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danr
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Language Self-Study
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Apr 19 22:10 UTC 1992 |
I just got back from Hong Kong. It was a very interesting trip,
and has renewed my interest in learning the Chinese language.
Does anyone know of any good self-study course? Anyone have any
experience with the tapes hawked in the Atlantic, like Audio
Forum?
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| 51 responses total. |
jdg
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response 1 of 51:
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Apr 21 03:40 UTC 1992 |
Which Chinese language do you want to learn?
Some years ago, before my father's first trip to China, he took a self-study
course in Mandarin. The course had him increase his vocabulary by marking
objects in his home with little post-it notes with their chinese equivalents.
I went to my folks house about a month before his trip, and there were little
pieces of paper on everything. On the clock, was the mandarin for clock. On
the phone, the mandarin transliteration for phone. On the fruit in the fruit-
bowl, there was a tag on an orange, a banana, and an apple.
I found one on the floor. I asked, "What's this, the chinese for floor?"
My dad picked it up and looked at it. "No, its 'dog'. She must have
lost it when she scratched at her collar."
I laughed. My dad pointed at the ceiling. There was a little tag on it.
Yep.
He may not have had any grammer, but he had a large vocabulary.
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danr
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response 2 of 51:
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Apr 21 16:26 UTC 1992 |
I might be wrong, but I think Cantonese would be the most useful. That's
what they speak in Hong Kong and Guangdong, which is the province adjacent
to HK.
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abchan
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response 3 of 51:
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Nov 27 00:40 UTC 1994 |
In Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese.
Hong Kong and Guangdong are actually two islands that can be referred
to as Hong Kong though... most people I know from Guangdong will tell
you they're from Hong Kong
In China, the official language is Mandarin, although, if you travel
the country, you will discover that every village has it's own dialect.
In Taiwan, they speak Mandarin and Taiwanese.
So when you say you want to learn the Chinese language, you had better
be more specific, learn only to write (characters are the same in all
dialects), or you'll have a heck of a lot of work to do trying to
learn all of the different dialects!
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asp
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response 4 of 51:
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Nov 27 04:19 UTC 1994 |
At my school, they only teach Mandarin, but my friend who takes it says that
she wishes they taught Cantonese, because that's what she hears most people
speaking here. I don't know where most Chinese immigrants are from, though.
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abchan
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response 5 of 51:
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Nov 27 16:32 UTC 1994 |
Where does your friend live, asp? Chinese immigrants from different
places tend to go to different places, because the trend was started
long ago, and most people will go where they have relatives.
For example, where I grew up, most of the students of Chinese descent
spoke Mandarin, where as if you go to Toronto, it's almost like being
in Hong Kong, with the amount of Cantonese you hear.
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srw
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response 6 of 51:
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Nov 28 01:47 UTC 1994 |
That's fascinating. I know so little of the Chinese people or their languages.
I studied Japanese about 20 years ago, and I had to learn a lot
of Chinese Characters (called kanji in Japan) back then. I really
enjoyed that part, too. I still have a character dictionary
written for English speakers who are learning Japanese.
But my question here is about Mandarin vs. Cantonese.
I never studied Mandarin or Cantonese, although I know they are
non-inflected monosyllabic tone languages, utterly different from
inflected polysyllabic non-tonal Japanese.
I understand the regional distinction and the government sanctioning
of only Mandarin, but how different are they? Are they like separate
spoken languages which just share the written form, or are they more
like two dialects of the same language, where some words and pronunciations
and idioms are different, but the structure of the language is the same?
Can Cantonese be understood in Beijing?
(sorry, I guess that's a lot of questions at once)
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abchan
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response 7 of 51:
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Dec 1 06:04 UTC 1994 |
Mandarin and Cantonese are both dialects of Chinese. To those who can
understand both of the languages, they are very similar, but to those
of us who can't, it is very diferent. One must understand that in China
if you as much as leave the vilage, you wil be hearing a diferent
language. But the characters are al the same. That is what unites the
Chinese language, the writen part, because no one could posibly learn
al the dialects.
Hope you can read this for some reason my computer is not leting me
type any double leters on grex today. *shrug*
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srw
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response 8 of 51:
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Dec 1 06:14 UTC 1994 |
Thanks, yeah I can read it fine without double letters.
I guess I had read somewhere that there were many dialects of Chinese,
but I am not at all sure I have an idea of how different they are.
