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hey langfocus, thanks for making interesting and informative "question of the day"s instead of stupid "bonding" questions as I have seen so many times before in this format!
Hey Paul quick question, If China hasn’t simplified their script, would China be able to read Japanese kanji? Or Japan simplified their kanji as well? Thank you.
I've studied Chinese for years. In my opinion it might be one of the most entertaining languages to learn. When you learn new bigrams (which are words that are made up of two characters to present a meaning), it's always interesting to see why they chose those two characters. The one example you gave was 电话 (diàn huà), which means "telephone", but each character translates as "electric words". Another one would be 龙虾 (lóng xiā), which means "lobster", but each character means "dragon shrimp". In my opinion, it doesn't get boring to learn, that's for sure!
Alexander Stucky 電話(telephone), later simplified by Mainlanders to 电话, was a term created by Japanese via Korean. In Japanese, the pronunciation is "denwa". In Korean, the pronunciation is "cheonhwa." See how (話/话) in Japanese pronounced "wa" is derived from "hwa" in Korean?! There were NO, I repeat NO "reborrowings", from Japanese in Chinese terms, mainlanders appropriated it, meaning they just TOOK IT as their own.
Not exactly. "wa" for (話/话) is from China's Wu dialect. When the Korean and Japaneses adopted the Chinese writing system in ancient times, they also borrowed the pronunciation in China at that time.
Well.... 电话 is more like "Electric tongue tongue" and 虾 is "Under bug" both of which illustrate the comedy of /radicals/ but yeah, calling lobster 'dragon shrimp' 龙虾 is also funny.
Fun fact: As Shanghainese speakers, when my parents traveled to Beijing in 1990s, other people (who speak standard Mandarin) on the bus thought they were speaking Japanese...
I've only recently applied some thought to the matter and concluded that, if we're going to call Spanish and Portuguese two different languages, then by consistency the various Chinese varieties should also be called different languages. I'm told that Portuguese speakers find it… if not easy, then at least possible, to understand Spanish. Not so for the Chinese languages. I had a friend speak Shanghainese once, and even knowing both Cantonese and Mandarin, it was impossible to understand what she was saying. The same goes for what little Hokkien and Hakka crosses my path.
Heck, Sinitic languages are like the “Indo” part in Indo-European. Bai languages are in a whole ‘nother classification altogether, like how you wouldn’t say that Albanian and English are the same except for the fact that they have mutual ancestors some 5,000 yrs ago. When you have Germanic languages for example, which could be divided into North, West, etc., you can divide the rest of Chinese languages into Ba-Shu, Min, Guang, Xiang, Huizhou, Wu, Yue, Pinghua, She, Yao, Tuhua, etc. *Then* can we break in down even further into individual languages. Take the Wu languages, there is Wenzhounese, Shanghainese, Wuzhounese, etc, with as much mutual intelligibility as Eastern Dutch and Western German. Saying Cantonese and Mandarin are same languages is like saying Russian and Greek are the same languages.
Portuguese speaker here. Our phonetic is very different from Spanish, ours is more complex. As such, they have a hard time understanding us when we speak, but not the other way around. This could also be because Spain is our only neighbour and we grow up listening to Spanish (and English) content. Written form is very intelligible both ways. Even for Italian and French. For Romanian is a bit harder.
@@ME-hm3tc Han Chinese as a concept can be scientifically defined, though. They came from the Northern parts of China proper, and then migrated to the south overtime, intermarrying with the locals. You can still identify them via genetics.
I live in China and my wife is Chinese... I have no problem speaking Chinese in the city where I live but when I got to my wife's hometown which is about a 4 hour drive away, I can hardly understand anything they say.... And they're also technically speaking mandarin.
well, they must have a different accent. Yes in China most of the people can speak Mandarin, but when we talk about accuracy, here's a big problem. Most Chinese in southern China find it hard to pronounce Mandarin in the right tone, well obviously due to their mother language's huge difference to the mandarin. While people in northern China find it kinda easy to say Mandarin as their mother language is either Mandarin or similar to it.
@@desperadoshao9733 yes, the accent is different and the vocabulary is also different as well. For example: If they say, "你给我二百块钱" they will say, "nia gei wo le bei kuai qianr" or if they want to say something like, "last night I ate some clams and drunk some beer" they'd say, "wo yelei(昨天) humshang(晚上) chi le gala(蛤蜊) he ha(喝) pijiu."
@@YelDohan actually its 夜来 pronounced yelai, 来 lai means 裡, because ancient chinese common people consider sunrise as the begining of a day rather than 0:00 or 24：00. but yelai means yesterday, not just yesterday night.
I've been learning mandarin for almost two month now and I was actually surprised how easy it is to learn how to read. I always assumed that learning all those characters is super complicated but really, it just takes a little time and effort. Recognising the characters after seeing them a few times feels surprisingly natural. Also, my native language is german and I learned some french in school. And I very much do not miss learning 20 variations and rules for one single verb to change it according to the sentence. Mandarin is very refreshing in that.
I agree, I've been learning for a month and I hope I can improve faster. Being Spanish my native language, English my second and German my third, I decided to completely change the way into east Asian languages and it's been VERY interesting
@@avril6922 Yeah, most languages Europeans/Americans usually learn work pretty similar. Mandarin has so many completely new concepts, it's really fun to learn
I have been learning it for a bit longer than you (3 months) and find the written Chinese to be extremely hard. I think spoken Mandarin is very very easy comparatively. English is my mother tongue.
Bro, latino here learning mandarin. The struggle is real, once you realize how hard is to pronounce mandarin; french, Portuguese and the rest of romance languages are like children's play to learn, well, for us as Spanish speakers.
being a Mandarin Chinese native speaker, and speaks fluently English and Danish, and is learning Italian, I must say that the grammar for Chinese language is probably the easiest one! Anyone who wants to learn speaking and understanding Mandarin Chinese should go for it! Don't be afraid of the tones, it really doesn't matter if you can hit the right tone or not as long as you speak a sentence with several words, people will understand you. It only gives problem if you only speak a single word, then it is very important to hit the right tone. Once you have learned the very easy grammar, and get some basic vocabulary, you will be able to manage a lot of daily situations. But the next difficult thing in oral Mandarin Chinese is to learn the idioms - there are many idioms linked to some ancient histories and stories, very fascinating!
The white arctic fox in purple northern light In order to be understood precisely, you cannot run away from expressing in Chinese script. There about 400 homophones in Mandarin and around 1700 different sounds if tones are included. The largest collection of Chinese characters is just above 100,000. Compare this to around 8000 different English sounds. Without tones, we are comparing 400 different Chinese sounds from 8000 English sounds. Many meanings would have been lost. Even when putting in the tones, it is still 1700 Chinese sounds against 8000 English sounds. As there are about 100,000 different Chinese characters, for each of the 1700 Chinese sounds, there is an average of 60 Chinese characters sounding the same. Therefore for those who recommend the use of Roman scripts to replace Chinese characters, we can just imagine how inadequate such a system would be. Of course, for those trying to learn Chinese, do not be discouraged as a basic vocabulary of 1000 characters is sufficient to get through most conversations and a vocabulary of 3000 characters is good enough to read 99% of all writings - newspapers, most books, magazines etc. To read ancient texts, I understand a vocabulary of 6000 characters is required. And this is talking about characters, not words (which are compound characters). There are 3.5 to 4 times the number of words as characters. The total number of words is close to 370,000.
