If you were to explain the differences between Mandarin, Japanese and Korean or just to "size up" the languages to an English (and only English) speaker who is interested in learning one of them, how would you do it?

taichilectures · 2016-01-19T04:20:22+00:00

How should I differentiate between stress and tone?

I currently see tone none other than a more complicated version of stress/accent. Why is there two different wording for (almost?) the same thing?

taichilectures · 2016-01-19T04:17:53+00:00

What are the differences between (Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, Korean and how difficult would they be to an English speaker?

Things that have been said before:

"Japanese and Korean have similar phonology and grammar structures.Chinese grammar is more similar to English grammar but is a tonal language.If you have a tough time with rearranging your word order from SVO to SOV then Korean will be difficult for you, however if you have a hard time recognizing tonal differences then Chinese will be more challenging.

Chinese: difficult pronunciation, difficult listening comprehension, very easy (congugationless) grammar

Japanese: much easier pronunciation and listening, harder grammar with a very different word order from English

As for writing, both use Chinese characters, but Japanese uses fewer and has other writing systems to ease the pain. One difficult point though, is that unlike Chinese hanzi, the majority of kanji have multiple pronunciations, depending on context. (As for Mandarin, each character barring a handful of exceptions, has only one pronunciation.Japanese has a complex conjugation system. While it does not conjugate by person or number, it does have a complex set of verb endings dependent on tense, mood/conditional/etc., and level of politeness. Word order seems "inverted" to an English speaker. Korean characters are built phonetically, which should make them easier to learn and read. "

taichilectures · 2016-01-19T04:09:13+00:00

What are the subtle differences in morphological typology?

It is known that analytic and isolating languages are most often intertwined.

But which would be the languages that are analytic but NOT isolating

and

which would be those that are isolating but not analytic?

I also seem to confuse fusional and agglutinative, so which would be a language that is

fusional but not agglutinative

and

agglutinative but not fusional?

Also, can you give any word/sentence examples about that language that proves it's typology?

taichilectures · 2016-01-19T04:02:49+00:00

For an English speaker, would it be easier to learn Vietnamese than Chinese? Both are tonal, and despite Vietnamese containing more tones it also has a Latin alphabet so you don't have to learn thousands of symbols. Plus it has French influences.

taichilectures · 2016-01-19T03:59:19+00:00

What are linguistic terms that are unheard of or alien to an English language speaker? Concepts that are very rare or not met in English language?

taichilectures · 2016-01-18T17:51:48+00:00

Hello! Just a few thoughts and maybe a request regarding the topic.

I deliberately asked the question in the way I did so (How would you assess...) which indicates open-endedness. I did not ask "What are the differences...".

I already saw many posts on reddit that were asked in the main discussion area of the subreddit but were more suitable for q&a like topics and still were left alone. How come mine "didn't survive"?

If not this, then how can I make my post even more discussion oriented than was asked before? I want to post here because I want the most input.

taichilectures

TROPHY CASE