You need to learn one new alphabet for Korean and two alphabets + 2,000 Chinese characters for Japanese.
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So can all native Japanese read Chinese?
Not really. A Japanese person I know once told me she could get the gist of Chinese newspaper headlines but that’s about it.
Chinese characters convey concepts but they’re also always pronounced the same way in Chinese. Japanese didn’t use to have a written language and on one of their periodic invasions of China, they stole the Chinese writing system, retaining the idea that the characters stand for concepts. But this didn’t map onto the Japanese language, meaning that the same character is read totally differently in different contexts. For example 大, conveying the idea of largeness or greatness, is read as “oo” in 大きい (“ookii”, big) and as “dai” in 大学 (“dainaku”, university). Characters can have 3 or 4 standard readings and then unique nonstandard readings in single words on top of this. Even after this, there were bits of the Japanese language that couldn’t be written this way, so they invented a phonetic alphabet of 48 characters. It would be possible to write the entire Japanese language in this but they’re like nah, we’re good, let’s use this one we stole even though it doesn’t map onto our language properly. Not content with this, they proceeded to invent another, completely different phonetic alphabet of 48 characters purely used to write Japanicized foreign words.
By contrast, Korea also stole the Chinese alphabet, but it similarly mapped poorly onto spoken Korean and a lot of people were illiterate because learning 2,000 characters is fucking hard. So back in the 15th century, King Sejong the Great was like fuck this and invented an entirely new alphabet of 28 characters (now 24, a few got dropped) from scratch, in which all Korean is now written. Because it’s designed ground-up, it’s so logical that you can learn to pronounce written Korean in a matter of a few hours, although obviously you’ll have no clue what it means.
I haven’t tried to learn spoken Korean but from what I understand I think it’s only marginally easier than spoken Japanese. Both languages have formality rules that change the way you speak depending on who you’re speaking to, but Korean basically just involves whacking some suffixes onto verbs, while Japanese is a bit more involved.
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My daughter takes both Spanish and Chinese (freshman in high school - also took them in 8th grade). I told her when it came time to take a foreign language to go with one of those because they’d potentially be the most useful in the future, especially Spanish. Now she just really enjoys the classes and plans on taking them all through high school.
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Great call on the Spanish. Less sold on the Chinese.
One of the dumbest things I ever did in my life was learning French in school instead of Spanish. I really liked it, spent a ton of time on it, and became quite proficient. And it’s almost all gone now. If the same time and effort had been spent on Spanish, I’d be fluent right now and maintaining it would have been effortless.
Same here, but at least I can impress my wife once in a while with a correct Jeopardy response that stemmed from some vague memory of French.
Also, my daughter’s two best friends are Chinese American, so that is fun for her. Hey, as long as she’s enjoying some of her high school classes, that’s cool with me.
Realistically Chinese/Japanese isn’t useful for USAians in the same way that Spanish is, but it’s super interesting to just see the basics of an Asian language that’s very different from English and also it’s a gateway into learning about a different culture.
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French was one of my favorite classes. It’s now one of my biggest regrets. I wish someone slapped some sense into me and told me to drop it and focus on Spanish. In her case, I get it’s different since she has that covered. I’m not sure if I would feel the same regret if I did both.
This whole convo has me thinking about what I’d do if I had kids who were bilingual in English/Spanish because they learned both at home. I think one can argue for any of the three of the below, and I’m not sure which is best:
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Take Spanish anyway, to get formal instruction in grammar and become more effective communicators. After all, people who speak English take English. I guess the only problem is that Spanish classes in high school are not really designed with that goal in mind. Maybe they could skip a year or two somewhere and move on the AP stuff sooner.
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Take a 3rd language. Lots of different candidates here depending on goals, circumstances. I suppose Chinese would be a good default #3 unless one has a good reason to do something else.
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Skip non-English language instruction entirely unless the kid really, really wants to do it for some reason. Use that time to take other classes entirely.
I’m leaning towards #3. But I can see reasonable arguments for 1 and 2.