Yeah, Chinese grammar is easier because there are no conjugations and grammatical order is more consistent and logical. That said, when going from a language which has highly different grammar, Chinese grammar can still be tricky because of unfamiliarity.
Actually Chinese characters are weird. You need to listen to the conjunction characters in order to learn and understand faster. Yes, tonal of a character has no meaning... as in, there are so many possible combinations. It is more like the logical sense, the next and previous characters that made up the meaning of that.
chinese characters have NO CONNECTION to spoken chinese whatsoever. it's like Heptapod B in Arrival the logography is totally separate from the spoken form though, there are a list of characters that, if you memorize it, can help you guess a character's potential sound(s) due to some/most characters are composite. (i guess that's what you mean by conjunction characters) if you don't understand what i mean, look at Vietnamese's Chu Nom, they can be read, given you know the character partially. we call this 有邊讀邊, literally "if there's a side, read the side".
In ancient time, Chinese people could communicate with Japanese Koreans and Vietnamese by Chinese character even though these languages are different language family .In fact today the chinese and japanese can still partly communicate with each others by writing so i always think that the chinese character is a amazing invention。
My grew up in a city near GuangZhou, and spoke Cantonese as my native language. My formal schooling was in Mandarin, and my mother is Hakka. Hence I speak all three fluently. I used to consider Chinese as a single language with different dialects (ie. variations of Mandarin). However, after moving to North America, where I met people who only speaks only Mandarin or only Cantonese, I realized how different the two are. Thank you for your video. It helped me with reflecting my identity and deepening my understanding of my culture :)
Wow! you didn't notice the difference because you were fluent in all of them from the young age. You didn't notice because the difference never came across your mind.
There have been numerous comments saying that Cantonese has 9 tones, not 6. It's true that there's a 9 tone system for Cantonese, but tones 7,8, and 9 are sometimes not counted for modern, practical purposes because they are not distinct in pitch, they are only distinct in length and the consonant at the end of the syllable. At least in materials aimed at learners, 6 tones are usually counted. It's two different ways of counting them. Also, as some people have noted, I mixed something up and said that in Mandarin the adjective comes after the noun, but it normally goes before the noun, as in Cantonese. If it comes after that makes it a sentence like "The wind is strong". Sorry for the confusion there.
Langfocus I think adjectives go before nouns they modify in most Chinese languages. Moving the adjective after the noun makes the sentence a predicate (as if there's an indicated copula there). Correct me please if that's not true for Cantonese . The Cantonese example you use 好大風 could be rendered into Mandarin 好大的風 (by adding a particle, meaning "strong wind").
I would perhaps argue that Mandarin has six tones, because if you count the neutral tone, which happens as a course of sandhi, then the "sixth" tone, which is the "falling" tone (similar to the Vietnamese hook tone) that occurs when a third tone meets a non-third tone, should also be counted. Some people say it's just the fourth tone, but the fourth tone is a sharp sound while this proposed "sixth" tone is a short, but noticeable, graceful fall.
Cantonese not the same language as mandarin . For most of us , Cantonese speakers, mandarin just a language that bring to our homeland by some invaders from somewhere . We are always been tough in school that the nine-toned Cantonese was the closest-related language from the official language used in the past , before Jin dynasty .Literature from the past was rhymed in Cantonese but not mandarin .They even cant pronounce some words in mandarin when they are reading classical literature. What I think for first , for a native tradition chinese user , it is not possible to recognize most of the simplified scripts, vise versa. Cos they are simplified from the tradition scripts. So it is very different in the structure. And the simplified scripts merged some characters with similar structure into one single character. For example, we have distinct words for Pine (N.) and Loose(V.) .But in simplified script , it just used one word to represent both meanings ,which is hard for us to read their sentence without guessing what they mean. Second, some history is saying that when mandarin first used as official language in China, they have their distinct writing scripts other than chinese characters ,which they adopted the chinese characters afterward. I'm not quite sure about that point tho. More research on that is needed for sure.
wind strength would be 風力 (lit. "wind power/force"). 好 in this context would be like an adverb "very", 大 "strong", 的 a particle linking the adj and the modified noun, and 風 "wind". So 好大的風 is lit. "very strong wind" and 風好大 the wind is very strong.
Personally as a speaker of a variety of Hakka found in Vietnam, I think that "Chinese" as a whole lingual family is made of many different Sinitic varieties all stemming from the one relation. For example, I learnt my Hakka variety (or dialect) from my grandma, who also fluently spoke Mandarin and Cantonese (Plus Vietnamese xD). Whenever she turned on a show or television program in mandarin or Cantonese, I wouldn't be able to understand a single word. This especially got bad when I was taken over to friends of my grandma or relatives that mostly only spoke Cantonese. Communication was impossible and they had as much trouble understanding me as I had with them. Once while they were talking, I heard them say a word that sounded like "door" In Hakka, and I was so surprised to hear something like the variety I was used to that I spent the rest of the day looking up the word "door" in Cantonese. So yeah, I personally think Chinese is a bunch of different languages under one umbrella.
My sister, a native northern Chinese. Years ago, when she first took an international flight, her English was really bad at that time. An attendant (not Chinese) asked her: "Do you speak English?" - "No..." - "Well, do you speak Mandarin?" - "No..." So they had no dialogue any more. Problem is, my sister just never knew "Mandarin" means "Common Chinese / Putonghua".
@@Weiweisunn No, the OP is correct. Generally, the word “Chinese” can be used as a noun or an adjective. The OP is using it as a noun, and you are using as an adjective. You’re both correct :) (source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
The example at 11:50 is not so accurate. We would express "Strong Wind" by "好大的风", where "好大" means "Strong" and "风“ means "Wind". Adjectives usually go before the nouns. Actually "风好大” is a full sentence, which means "The wind is strong."
From my little understanding of how Cantonese work (I don't really speak it), in Cantonese that can be either a sentence or a phrase. It does not have to be a sentence.
Yes, I was about to type this. Usually in Mandarin its adjective then noun. Its only noun then adjective when there's an adverb (in this case 好 is similar to the adverb "very"). People would look at you funny if you said 苹果红 instead of 红苹果
I'm native Mandarin speaker, and my mother tongue is Taiwanese Hokkien. I would consider them completely different languages. Even though we can understand different languages from the written words, there's no way you understand what people are actually saying without learn it as a different language. I have to actively learn the vocabulary of Taiwanese Hokkien to understand what my parents are saying when they are saying Taiwanese Hokkien to each other. Also, learning the tones and the rules of it of Hokkien is pain, even I'm already familiar with the tones, I'm still struggle to change the tones correctly lol.
I'm learning Chinese right now as non-native. And tones are just pain in the ass. To even thinking other dialects have more tones just blow my mind. People just have to have it as mother tongue..
They say these are dialects to make everyone United , the difference between these "Chinese languages" is same as different Dialects of Hindi which are actually different languages but considered single to make northern India United the same way China has done @@LMB222
Please speak in Taiwanese hokkien to your parents and when in future you have kids and your own family teach all of them Taiwanese hokkien as native language because that's your mother tongue preserve your mother tongue.