Is the difference only pronunciation of words, or are there different
word choices? If there are only pronunciation differences, it would
be a lot like listening to someone with a regional accent. It would
be distinctly noticeable, but nevertheless completely comprehensible
to all. Not at all like another language.
Somehow I suspect that the difference between, say, Cantonese and Mandarin
is greater than that. But wouldn't word choices and idioms result in a
difference which could be seen in the written form? Though the characters
used for the same words are the same, different words are used.
If that were true the languages could well be nearly unintelligible to
speakers of the other one despite the character=word agreement.
Did that question make any sense?
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abchan
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response 9 of 51:
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Dec 1 19:13 UTC 1994 |
I'll try to answer this the best I can.
The characters are all the same, and therefore, no matter what dialect
of Chinese you speak, if you are literate, you can communicate easily
with any other literate person. It is only the pronounciation of the
characters that are different, but somehow, it's not the same as it is
here. The differences in English prnounciation depending on region are
not nearly as great as the ones in the different Chinese dialects. It's
not as simple as north and south. China is made of many little villages,
and every village speaks a different dialect. I guess it's because
Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. I mean, in English, how many different
ways can you pronounce something? And the differences aren't enough
that you can't understand the other person (well, most of the time, I've
heard stories). But in Chinese, unless you speak a dialect, there's
very little chance you will know it, unless you hear it a lot, at home,
or elsewhere. There. I hope that answered your question. :)
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rcurl
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response 10 of 51:
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Dec 1 19:19 UTC 1994 |
Good point: while everyone knows what the characters mean, different groups
can *call* them anything they want! A language of aliases!
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srw
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response 11 of 51:
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Dec 2 00:50 UTC 1994 |
Thanks for the answer. Let's see if I get it, then.
It is the same words, then, but each dialect of Chinese has such a different
pronunciation that they can be unintelligible to speakers of another one.
I guess that can happen much more easily in Chinese than in English, because
of the monosyllabic nature of every Chinese word.
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davel
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response 12 of 51:
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Dec 2 11:10 UTC 1994 |
This mostly fits with what I've heard. The assignment is entirely arbitrary
in terms of *sound*, relatively constant in terms of meaning. This assumes
some pretty strong similarities of structure among all the dialects, but
that's not much help for oral communication.
English has historically undergone some major shifts in letter-to-sound
mapping, most notably in the vowel sounds. (If you'll notice, most other
European languages' sounds for long & short vowels are similar to each other
but quite different from English's.) This would make understanding the
English of 4 or 5 centuries ago much harder than the written language
suggests - if there were speakers (or recordings) around. But that *is*
mostly the vowels, and I suspect that we'd be able to get along if we
had to. (The differences would be systematic, & vowels are fairly redundant
as far as information content goes - you can mostly read English with all
the vowels crossed out, albeit slowly.)
The situation with Chinese (as I understand it) is different in that the
mappings are mostly arbitrary rather than systematic, in principle. I don't
think it's quite that bad in practice, but it's bad enough to produce
mutual intelligibility among people who have the very same written form of
the language.
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brighn
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response 13 of 51:
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Dec 4 23:48 UTC 1994 |
*sigh*
While Kim's comments are, in the main, accurate, there are some linguistic
concepts that she completely mangled, so let me try to state it a bit more
consistently:
"Chinese" is identified by the average Westerner (i.e., in this case,
user of an alphabetic script) as a single language because the writing
system is universally intelligible. Japanese uses the same characters,
as does Korean, but because both systems also have additional characters
(in the case of Korean, the use of Chinese characters has almost completely
faded, I'm told), they do not belong to the same "language."
All speech systems subsumed under the term "Chinese" furthermore come from
the same source -- just as English, German, and Dutch all came from
ProtoGermanic. there is no more arbirariness in the shifting of Chinese
sounds over time than there is in the shifting of English sounds; all
sound change is principled and regular.
Whether one terms the systems subsumed under Chinese as dialects or as
languages depends primarily on ones definition of those two terms.
Generally, two speech systems are different languages if speakers of the
systems can't understand each other (in speech). This is hardly a black-and-
white distinction: speakers of German can usually puzzle out Dutch, and
speakers of Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian can frequently intermingle.
There is a spectrum of language differentiation, and where we draw the
lines can often be arbitrary. The accepted analysis currently is that
most of the speech systems within Chinese are, in fact, dialects, but
there are some outlaying regions that speak something different enough to
be called a language.