This is actually part of the reason Japan stuck with Chinese characters: it’s much easier to enforce class boundaries when only the upper crust of your feudal society can master writing. Plus, China was considered to be an extremely sophisticated culture, so you could impress people at court by throwing down Chinese in the same way that educated Europeans used Latin.
In principle, Japanese would be one of the easiest languages to learn if they simplified their writing system in the way that Korea did. Spelling and pronunciation is ridiculously simple. Grammar is a snap. Of course, that would be like asking the English-speaking world to streamline all their insane spellings and grammatical weridsies, we’d never stand for it.
Then why is Korean so hard? As far as ease of learning for English speakers they are both in the highest difficulty category (but as you said, Japanese is considered the harder of the two).
If simplifying the writing system only gets you to where Korean is, it still seems like Japanese would not be one of the easiest languages to learn.
I have no clue, really; I know basically nothing about Korean or Chinese. Between Chinese/Japanese/Korean, I would guess that Korean is by far the easiest to learn because it’s not tonal and you don’t need to learn thousands of characters. But I have no idea.
It seems like Korean pop culture is having a moment in the US, with Squid Game and Parasite and K-pop and K-dramas. I wonder if we’re going to see Gen-Z kids try to learn Korean in the same way that Gen-X nerds got into Japanese because of anime and videogames.
On the west coast, and especially in the sciences, Mandarin is legit useful, but obviously much less than Spanish.
in which a white man realizes racism is pervasive for the first time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/25/blm-banner-saved-by-white-man/
What he uncovered during his deep dive changed everything. “Oh my God, [racism] is there,” he says he discovered. “I was beyond devastated.”
Realizing that he had unknowingly harbored racist thoughts despite being raised by loving parents and having enjoyed working with dozens of Black people was deeply hurtful. “Somehow this was instilled in me … growing up in a society infected by white supremacy that keeps people ignorant and fighting each other,” he says. “It keeps us from seeing the beauty in all of us.” Supporting a neighborhood church’s loving message to its Black neighbors — in a world in which a surprising number of Christian churches worship a deity who embraced the poor and disenfranchised but still support intolerance — appealed to him. Colesville Presbyterian’s sign “countered the hundreds of years in which European churches disseminated the message that Black people were unworthy in God’s eyes,” Nix explains. “It was difficult accepting that [bigotry] is in me, too.”
oh yeah, one BLM sign should totally be enough.
When the sign-tampering started, Nix felt he was “on a righteous mission.” Actually seeing the tamperer helped him realize that mission “wasn’t just to make amends [to Black people] but to fight back against what had been done to me. White people were victimized, too, because we didn’t know we were being taught. I never knew about the Tulsa massacre. Why didn’t I learn about it in school?”
hmmmmmm… not sure where this is going but probably not good
Nix sees the Jan. 6 insurrection as proof. “Not everybody there was evil or had hate in their heart,” he says. “They got caught up in fear-based rhetoric. Fear turns into rage,” he adds, which anyone who’s made terrible decisions in its grip knows too well.
oh no-no-no, this seriously going off the rails.
These days, Nix says that whenever Colesville Presbyterian reposts the banner, he will do his “diligent duty” to keep it up. But if it’s stolen again, he’ll feel he’s done his part. “I’m not angry anymore — I have pity for [the defacer],” he explains. Witnessing his adversary’s naked fear resulted in him viewing him “the way I’d look at a drunk or a drug addict. … I think of how sad you must be to have to cut the word “Black” out of a sign.”
white people gonna white people i guess
Is it pretty normal that schools teach Japanese or Korean or Mandarin now? That’s kinda cool. It was only Spanish, French and German where I grew up in the Midwest ‘burbs in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
I can only speak for Mandarin, but learning it from scratch is really fucking hard because all of the words and sounds don’t relate back to anything in English. And then you’ve got the tones and thousands of characters to memorize. But at least the grammar structure is easy!
I’m a bit biased by living in Toronto, but being able to speak fluent Mandarin would be massively valuable here. I interact every day with people that were born in China.
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Like this guy?
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same, I took latin and french, and it’s almost all gone. I went to Montreal in 2019, and I could order a coffee and check into the hotel, and that was about it for my french.