我是个中国人，我觉得你的视频讲解的非常细致，汉语从几千年前流传到今天，经过了几千年的演变，形成了我们的基本文化，我为我的国家感到自豪，为我的语言感到骄傲，非常感谢你的视频，能让其他国家的人也了解中文和中国文化。 I am a Chinese. I think your video is very detailed. Chinese has been passed down from thousands of years ago to today. After thousands of years of evolution, it has formed our basic culture. I am proud of my country. The language is proud, thank you very much for your video, and let people from other countries understand Chinese and Chinese culture as well.
Here's a strategy for anyone who's learning Mandarin: the basic word order in any statement sentence is "STPVO" - subject, time, place, verb, object. For example: 我昨天在公园打篮球。 (I played basketball in the park yesterday.) Word for word it's 我 (I) 昨天 (yesterday) 在公园 (in the park) 打 (play) 篮球 (basketball). Basically, in Mandarin, we set the listener up with the scenario first (by giving them the time and place) before telling them what's happening. It's very logical.
ZhangtheGreat The thing is that many of the components of the sentence can be leniently placed in different positions and it would still logically make sense lol.
They are definitely different languages. Other languages such as Spanish and Portuguese (I speak both) are almost completely intelligible without prior exposure, yet they are never seen as dialects of Romance/Iberian/etc. On the other hand, with Mandarin and Cantonese (I also speak both) you can't understand one by only knowing the other.
Mutual intelligibility is not the only factor that determines whether different "tongues" should be considered different languages or dialects. Infact in most cases it isn't even the primary factor. What can be considered a dialect or a language is often dependent upon politics, power dynamics and self identification. For example you may consider two languages as different based upon mutual intelligibility but people speaking those languages may have a united identity even across those spoken languages. Like for example Kurdish people who speak different mutually unintelligible Kurdish languages yet identify themselves as one people. Some of them even speak non-Kurdish languages like Zazaki which belongs to entirely different sub-family yet even they see themselves as Kurdish as others. On the other hand Hindi (India) & Urdu (Pakistan & India) are basically two different official standards of the same dialect yet speakers of these languages vehemently identify them as being seperate despite extreme level of mutual intelligibility. Infact some "dialects" of Hindi are much more different from the standard language than Urdu itself which mostly differs only in technical and literary vocabulary. Thier arguments have a lot of truth though when seen from the perspective of politics and history as these two languages have seperate literary traditions and seperate populations to cater. What linguists at best can determine and put forward is the level of mutual intelligibility between languages. They can determine the relationship between two languages or dialects based on that. To determine which ones should be seen as dialects and which should be seen as seperate languages isn't upon them to decide. It is dependent on the people speaking those languages and with what they identify with. Mutual intelligibility is a gradual scale not a strict boundary. In reality every tongue spoken is a dialect. But it is politics, power dynamics, history and self identification that determines which part of that scale should belong to a particular chosen standard dialect which then becomes a language. Note:- This particularly applies to "dialects" which are closely related to each other. In these cases we need to be careful of strict classification. It doesn't apply to languages which are clearly different enough although there are exceptions even to these. However even in these cases we can linguistically consider them different enough on mutual intelligibility scale however we should leave classifying people speaking them in terms of thier identity. Unfortunately people especially outsiders often end up mixing these two & it can have serious consequences in the long run.
@@Aws895It doesn't have any sense , many people consider themselve as united identity , polish and lithuanian also consider themselves as united identity , so does it mean that polish and lithuaniani are the same language ? In Ussr we also consider ourself as united identity but does it mean that all 100 languages spoken in that country is just one language with many dialects ? In caucaus they also consider themselves as united identity but they never say that their languages are the same .Such a strange logic
@@Aws895Considering it same and being same are two different things , and the example of Hindi & Urdu is totally wrong because Hindi and Urdu speakers aren't ethnic Hindi or Urdu , 99% of native speakers of Hindi/Urdu are non-ethnic speakers it is used as a lingua franca in India and Pakistan and most people in big cities only speak Hindi/Urdu and in medium sized cities many are only speaking Hindi/Urdu but yeah you can give example of Hindi language Dialects speakers of India , Government says these people are speakers of different Dialects of Hindi but actually they are different culturally, Ethnically , historically and by language also the reason it is considered one because of lack of education and awareness. Urdu/Hindi was the first Language I learnt but still I can't understand most of the languages considered Dialects and some I could Hardly understand some words like 30-40%.
I'm a native Chinese speaker, to me Chinese is not just one single language, it's consisted of about 10 languages, cuz you'll find out that each language is different in both pronunciation and grammar, and Mandarin is my second language, I speak Teochew as my first language(it shares the same roots with Hakka mentioned in your video 06:33), and Cantonese as my 3rd language. if you are not native in any of those languages u r not gonna understand nothing when people speak, like my mom, she only speaks Teochew when people speak in mandarin she doesn't understand anything, and like my classmates who don't speak Cantonese, they won't understand anything when I speak Cantonese even tho they do speak mandarin.
Teochew is also my mother tongue. Lots of Chinese immigrants in Malasya , Singapore, Saigon especially Thailand speaks Teochew. It is significant therefore should be mentioned in this video. Teochew is much closer to Taiwanese but shares different system with Hakka. Teochew is one of the most orthodox ancient Chinese languages. Many ancient Chinese terms can be found in our dialect.
这个世界上，任何一种方言都可以算作一种独特的语言。。。照你这么说江苏省十里不同音，所以“江苏话”这个概念不存在？？？所以“吴语”这个概念不存在？？您算老几？您会普通话和粤语吗？您大放厥词说这些方言之间语法“完全不同”，您是瞎子吗？？？我知道，您作为高等的海外华人大陆和您一毛钱关系都没有，大陆在你们眼里只是邪恶的美国敌人，是不是给你们的黄皮肤带来困扰了？？？华人不了解中国大陆是一个怎样的世界，麻烦滚远点不要造谣好吗？？老子说的是安徽方言，北京人听不懂，广东人更是听不懂，我们隔壁一个市的方言我也听不懂，所以“中国话”“华语”这个概念是假的？是虚构的？？海外华人如果对大陆的汉语一知半解，麻烦不要来说自己是“native chinese speaker”好吗？？？拜托了。。。建议您不要觉得自己祖上多少代会说汉语然后就自以为自己很了解汉语OK？？？
it's been quite a while since I've attempted to learn Chinese, but I took it as a language class in middle school and again in college. Something this video dug up from my memories is my mandarin teacher in middle school would sometimes stumble a bit with the language herself, at the time I didn't know why but now I realize it's because she was teaching us mandarin, but her first language was Wu, and she had even mentioned this to us but had a hard time explaining the differences between the two. I had no idea how much she was juggling in her head switching between her first language, the second language she was teaching us, and the third language she was teaching us in.
hahahaha, actually it would not be that hard, all the Chinese have no trouble using mandarin because people started use it since first grade.everyone studied all subjects in school with mandarin and all the writing and speaking on internet are mandarins. So like Wu speaker never know how to write an article in Wu, even the character of Wu. The mothertone and mandarin are like parallel as first language, one for local chatting one for official use.
I discovered this language when I watched Chinese TV series. By the way, I think Mandarin is a very beautiful language. I'm sure other Chinese languages have nice phonetics. Really good job Paul! You always enlighten those who love to learn languages ! Greetings from a language savvy that speaks Turkish as mother tongue
It's also nice how people generally aren't being assholes. For example, you can watch a video about Chinese and/or Japanese on this channel and not have to see a lot of very Xenophobic, nationalistic comments.
