On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 01:06:50 -0500 (EST), Thomas Mueller wrote: <SNIP>
> Is Japanese a more ridiculous language than Chinese or Korean? I think these > three languages have a large complicated character set as opposed to an alphabet > such as Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic. A Japanese and a Chinese can write to each other and understand most of it... but talking to each other is useless. > I imagine Chinese, Japanese or Korean must be monstrously difficult to learn for > somebody accustomed to an alphabetical language such as English. I hate to > think what it must be like to read less-than-neat handwriting. Sometimes I > can't even read handwriting in English! I had some courses in Chinese and yes it is difficult to write and read. Handwritten is impossible to me but printed writing can be understood... if you knew enough 'caracters'. You need abt 4000 to read a newspaper... I know abt 700. Knew because you forget them very quickly if you do not use them on a daily basic. Speaking and listening is also not easy for Chinese is a "tone" language. Eg. the word "ma" has abt 30 different meanings and wichone is meant depends on the pitch given to the word and it's location in the sentence. At the end very often it is a spoken question mark... At the start: mum or horse could be the meaning or in the expression: "ma shang" literally "on a horse" it means: very quickly, very fast. However: grammar and structure of the language is very simple. No irreqular verbs (one exeption), no femine/masculin, etcetera. CU, Bastiaan