Saying that English has more sound variety because we have 26 letters
is patently absurd. There are many letters that have multiple
pronunciations (we have five vowels but 11+ vowel sounds), and vice versa.
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srw
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response 14 of 51:
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Dec 5 02:33 UTC 1994 |
brighn, I appreciate your definition of what is a language and what is a
dialect. It is a very nice operational definition, but as even you pointed out
it is as fuzzy as heck. If I have 3 regions, A B and C, with B in the middle
both geographically and linguistically, then I could easily have
A and B be dialects of the same language, and
B and C be dialects as well, but by that operational definition A and C be
different languages.
I don't buy it. I think if two dialects use the same words but have
corrupted the pronunciations even beyond the point of intelligibility, then
they still have the right to be considered dialects. That appears to be the
case with many if not most of the Chinese dialects.
This has nothing to do with characters. I am quite familiar with Japanese.
It is a completely different language with all kinds of language
features that are not present in any dialect of Chinese.
Verb inflections, adverb inflections, are prime examples.
It uses mostly the same characters, but that is only because they were
borrowed to express in writing what was an unwritten mongol-derived language.
If I understand correctly, the borrowing of the Chinese written language
to express an existing oral language is not the way the various forms
of Chinese appeared. I am guessing from what abchan said earlier that the word
usage radiated along with the written language. I am also guessing that the
architectural features of the language were preserved (e.g., monosyllabic
words, compounds to relieve ambiguities, tones).
I am not satisfied with the operational, fuzzy definition of a dialect,
but I am willing to look at the development or history to help decide
a question like that.
I don't recall anyone claiming that English had more sound variety because
it has 26 letters. Abchan said English had less, and guessed that it was
because Chinese doesn't have an alphabet. This is not at all absurd.
It makes sense to me that if 25 different words are pronounced "ma - tone1"
in dialect A, that not all will necessarily be pronounced the same in a
neighboring dialect. This kind of issue doesn't come up in English because the
words are spelled out. Most dialect differences come about because of vowel
shifts in English. This difference permits every word in Chinese to have
its pronunciation drift in a different direction. The alphabet in English
prevents a similar phenomenon.
If I misrepresented what abchan was saying, I trust I will be corrected.
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davel
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response 15 of 51:
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Dec 5 02:54 UTC 1994 |
(There are consonant shifts too, of course. And Steve, you are thinking
of one kind of dialect difference - pronunciation - whereas there are of
course other kinds of differences (vocabulary and grammar, at least).
I am quibbling on details - I think I generally agree with your main points.
FWIW, I've been told that the Scandinavian languages are more or less
mutually intelligible. I don't know any of them myself & haven't
ever tried to confirm this from the viewpoint of native speakers; and
I'm sure that there's significant loss of precision across the language
barrier. But I wonder if anyone would argue that they're just dialects
at this point, rather than closely-related but distinct languages.
And in any case, *however* we characterize the language/dialect distinction
in abstract terms, the line will be fuzzy in practice. (Application of
the criteria will be disputable. Just for example, how far does
"mutually intelligible" have to stretch?)
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rcurl
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response 16 of 51:
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Dec 5 07:46 UTC 1994 |
Dutch and German are mostly mutually incomprehensible. In fact, two
Dutch dialects can be mutually incomprehensible. The grammars are
similar, but vocabulary to a large extent, and pronounciation to an
overwhelming extent, are very different.
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brighn
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response 17 of 51:
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Dec 5 08:21 UTC 1994 |
#14: Quite right, re: what Kim said about the English alphabet.
That was my inference. There is less homophony in Chinese, and more
in English, than is typically alleged. Dialects of English in
Appalachia, where the literacy rate is abyssmally low, are generally
considered to be the most conservative dialects in modern English.
The written mode has little affect on the rate of change.
er, effect.
Rane, I have no knowledge of Dutch, but can read it sloggingly
and VERY inaccurately based on Germ\an, which I am far from fluent in.
I was including the written form, which is fair in this discussion,
since we're talking about the written form of Chinese as well as
the spoken.
Oops, going back to #14: You mention tone: that is on reason for less
cononantl variety in Chinese. That has nothing to do with the way
in which the language is written. Consider: sight, site, cite --
homophones but not homographs: the spelling has done little to
preserve pronunciation in "sight", "night", "knight", etc. Comparing
English and Chinese on ANY level and saying this part is less diverse,
thsis aprt more, because of a simple factor is like saying that
oranges and apples aren't the same color because the first is a citrus
fruit.