I think you might misunderstand something. 汉 does not directly mean Chinese. 汉 could mean Han dynasty or Han ethnic group. 汉人 means people belong to Han ethnic group. You can think Han ethnic people are Chinese people.【小姐姐你是中国人吧？看你关注了敖厂长才发现的，怎么会有汉人表示中国人这种理解。。【话说厂长在youtube上的关注量真多啊，都有b站关注的一半了。
I once learned maybe 100 Chinese characters in order to catalog some coins in my collection. Discussing this with a Chinese co-worker, I was surprised to learn that she could look at the two characters I read as "change-study" and only see "chemistry". In fact, when I called her attention to the separate characters, she was surprised as she had never thought of them that way. It's easy to understand how an English speaker might not know that "geometry" means "earth-measure", but I found this woman's reaction fascinating.
The "chemistry" example it's a specific term. We were taught the word that way just like you do not separate week and end in "weekend". In fact, most modern Chinese words/terms are built this way and you have to learn them one by one. Like mathematics is "counting study", physics is "objective theory", English is "English language", French is "French language". They all have two or more characters. A single Chinese character often has multiple meanings and it will combine with other characters to create a specific word.
@@RadicalCaveman how about words like "mayday" "understand" ...The chinese word for chemistry 化學 literally translates to transformation study ...whereas the english word Chemistry came from Greek meaning cast together. This is how language evolves, nothing new..
i think this is because 化 meaning change as standalone character is rarely used, so seldom would anyone come to the word formation, but as the word like 物理physics, both characters here are not so obscure in their seperate meaning
I think they are a group of distinct languages. We normally don’t question whether Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French are different languages, even though speakers of the different languages can somehow understand each other. But speakers of different Chinese languages can’t understand each other.
That is because the government of China pushes Beijing Mandarin as the "correct" language and tries to eradicate local languages by pretending they don't exist.
Langfocus Hey man, love your videos. I'm currently studying French and I know you have some background in it. What are the best ways to learn French and what path did you take? I'm currently using Pimsleur and taking lessons on Italki. Any thoughts?
I am studying Chinese, and I was surprised to find out that there are some words from English- loanwords, is that what they are called? The words for t-shirt, chocolate, and coffee, for example, all sound very similar to their English versions. Chinese is easier than English in some ways- no plurals and fewer number and tense changes. It's really fun to learn, and while writing is still intimidating, speaking it is not as incomprehensible as I thought it would be!
Findingthe3truths I am Chinese, I want to find a partner to learn spoken English,do you want to find a partner to learn spoken Chinese? if yes,I think we could help each other
There are a fair amount of loanwords and transliterations in Chinese from other languages, esp. English. Canadians are, for instance, Jia na Da ren (forget the characters, but sounds much like 'canada'). The pronunciation is of course pretty different, but it sounds like the English version. There's also interesting parallels, like Bei Bei means baby (and one bei means shell), and mao is cat as well as the sound cats make in China, quite similar to 'meow'.
The Wu dialect is a very fascinating one. It is soft, delicate, sing-song like, earning itself the name "吴侬软语“ which literally means the "soft words of Wu region".
ProTip, given to me by a Brit who had had dealings with China in industrial sales. You will need bilingual business cards which include a phonetic Chinese version of your Western name. It is auspicious if that phonetic version has three syllables and consists of auspicious words. Because Chinese is a tonal language and Chinese characters are based on meaning not pronunciation, more than one version will be possible. So, ask a native speaker to suggest something suitable. Before having your cards printed, ask a different native Chinese speaker to translate that proposed version into English, without explaining why you're asking. It is a bad mistake to assume that only native English speakers can have a sense of humour. It is much better to have business cards which read (invented example) 'precious jade dragon' than 'man who cleans toilet bowl with own head'.
People used to have me proofread their Chinese tattoos before they got them, and I had to constantly remind them that I know only a little Japanese, so I don't know if anything they're doing sounds natural or normal or has any grammatical accuracy. I only know how to look up the characters. But even at that low rate, I was able to catch several people before they put utter nonsense on themselves.
I'm an English speaker with some background in Vietnamese from my parents. When I took a few years of Chinese in college, I was struck by how many loanwords Vietnamese had from Chinese. Learning Chinese actually helped reinforce some of my Vietnamese vocabulary, and knowing some Vietnamese made it easier to remember some Chinese words.
Liangben Huang Yes, that's right! But it's no surprise since Chinese characters were once used as an official script in both Korea and Vietnam for a very long time.
The difference between Chinese languages is as much as that between Roman languages. It’s reasonable to count them as different languages since we won’t say French and Spanish are just dialects of Latin. If Chinese uses alphabet, not characters, its diversity will be more visible.
@@suomeaboo That's very fun to imagine! I guess latin languages would be much more similar than they are today, not only because the writing system's restricted representation of trivial differences in pronunciation, but also because because using logographic systems itself will limit the evolution of pronunciation
I mean, like Chinese, in the ancient times there was no tones in Chinese. If logographical characters hadn't been applied in the ancient times, perhaps tones would not have exist either, or at least tones would been used less often. The application of logographic system itself makes people pay less attention on the trival pronunciation, resulting in people blurring the pronunciation differences, thus many words thet were different in pronunciation finally sharing the same sounds. In this way, tones are kind of forced to be put into use, in order to distinguish different words.
As a Chinese from mainland China, I think your introduction is very precise. I think the reason why China can continue to be one united culture for more than 3000 years despite the spoken languages are no longer intelligible to each other, is the written system. If the written system was phonogramic like Europe, there would be several Chinese country and nations rather than one united Chinese culture now.
china must be separated into several countries as each language from each province is entirely (only the same characters)different. I wish china no longer to be a bully or a ganster to its neighbor and for that, china must be separated
김요한 I think Korea should be separated into several parts.One belongs to USA,one belongs to China,and the last one controlled by Japan! That’s your fate!Right!
@@김요한-l2e If you think China is a bully. I'd say if China break into more nations, those nations will still bully on Korea. Right, It's because Chinese people are bully, even the Korean ethnic people live in northeast of China do the same, I met a lot of them who go to South Korea for higher salary, send their money back to their hometown in China, and talk shit on South Korea. So you'd better give up that thought because it only turns 1 bully into more bullies.
@@김요한-l2e Bully? Old Korea had existed for more than 1000 years, but China never conquered Old Korea. There are many different cultures in China, but all the Chinese people have the common self-identity. So, united China is not formed by the power of control or conquering. But china did influent its neighbour, since you Korean didn't have language of your own and had to use Chinese as Old Korean language. Besides, Japanese kanji is acutal Chinese character.
As a native Cantonese speaker , I can’t understand other dialects at all. 😂 I simply think all dialects is different languages and need to pay efforts to learn.
While taking a taxi in Shanghai, a group of us from Singapore were engaged in an English conversation (more accurately, 'Singlish') with some chinese words thrown in the mix. The taxi driver who was apparently listening to us asked us which province we were from and what 'dialect' we were speaking.
zzajizz I lived 7 years in 大陸， with some other 留學生 we ended up speaking 老外ish chinese between us 😂😂😂 the more seniors we used more Chinese words, and the younger ones mixed more words from their native languages and english. I remember me asking a friend from Germany: hast du das schon ge概括t? Because 那個太麻煩了！ Dios mío! In those times it was rare to see a 老外 like me in the markets, I always said I was from 新彊 or from 西藏 and they were o.k. with that and I was treated like a local ....
