound really different.

Also the syllable structure is very different. You will recognize immediately that "mei tian" is a Mandarin Chinese word while "Krankenhaus" is definitely German.

All languages evolve and change overtime. So while languages like Chinese may be older than English - ancient Chinese was very different in terms of pronunciation and grammar from modern Chinese dialects including Mandarin.

If you mean the oldest recorded language, then Sumerian would win the prize. I definitely agree with the Aramaic. The modern dialects are still in use (although many are dying out) and the written forms survive as a liturgical language among some Christians in the Middle East.

Definitely when you start to dream in the foreign languages that you are learning.

That's a major milestone and the point of no return!