mrosenlof wrote:
Japanese is not quite like Chinese that you can read it without being able to speak it.
Well, you can read it without being able to speak it
well. I'm not sure any language can be read without at least having some kind of internal representation of the language as we might try to speak it.
This even goes for the various kinds of "Classical Chinese", which have not had native speakers for many centuries. A Mandarin speaker will still sound out the characters according to some kind of Mandrin standard pronunciation.
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As I understand it, at least, written Mandarin and written Cantonese are the same.
Not so. (Sorry if the following gets a bit long. Feel free to skip it.)
First, written "Mandarin" is seldom precisely the same as the the spoken language (and very few Chinese actually speak the idealized Beijing language that is taught in foreign schools--not even natives of Beijing).
In fact, up until the previous century, colloquial Mandarin was seldom written, except as dialog in novels. Books and newspapers were written in modified Classical Chinese. When I studied Mandarin in 1963, we were taught what was called "Newspaper Chinese"--an odd mixture of Classical Chinese with some colloquial elements (mostly in the area of vocabulary).
When we read aloud in class, we used standard Mandarin pronunciation.
Next, although there is an old tendency to refer to all the Chinese languages as "Chinese dialects", that's about the equivalent of referring to Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian as "Latin dialects", or to Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, English, Scots, and German as "German dialects". The degree of difference is about the same among even the "standard" languages, like Beijing Mandarin, Guangzhou Cantonese, Xiamen Hokkien, Meixian Hakka, and Shanghai Wu.
The various Chinese languages vary both in vocabulary and in the pronunciation of even shared vocabulary--just as the French and Spanish words for "dog" have different roots, and the French and Spanish words for "three" are pronounced differently, even though they come from the same root.
Chinese languages other than the official standard have seldom been written as spoken. My wife's language, Hokkien, has a number of words for which no characters have ever been devised. There was a time when something resembling Mandarin was written, but was read with Hokkien pronunciation, even substituting their own words that have no Mandarin cognates.
The exception to this is Cantonese. Cantonese speakers have been very active in coming up with a written language that closely reflects spoken Cantonese--even going so far as to invent new characters where necessary. There are even Cantonese-language newspapers published, which are at least partly unreadable for most other Chinese.
In recent decades, Hokkien speakers have sometimes borrowed some of those speciall Cantonese characters for words that are related to the Cantonese terms, but not to the Mandarin equivalent. However, about the only place you'll see colloquial Hokkien writing attempted is in writing out Taiwanese folk songs.
The result of all this is that most Chinese basically learn Mandarin in school as the vehicle by which they learn to read and write. Their pronunciation is seldom very accurate, in part because they take the nationalistic--but unscientific--position that Mandarin is just another Chinese dialect, so they don't have to study it as a foreign language. Most members of my wife's generation in Taiwan didn't really care how their Mandarin sounded. It was just a tool that they couldn't avoid using.
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Written Japanese has a lot of elements that are written phonetically, and a lot which are written with Kanji (Chinese Characters).
That's true. And when I hit Kanji for which I don't know the correct Japanese pronunciation, I generally just pronounce them in Mandarin and see if that gives me an idea of what it might mean in that context. Unfortunately, a lot of Kanji usage is quite different from any version of written Chinese.
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I read Japanese OK, but not terribly well, and will occasionally come across a word which I understand the probable meaning, but don't know how to pronounce.
Babelfish is great fun translating Japanese into English. Here's the Babelfish translation of the first paragraph under the photo.
As for me time before speaking small time and word from, song was sung. And vocal training of 6 years was received. Until it becomes 22 years old, taking in the hand there was no whistle, (4 years it is the half ago from now don't you think?). At the time of a certain, the part of the breath technique in song and whistle, perceived to being something which resembles very. Actually, it is possible to use many of technique of song in the performance of whistle. Barely, it is frequency, but making the money in the performance of whistle, then no ten times it performs in the public place and recording etc., (as for the majority traditional performance is, solo of ????????? ["instrumental" - mr] of the exact opposite). Travelling the world in order to meet to the musical instrument production people, you built around, him et. al. to be many and friendship. Being expensive, really it performs all all whistle which are introduced to C&F the high end in regard to whistle. However, you do not experience Wooden Pennywhistle due to Wooden Whistles and Lark due to Silberton whistles and Weltmeister due to Foky Gruber.
It may look funny, but that's really pretty impressive, given how different Japanese and English are. I should test Bablefish with some Chinese. Chinese word order and English word order are much closer to each other than either is to Japanese, so you'd expect it to do a better job.
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Shame I don't speak Japanese!