That's really interesting. Do you think it might be because he recognised some dialect words in your Singlish? Singlish has a bunch of Hokkien and Cantonese vocabulary. Maybe he recognised a few Singlish words of 'dialect' origin and thought you were speaking a Chinese dialect.
I'm a native Chinese speaker, specifically a Mandarin speaker. Before watching this video: I'm a native Chinese speaker, I'm pretty sure I can introduce my native language correctly and perfectly. After watching this video: am I a native Chinese speaker? :D
“...because in many cases they are unintelligible.” 😂😂😂 I know you meant “mutually unintelligible,” but it still gave me a chuckle. Awesome video, as always! And thank you!
Would you consider doing a video on the Roma languages? Not the Romance languages (you did a video about those), but the language of the Romani people ("Gypsies"). Imho they and their language are kind of brushed off to the sidelines by Europeans, and most probably don't even know that Roma have their language.
YakuzYah #staʟe_memes They sure do. It is a Indo-European language and a brither to Hindi and a far cousin of Persian. I also suppose that Romani also has different vocabulary and pronunciations depending of the location of the speaker. I am half Romanian and Half Iranian and Romani people are very intresting but the hate they get is caused by a lack of education in their own community. Spread peace,not hate dear people. Sir,your Idea is very intresting. Paul,I would also love to see a video about the Greek language as I just made a couple of Greek friends and git into Greek culture and stuff like that. Peace
YakuzYah #staʟe_memes they have no standard language to be analyzed so it's pointless. As far as I know the language is passed down through generations and most educated romanis don't speak it a lot or at all...
LifeSaver996 You are mostly right. They don't have any standard language and most of the times even Romanis don't speak it. In Romania for exaple they would just mess around with the Romanian language but wouldn't add more than an accent and 2 or 3 funny words. They also don't have any written language and like the old jews of Europe they would just adopt the language of the country they live in.
As far as i know there are different varieties of Romani, am from Colombia and the Rom people here speak a variation called Romanesh Calderash it is not written and though they speak spanish, they use their language a lot with their family and romani friends, i even went to a romani church and the cult was almost completly in their language.
wow,that sounds very intresting,In deed there are lots of varieties of Romani but If I am not wrong they are all dialects of the same indo european language based on an indo-iranian one when the Romani people migrated from the Indian subcontinent fearing the Persian invasions in the area. I am actually happy to hear that as I never knew they had communities that well established abroad. Have a great day sir.
I spent a little time learning Italian, which I very much enjoyed. After that, I took just a few basic classes to learn some Mandarin. The thing that struck me was the polar opposite approaches to verbs and their conjugations. In Italian, learning to conjugate the verbs is the most complex part of the language, whereas in Mandarin, verb tense is done more through context rather than conjugation. I'm a complete novice in both languages, this was just my impression. PS I think both are beautiful sounding languages.
What I noticed about Italian and Spanish when compared to Japanese and German is that the location of the verb in each sentence sort of reflects the stereotype of the temperament of the culture. The verb is the action of a sentence. In Italian and Spanish, the action is up front; with the rest of the information tossed to the back. In Japanese and German, the audience is forced to sit through the entire sentence to get to the verb / action, which is in the very end of the sentence. LOL!
Being an Italian I can confidently say that we change the word order in base of how we feel in that specific moment. I'm happy you enjoyed learning my language!
Really glad to see the video as a native speaker of the Chinese language. But there are actually two mistakes in the video though: 1. At 10:22, "给我本书" means "give me a book" instead of "give me the book". Here the measure word “本” is used while the numeral “一” (one) is omitted. In this situation the noun is not definite. (We don't have articles like a/an/the in Chinese!) 2. At 11:33, the placement of adjectives in Mandarin is before the noun. The example in the video is actually a sentence rather than a phrase. In Chinese languages, structures like subject+adjective are grammatically correct. We just tend not to use ”是“ (the word for "be") here and the sentence would sound weird if ”是“ were placed there.
I love the way you think every dialect as a distinct language. It’s frustrating when you know in this period of time, people still judge one another by their accent. I genuinely think that every language has its beauty and value to be appreciated. But as we are in a time where almost everything should be standardized, some of these languages are vanishing in an overwhelming speed.
To answer the question, I would consider Chinese as a group of distinct language. My native language is Southern Min under the Min Language subgroup and we had to learn Mandarin from Grade 1. Our way of the pronunciation from Southern Min is way too different from Mandarin although grammar-wise is similar to Mandarin. It feels like Italian and Spanish has the same grammar structure but different in pronunciation and some vocabularies. After I moved to Canada, I started to make friends from Hong Kong and I learned Cantonese through them. Some of our grammar structure and pronunciation is similar but also different in many ways.Let's say if a Shanghainese person speaks Shanghainese to me, it will be very hard for me to understand, vice versa.
Chinese is more complicated than I thought. I really hope you get to read this, what makes a language a "language"? I wonder this because Castilian and Portuguese are totally mutually intelligible in the written form, the big difference of both languages are the pronunciation. They're considered two completely different languages, and to be honest they're closer than those Chinese dialects. Greetings from Spain
This is what a wrote in Castilian and Portuguese so you can see my point: Spa: El chino es más complicado de lo que pensaba. Realmente espero que puedas leer mi comentario, qué hace que un idioma sea considerado un "idioma"? Me lo pregunto porque el castellano y el portugués son mutualmente inteligible en su forma escrita, la gran diferencia es la pronunciación. Ambas lenguas son consideradas diferentes, y para ser honesto están más próximas que estos dialectos chinos. Saludos desde España Pt: O chinês é mais complicado do que pensava. Realmente espero que possas ler meu comentario, que faz que um idioma seja considerado um "idioma"? Pergunto-mo porque o castelhano e o português são mutuamente inteligível na seu forma escrita, a grande diferença é a pronúncia. Ambas línguas são consideradas diferentes, e para ser honesto estão mais próximas que estes dialectos chineses. Saúdo desde Espanha!
Iker Berasategui The views are different from the Chinese linguist and the western linguist. Yes according to western linguist definition, Castilian and Portuguese are two different language just because they are both separate by politics. I would say that the languages of Chinese are luckier to be politically and culturally united by the people.
Actual there's a more precise terms for this kind of situation for Chinese language, it's call "regionalect"(方言). I don't know if western linguist had this kind of concept in their mind or language, but in Chinese vocabs we have it.
I'm native mandarin and my dad is native cantonese. I just wanna share that if you grow up in china with somewhat level education, the knowledge here is pretty much common sense for us because you will always hear or read other dialects in real life, and some facts about Chinese language(s) are taught in school. But you explained really really well! I appreciate that
I have a question, doesn't it feel weird to call your country China when in your native language it's spoken and written differently and actually means another thing? I started thinking about it when I discovered that Greece is actually called Helinic Republic in their language and I felt lost in translation, I don't know, I feel like when we try to translate it, it looses the meaning and the essence of the name, like, I'm brazilian and Brazil is actually how we call it, but we write it with an S, so, it feels quite accurate, but also in portuguese we call Netherland "Holanda" and the literal translation would mean another thing. It just feels wrong.
I really enjoy philosophy and I felt betrayed to know that all those people that I read about didn't call the space they lived the same thing I called to them Greece is actually Hellada, that to them it would seem something very weird and senseless. We should call countries how they actually call themselves.