The definition I give of language and dialect is the most useful:
the lay definition is based on political boundaries and writing systems,
hence the difficulty characterizing African languages (which usually
do not respect political boundaries, such taht there are, and only
acquired writing systems fairly recently).
It is admittedly grossly flawed. The only other answer is to say
that there are no languages.
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srw
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response 18 of 51:
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Dec 6 01:47 UTC 1994 |
Well you've mostly convinced me regarding reasons behind diversity.
As far as what is a dialect versus a separate language, I cannot
accept mutual incromprehensibility. I admit it, I am a mathematician
before a linguist. To me all the dialects of a language must form an
equivalence class. That is, the relationship of "being a dialect of the same
language" must be a transitive relationship.
That is to say, if A is a dialect of the same language as B,
and B is a dialect of the same language as C, then
A must be a dialect of the same language as C in my book, and I
don't think A and C's mutual incomprehensibility should stand in the way.
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brighn
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response 19 of 51:
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Dec 6 03:51 UTC 1994 |
I struggle with that myself. Certainly someone from the deep South of
the United States would have difficulty discoursing with an Upper Class
Londoner, even though they're ostensibly speaking the same language
(after all, *I* can understand them both).
What sort of definition should we use, then? Geopolotical? Orthographic?
Social? Folk?
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davel
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response 20 of 51:
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Dec 6 11:49 UTC 1994 |
Let's just say "cultural" and push the problem over into anthropology!
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brighn
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response 21 of 51:
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Dec 6 20:04 UTC 1994 |
Passing the social scientific buck, eh?
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davel
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response 22 of 51:
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Dec 7 02:22 UTC 1994 |
Exactly. The identity criteria for cultures are surely no easier to
pin down - but that's a problem for some other conference.
Seriously, though, this may be a case where different criteria are
appropriate for different contexts. I'm personally (shooting from the
hip here, you understand) inclined to take that line as far as cultures
but not as far as languages go. Hmm.
And one personal anecdote: I once heard a lecture (years ago) about Indian
cultures in Chiapas (Mexican state). The speaker began with a short
movie giving general background, by no means an amateur job. Before
playing this, though, she warned us that it said that there were 3
(I think) indigenous languages in the area under consideration, but that
it should say that there were 3 language *families*, comprising (again, I
think) hundreds (dozens?) of distinct languages. This kind of thing
is not at all easy to sort out, & (fortunately for me) it's easy
to shoot from the hip in the absence of detailed technical knowledge.
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srw
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response 23 of 51:
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Dec 7 02:26 UTC 1994 |
Well the mathematician in me says that you could solve the problem I raised by
extending the definition to (as mathematicians say) the transitive closure.
For Linguists (and other non-mathematicians) that means we could define
two languages to be dialects of the same languae (as opposed to separate
languages) when there is a sequence of mutually comprehensible languages/
dialects between them.
Did that make sense to anyone?
Does that make any linguistic sense?
Remember, we're only defining words here.
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mdw
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response 24 of 51:
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Dec 7 10:16 UTC 1994 |
Sometimes "different languages" are as much a question of politics as
anything else. When what is now sw Sweden was part of Denmark, the
people there spoke something that was more like Danish. After the two
separated, and as people moved around, the language chaned so that today
it's more like Swedish. In england, until about the 13th century, the
language spoken in different parts of england was becoming more and more
different. But when the country was unified, travel and communications
was improved, and as printing was invented, the process was reversed,
and in fact the language spoken around london became more or less the de
facto standard. That's why Chaucer is more comprehensile to modern ears
than gawain & the green knight.
Australia represents perhaps the most puzzling test case for "when is a
langauge different". Unlike most parts of the world, Australia has
never been large or civilized enough to have the kinds of large scale
wars & migrations the rest of the world has seen. What that means is
that for many thousands of years, the ancestors of the present natives
have lived in just about the same place, around the edge of most of the
continent, leaving the center of the continent largely deserted. As one
goes from tribe to tribe around the edge of the continent, the language
changes - but in each case the changes are not that large and it's clear
each language is closely related to its neighbor. By the time one gets
to the other end of the continent, however, the changes are no longer
minor, but great enough that if you didn't know about the other
languages inbetween, you would think the 2 languages are completely
unrelated.
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