some questions to all speakers of Asian languages
I always wanted to know:
How hard/easy is it for a native speaker of one Asian language to learn another?
How can you compare that to the Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages?
For example, if a Chinese learns Japanese, is that like an English speaker learning German, or more like learning Spanish, or Russian, or Greek?
And how close is Korean to these languages?
Does learning one Asian languange help at all to learn another Asian language later?
I speak Japanese and studied all the Kanji you need in order to graduate from high school in Japan. This allows me to read "some" book titles, signs, etc. in Chinese. I can also make simple communication in China by writing characters.
Knowing some Japanese has helped with some vocabulary in Korean and given me some clue about the structure of the language.
It hasn't helped me with Vietnamese at all, but French probably will as there is a hodgepodge of languages embedded in Vietnamese, including English and Russian. Of course, there are a number of words of Chinese origin.
I think Thai may help you in Vietnamese.
I think I am on the money with my comments, but I don't mind if others disagree. I'm a polyglot, not a linguist, and my perceptions of languages are largely based on my experiences learning the languages and practicing them with native speakers when possible.
I used to have a number of patients from Southeast Asia and I learned some words to communicate with them. I noticed that there was some similarity between words, that's all.
Asian languages cannot be compared to one another as one compares Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages.
Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages--relative to "Asian languages" as a whole, are *extremely closely related*. Relative to pan-Asian languages, one could even go as far as to say that Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages are merely "dialects" of the same language (relatively).
Taking for instance only Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. Here you have FOUR distinct language families: Sinitic, Autro-Asiatic, Altaic (by most accounts), and Isolate (by most accounts).
Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages all belong to ONE language family: Indo-European.
Chinese and Vietnamese do share some feature with one another (tonality, monosyllabicity [largely]); and Korean and Japanese do share some features as well (agglutination, SOV word order)
But when you include other language families, like Uralic, Ket, all the families under the Paleo-Asiatic umbrella term, Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian, etc it gets to be too much. I realize though that by "Asian" you are probably only referring to the major East and Southeast Asian languages ;)
No *real* comparison can be made, other than the fact that any comparison would be invalid.
<<Isolate (by most accounts). >>
The specific name for the Japanese language family is "Japonic", not "Isolate". A language isolate(s) is what most linguists believe Japonic to be.
sorry.
if you're looking for whether Chinese is the counterpart Graeco-Latin of East Asian languages, the answer is Yes.
Personally, I don't think knowing an Asian language will help much with learning other asian languages.
Knowing Thai won't help with learning Vietnamese. They're nothing alike. Well, maybe a little, considering they're both tonal lanugages. But other than that, no.
But knowing Thai will help you learn Laos, since they're practically the same language with different dialects and spelling systems.
Knowing Chinese characters will help you learn Japanese's Kanji, but doesn't help much further than that.
Japanese and Korean are similar in grammatical structure. But that's it.
Anyway, that's just my two cents about asian languages that I know of. I speak some of those and have learned all that was mentioned. I can pretty much assure you that they're all pretty distinct.
No. Asian languages are largely unrelated. For example Chinese is not related to japanese, which is not related to Korean.
Theres no family of "Asian Languages" with common origin.
oh shit, if that's so I think I will abandon learning any asian language
Japanese and Korean have both obtained large portions of their vocabularies from Chinese, so it's not like learning one of the 3 provides absolutely no advantage in learning the others.
So, there is a great advantage if you study a Romance language. There are 3 of them in the top ten: Spanish, Portuguese and French.
You can study all of them in 4-5 years. In the same time, you can only speak a basic Chinese.
All the other languages of the top ten are very different. You can see:
Chinese
English
Spanish
Hindi
Arabic
Russian
Malay-Indonesian
Portuguese
Bengalian
French
<How can you compare that to the Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages?>
For example, if a Chinese learns Japanese, is that like an English speaker learning German, or more like learning Spanish, or Russian, or Greek?
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From hardest to easiest:
Slavic(Russian) > Germanic(German) ≥ Romance(French/Spanish).
And it's not very difficult for Chinese to learn Japanese or Korean, even if Chinese grammar is different from Japanese or Korean, and if you can master Japanese, then it's very easy to learn Korean, because Korean is very similar to Japanese, especially on the aspect of grammar. It means that the difference between Japanese & Korean seems just like that between English & German, or that between French & Spanish. But Chinese is a specially language which is almost different from a lot of Asian languages. Even if you learn Chinese very well, maybe you won't benefit much from your Chinese advanced level, when you start to learn another Asian language, such as Thai, Vietnamese, Philippine or Korean.
Indonesian & Malaysian are practically variants of the same language. Comparable to Hindi & Urdu.
Knowing Indonesian or Malaysian may perhaps help you learning Tagalog. Otherwise there's barely any similarities with other Asian languages.
Knowing traditional Chinese characters may help you understand Japanese kanji, but the languages are very different.
Korean is a whole different language of its own. Kind of a language isolate.
Vietnamese is related to Khmer.
Thai to Lao.
But Thai and Vietnamese are very different.
I don't know much about Burmese.
Persian is spoken in non-Turkic central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Turkic languages are quite closely related to each other, so the knowledge of one is a big help in understanding other Turkic languages.
<Korean is a whole different language of its own. Kind of a language isolate.>
Not exactly, Japanese & Korean do share the largest similarities in many respects, such as basic grammar, loanwords from Classical Chinese, Honorific speech & agglutinative structure. None of the other languages seems so close to Korean, but Japanese. And some vocabularies even sound the same or very similar in pronunciation. So, I don't think that Korean is an isolated language which is very far from Japanese, IMHO.
< How can you compare that to the Slavic/Romance/Germanic languages? >
The difference between Indonesian and Malaysian is like that between Portuguese and Galician, but unlike Portuguese-Galician, Indonesian-Malaysian have the same spelling system.
< For example, if a Chinese learns Japanese, is that like an English speaker learning German, or more like learning Spanish, or Russian, or Greek? >
It's like an English speaker learning Finnish.
< And how close is Korean to these languages? >
Korean has a similar grammar like Japanese, but everything else is totally different.
< Does learning one Asian languange help at all to learn another Asian language later? >
Depends on which language.