The Chinese "漢" was typed incorrectly in the video. That character is modified by Japanese kanji (漢字). This adds another layer of complexity of "Chinese characters". Not only we have Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, there is also Japanese kanji (Chinese characters). 漢汉漢 (Chinese character in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese Chinese)
The character you typed appears exactly the same as the Japanese one on my screen, so it must be an issue with the way my computer renders the fonts. When I made the video I definitely used the Chinese character, but it seems to have been rendered as the Japanese one.
+Langfocus You can see more clearly in pictures: Traditional Chinese: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Hanzi_(traditional).svg/220px-Hanzi_(traditional).svg.png Japanese Kanji: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Kanji_furigana.svg/100px-Kanji_furigana.svg.png
This probably due to both Japanese Kanji and Traditional Chinese sharing the same Unicode (or maybe I'm wrong). I posted an image to illustrate the difference. See here: drive.google.com/file/d/0ByQa6q7cUcwkc2xtSzNHeGZGamM/view?usp=sharing
And other than that, there is the Korean Chiese character: 한자 or Kanja. They used to use Chinese too, and they are still using them in some places like locations.
Great video! I am a native Mandarin speaker. And I learnt Cantonese when I moved to Hong Kong several years ago. I’ve reached I would say a decent B2-C1 level but the tones are still a bit of a challenge. Clearly I was learning a language with 9 tones with a Mandarin knowledge of only 4 tones. Native speakers could tell I’m not native in Cantonese when I speak longer sentences. Something worth noticing from your video was when you said the Min dialect (which later developed into Hokkien/Taiwanese etc.) had a different base than most of the other dialects. This explained why my Cantonese speaking friends could not understand a word when I spoke Taiwanese but I could somehow guess what they were saying in Cantonese with my Mandarin knowledge. Again, very informative video and thank you for your hard work!
I have been learning Chinese (Mandarin) casually for 6 or so months. I found the tones relatively easy to overcome and the grammar is fairly straight forward and logical (although different from any other language I've known), but it can be difficult to remember every single hanzi character and tone for every word and then say/understand them quickly in spoken conversation. I think it takes a lot of steady practice and having a fluent speaker friend around to help is a great idea. I'm really enjoying the journey and most days I make some small progress - it's very rewarding! Patience is key. I already am a speaker of multiple other (easier) languages and I think those have prepared me with a general language-learning mindset that has been invaluable for me developing the skills necessary for now tackling one of the hardest languages for native English speakers. Learn Chinese! But don't underestimate the difficulty of learning such a different language from English!
Chinese and Asian languages are completely different, you have to learn the characters and structure, that's why a lot of people struggle when trying to learn, and each character has its own tone and correct pronunciation
Paul, Really appreciate your work on this subject. As a native mandarin dialect(Beijing dialect with a little Beijing-metropolis accent), most of the mandarin dialect are intelligible to me. I can understand over 80% in most mandarin dialect speeches. Yet, basically all other Chinese languages(dialects) are not intelligible to me. With respect to intelligibility, I consider Chinese languages as distinct languages. However, since we all share one formal writing system, it makes sense to suspect if all the "languages" are distinct with respect to languages in other language families(like Italian to Spanish). And after all, it is hard to imagine that one fifth of the global population are speaking a single language, even if they have been under the same sovereignty for thousands of years. Some comments for the vid: 1:Though the simplified writing system is created recently, lots of the simplified characters had been created in quite ancient time, which for some reason are not officially used in the formal writing system. 2: Wu languages has more than 2 tones. In Chinese linguistic literatures, most of dialects in Wu languages have 5-6 tones. 3: The tone systems vary in basically every Chinese dialect. Take mandarin for example, in the 8 major dialects of mandarin, every single dialect have its own tone system, and within every dialect, the tones vary with respect to subbranch dialects. 4: Even within the "major languages", the native speakers of different dialects can be unintelligible to each other. For example, the southern Wu dialects are hard to understand for the northern Wu speakers, especially the Ou dialect, which is spoken in Wenzhou area recognized as a Wu dialect. And Min languages are sometimes considered as different languages, since the eastern(Fuzhou), southern(southern Fujian and Taiwan), central, northern Min dialects are not mutually intelligible. Looking forward to more vids in Chinese languages and other eastern Asian languages, like Japanese and Korean.
In a strict linguistic sense, I believe Chinese is best thought of as a language family, composed of several distinct languages. (Traditional characters with Pīnyīn ahead. I'm American born and raised w/ family in Taiwan). Much like how Greek has different words for "love", Chinese has several words that get translated as "language." 文(wén) refers to a writing system, as well as the body of classic literature that was written using such a system. Since there is a standardized writing system used throughout China (even if that standard has evolved over time), Chinese is often called a single "language." On the other hand, 語(yǔ) and 話(huà) refer to the spoken word. As your video points out, there are many varieties of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and Italian, both derived from Latin but indisputably different languages today. 語(yǔ) is closer to the linguistic definition of a "language" (the English word comes from the Latin "lingua," which means tongue) which can be further broken down into several variant 話(huà), best translated as "dialect". Chinese also speak about foreign languages in the same way. For example, if a Chinese university student were to major in French, they would typically say 我學法文 "I study French (writing)." However, if they were to simply tell someone that they can speak French, they would say 我會講法語 "I can speak French (speech)." 我會講法文 would be incorrect, because you can't "speak" a 文. So why is 語(yǔ) almost always translated as "dialect" instead of "language?" I believe the main reason is purely POLITICAL. Chinese leaders have a very long history of preoccupation with territorial integrity and political unity (not without reason). To be able say that the country is unified by a single "language" is a powerful political tool. Even though the 文(wén) these days is diverging in certain claimed territories (traditional vs simplified characters).
Being an Indian but belonging to one of the Sino-Tibetian language speaking community, I couldn't agree more about your "not dialect but distinct language" thing!! You are such a 💎 in TH-cam. 😁
Whats also interesting is that in English your sentence actually says that you dont agree with him , you did up until a point then you stopped being in agreement '' could agree 'no more' ..... '' Of course in context its understood what you meant .
@@rippedtorn2310 Hahaha 🤣.. thanks for pointing out... I didn't even read it... Just frantically did ninja typing! And funnily it went unnoticed by all... Thanks for the reply... It came to my notice.
Strong wind in Mandarin is 強風(风) ,it's only a word with further describe . 好大的風(风) is already a sentence only some parts are removed. It means : The wind is strong . 刮大風(风) is same as the sentence upon this (some parts are removed) ,wich means wind is blowing strongly .
Both are valid, and the use depends on the context. 風好大 stresses on the wind, 好大的風 usually is used to describe other things when the strong wind is part of the context.
Very very informative video. As a native Chinese speaker and also speaks Shanghai dialect I didn't even notice there is such a difference in both gramma and writing characters. New subscriber confirmed!
There actually has always been a common dialect throughout Chinese history, except it changed over time. When Confucius (551 - 479BC) went to different states to promote his teachings, he had no problem communicating with rulers of those states. This is because there was a form of common speaking dialect for aristocrats of all states. At the time written characters varied in different states. They only got standardized around 220BC.
Something I love about learning Chinese is that the characters are great for visual learners! A lot of the radicals within the characters have meanings and you can create little stories to help you remember what the character means.
Finally a video on Chinese. I can understand why it take so long for you to get this video out. As a native speaker of Mandarin and partial Taiwanese. I find it really difficult to tell if all these language family languages are different or a dialect of one language. I can understand Cantonese (but cannot speak it myself) and find a lot of similarities among Cantonese (Yue family) and Taiwanese (Min family) but my parent who are native Taiwanese speaker understand nothing from Cantonese. And I have Cantonese friend who can speak Mandarin mostly but with some difficulties with the some vocabularies.
I've been studying chinese for several years and even though I already knew most of this, it was really interesting to actually see and hear the differences between Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese. Personally I don't think all those Chinese dialects should be considered just dialects and not completely different languages. They all have their own grammar structures, phonetics and vocabulary, so even if they use the same writing system, they might not be able to communicate everything properly, just as if a french person spoke or wrote me something (I'm Spanish). The difference between languages and dialects is merely political, so the reason why the dialects are considered as such is probably just because China wants to maintain its unity and not because the dialects don't have the characteristics of a language.
Chinese languages family has a lot of languages and hundreds of dialects waiting for you to learn and explore (I bet you will not have enough time in your lifetime to learn the whole Chinese languages and their dialects) 😁😁
Part of my responsibilities includes teaching English to children whose families have migrated to California. Many of these children come from the various regions of China. It is interesting to note that, for many of them, English provides an easier means of communication than trying to work through the many differences in their regional usages.
Hi Paul, love your vids, and happy to see a non-Chinese tackle the complex subject of Chinese languages! To me, Chinese is made up of different languages as you explained. However, since official 普通話 is based on northern dialects, I would say that nowadays the northern varieties have somewhat lost their language status to become dialects of Mandarin (for example, I'm a native Cantonese speaker, learnt Mandarin and I can still understand Shanxi dialect or Dongbei dialects, for the most part). If I may though, you should have talked about Min Chinese a bit more, as it is the closest to the Chinese that was exported to Japan and Korea (ex: 世界 is shijie/saigaai in Mandarin/Cantonese, but sekai in Min Chinese, just like in Japanese): to me it is the historical link between these 3 countries, something we should reiterate in these conflicted times :( Keep up the great vids, you're an inspiration to us all!
crimsonwires I'm a northerner, as I found out the dumplings in Turkey is Manti which was our Mantou in the history. Historically a lot of things moved from the north to the south. Your accent is more traditional Chinese. Northern dialect has been incredibly influenced by northern minorities. But that's what changes the history.
My mother tone is Min-nan, and I consider it a separate language. The difference between Taiwanese (Min-Nan) and Mandarin is like German to English. Perhaps more. Now, I know why Japanese and Korean have so many words from Taiwanese. The word for junk (flat bottom boat) also comes from Min.
As a native Chinese speaker from Taiwan, I think most of us are "educated" that Chinese is just a single language with different varieties of dialects. As a result, most of us will consider those dialects as varieties from the "formal" or "standard" language, which is "Mandarin" of course. I suppose this is true to people living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. However, as I grew older and traveled to multiple provinces in China, the fact that these so called dialects are not just "dialects" started to emerge. Although all the varieties of Chinese are connected by 漢字, but in reality, no one can fully understand the meaning of the written language in the dialectal form without learning the dialect in the first place. Of course we can guess the meaning just by reading the characters or phrases we're all familiar with, but the truth is that all the varieties of Chinese are separate languages. The only reason reason we think that all the varieties of Chinese are some form of dialects from the standard language is that 普通話 or 國語 is taught in every school to every student. If we were to stop teaching 國語 one day, we'd not refer to these varieties as dialects any more, i suppose. It's just like reading Japanese! Chinese speaker can guess the meaning of the written language but can not fully understand it. This is why I consider all the varieties of Chinese as different languages. I think the reason why we're educated that way is that both Taiwanese and Chinese government tries to picture themselves as the ruler of "the whole Chinese". Given this fact, it's easy to understand why they make students in school learn a lingua franca, which is to create a sense of connection and bond within us to construct a imaginary community. Otherwise, the land will start falling apart. No government will ever want this to happen. Your videos are amazing! Keep it up!
Chen Jesse I don't think the writting system is different in Wuhannese even Wuhanese is different from Mandarin. I think your example about Japanese and Chinese is not very suitable. Because Japanese use some of Chinese characters, but most of Japanese is syllabaries, and grammar is totally different. Also people in China will not write with pronunciation. In ancient times people from different place in China also haven't use dialect into writting system. Even the time people use Vernacular to write, they are not using dialect to write.
I am from a small place in southeastern China, having no idea which dialect/language that I can speak (Gan or Hakka or between). Before I discussed this with my bf (he is Norwegian), I took it for granted that it is only a dialect. That's the recognition of the Chinese mainstream society, regardless the political reason or whatever. The time when I was educated in China (90s-10s), it is well recognized that it is a shame if we cannot speak good mandarin. It is believed only people from small places or low status cannot speak it well. I felt lucky now that I was born in a family that they teach me their language first even though I am not a good user anymore. I also have a young brother, who barely speak our own language but is able to understand. It's sad to think about so many kids being proud speaking good mandarin and looking down on their own language (at least I did feel that way during my teenage time). China is a big country and an official language is important. It is hard to preserve things exactly same as what it was. But still it is important that people realized that it is not a shame to speak dialect/own languages and teach their kids it. No matter where you're from, you should be proud of your identity and cherish it.
Very interesting. Hope China can preserve the Chinese languages in a similar way to Europe, where the language of each country is well preserved while everyone can communicate with each other (for the most part) through English.
Zhenying Wu It is not just a question of dialect and language but also regional cultural differences often represented by the dialect of region as in e.g. regional operas. Those cultural elements, if lost, would be such a pity.
Hi, Most of my friends which comes from small cities/rural areas told me that they learned mandarin when they start to go to primary school. I'm lucky to have chance to visit their families and stay in their homes some times for a month. I can say that all of them have different languages. After a while I can learn to distinguish difference between mandarin and local dialect. In some cases I can learn some simple sentences. I can tell you even rice different part of chine likes is different. The only thing that doesn't changes is great hospitality which in some cases require me to sleep in rock hard bed, which is not so comfortable for western people.
Zhenying Wu I am forever thankful to have been able to speak Cantonese! ^^ It would be a shame if all these wonderful Sinitic languages were lost for the sake of unification and nationalism. For example just today I learnt about the Yi script and it absolutely blew my mind! Have a look here, it's like they took syllabaries to a whole new level: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script
Native mandarin speaker here. 11:37. In mandarin, we actually place the adjectives behind the noun if you are using it as part of a larger sentence (not sure if its called a nominal), but if you put the adjective after the noun, you are stating that the noun has the attribute/adjective. To select a noun with the attribute, put the attribute behind (left-hand side). To state the noun has the attribute, put the attribute after (right-hand side).
I think the most useful thing (for other learners) that I can relate from my journey learning standard Mandarin (普通话) and living in mainland China would be regarding the relative importance of tones. In my experience, most people who take on the challenge of learning this language fall into one of two camps: 1) tones are super-important and you have to drill them and nail them down and pronounce them clearly for all syllables pretty much always, and 2) tones aren't that important because most native speakers are used to foreigners not being able to produce clear tones or getting them wrong and because context usually makes it clear which meaning was intended. My experience is that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes. My observation of native speakers (admittedly only in a few parts of the country) is that when the tone is crucial to avoid ambiguity, it is very clearly pronounced. When the meaning would be clear regardless of the tone, then the tone is either pronounced "lazily" or converted to a neutral tone, especially for the latter syllables in a word. (Most of Chinese-language lyrics would be incomprehensible if it weren't possible to be understood without clear tones.) My supposition is that some of this "tone dropping" actually has to some degree been codified into the "standard" Mandarin pronunciation in many words where the second syllable is explicitly listed as a neutral tone, even when the character it is written with would normally be pronounced with a clear non-neutral tone. Exhibit A: (not what I'm talking about) 舌头 shétou = tongue Every source I've checked explicitly lists the second character/syllable of this word as a neutral tone. Pleco also has an separate entry for this character in its neutral tone pronunciation as a "suffix for nouns" (like 子 zi). This is definitely not "lazy" pronunciation or dropping of the tone that rightly ought to be there. It is the standard way to pronounce words that use this character as a noun suffix. I include this first example just to be clear that this is *not* what I'm talking about. (But, perhaps, long ago at some stage in the evolution of Mandarin the second syllable was pronounced with a rising tone? I don't know.) Exhibit B: 窗户 chuānghù/chuānghu = window While in some sources (and Google Translate) the second character/syllable is listed with a falling (4th) tone (hù), my Pleco dictionary lists it with a neutral tone (hu), which agrees most closely with my observations of how most native speakers say the word in natural everyday speech. Note that there is no other word in Mandarin that uses this sequence of syllables, even disregarding tone, so it introduces no ambiguity to drop the tone on the second syllable. Exhibit C: 热情 rèqíng = warm/enthusiastic/passionate While no dictionary I've ever seen has dropped the tone on the second character/syllable, I've observed that it's perfectly fine to drop this tone in practice (rèqing). I think this is because there is no other word that shares this sequence of syllables, regardless of tone. Another anecdote relating to the importance of tones comes from the pronunciation of the numbers 4 (四 sì) and 10 (十 shí). While some Mandarin dialects will swap or conflate the /s/ and /sh/ sounds in the initials of a syllables, the tone for 4 is always falling (4th) tone, and the tone for 10 is always rising (2nd) tone. If you were in an elevator and you accidentally used the wrong tone, it wouldn't matter whether you got the /s/ or /sh/ "right" or not. The person asking which floor you wanted would hit the button corresponding to the tone. My takeaway conclusion is that tone matters a lot more than a lot of the "camp 2" people would like to admit, but that you don't have to always get them all right in order to be understood. You can be a little "lazy" with your tones, especially once your vocabulary is large enough to know whether doing so might potentially introduce confusion/ambiguity for the listener.
Great observations and analysis, especially the part about the lyrics in Chinese songs. I've always subconsciously noticed that too, though never given it much thought.
I'm from Beijing and just one funny little fact here. Even as a native Chinese speaker the language is fascinating for me (picking up Cantonese and Shanghaiese right now :)) Although Standard Mandarin pronunciation is said to be based strictly on Beijing dialect, its grammar, vocab and even some pronunciation are based on Northern Mandarin in general plus Written Vernacular Chinese, and Beijingese has a quite different set of local vocab, grammar and pronunciation (like adding "er" and extensive use of the neutral tone). YET I didn't know that till a few years ago and I believed I was always speaking STANDARD Mandarin. It pissed me off when I was talking in Beijingese with other people using Standard Mandarin (usually from other areas of China where Mandarin is not the first language) and people couldn't understand me :( I love ALL Chinese dialects cuz they are so fascinating (especially for a Linguistics major). But it's still good to have Mandarin as a lingua franca otherwise it would be too gruesome to communicate with solely written language...
Cantonese native speaker Hong Kong here~ I have a hard time understanding Beijing Mandarin, but it's more of not understanding the accent. for example, it throws me off when Beijingese roll their r sound. To us, you guys also tend to speak faster. Slowing the pace of speech can actually help us understand better, since we do understand Mandarin in the first place, just not Beijing style. The 兒 is not much of a problem to us, but maybe vocabs like 胡同 might trick us since it's not a vocab in Cantonese
I'm born/raised in San Francisco to parents from China and I always argue that Chinese is a group of written language while spoken Chinese is a large group of many different languages that I still refuse to call dialects. I picked up Cantonese from my parents growing up which my dad spoke the Hong Kong variety while my mom spoke the Canton or Guangzhou variety, though both are pretty much the same with some subtle differences like English commonly spoken in San Francisco vs. Boston which I've been to. My grandma and relatives primarily spoke native Toisanese (臺山話) and what I meant by "native" is genuine Toisanese that is pretty different from standard Cantonese, not "Cantonese spoken with a Toisan accent" which was also pretty common when I was growing up. So that's my justification that spoken Chinese is a large group of many difference languages that I often compare the differences to Germanic and Romance languages of Europe. Romanize each spoken Chinese variety and they no longer have a common written language but will prove they're as distinct as French vs. Italian vs. Portuguese vs. Spanish and Dutch vs. English vs. German. The word "Earth" from Google Translate, for example: French: Terre Italian: Terra Portuguese: terra Spanish: tierra Dutch: Aarde English: Earth German: Erde I speak these languages and these romanization do not include their respective tone marks: Mandarin: Diqiu (地球) Cantonese: Dei kau (地球) [pronounced: "day" "kow" where the 'ow' is pronounced like the 'ou' in house by saying "kouse" without the 'se'.] Toisanese: Ei kiu (地球) [pronounced: "ay" "kee-u"]
As a native speaker, Paul brought me the new angle to treat Chinese as a group of languages instead of a single one. It's interesting to think that way! By the way, as a native Shanghaiese speaker, I would suggest that if '吾‘ is chosen as I, same charater shall also be used in the expression of 'I go first'.
I only started learning Chinese in March, but it’s quickly become my favorite language to learn. The history of every character is incredibly interesting, as people had to find ways to signify abstract ideas as well as real world objects. For example, 我, “I/me”, is a composition of the radical of 手, “hand” and 戈, “weapon”, symbolizing someone defending themself. I also saw another comment mention how 电话 means “electric words” or “telephone”. I think my favorite translation is 电影, “electric shadow”, aka “movie”.
Yeah, I think it's because the original feature. Chinese always want to present the meaning of reality object. Sure, a lot of words us present just sound, like Buddhism character name
many characters were adapted from existing ones, that's why they have the same radical on the left, they evolved to meet the demand of needing new characters
You are a true professional, got our shock. I didn't hear that detailed yet, globalization is so unbelievable. Hope more people come close to we Chinese.
I bet this gentleman is the most knowledgeable linguistic expert! I watched his video about Japanese and other language years ago. Now he surprised once again!
As a native Cantonese user, I would like to add some information about the word order in Cantonese. For the case "我走先" mostly be used under a context: You want to empathize that you have to go NOW. Sometimes we use "我先走" for just describing the order of the action "going". For example, "我先走，之後到你走。" that means "I go (first), then you go."
i think its how Hong Kong people speak then. When we say "I walk (e.g. on the road) first, u after me 我行先，跟住到你" in your example, it's still like in the "I - walk - first" order
I also love how playful mandarin is handled, sometimes new words were created along the sound of an old sign or just by combining the meaning of signs as Alexander Stucky mentioned here in the somments already
As a Mandarin user from North China, it's hard for me to read Cantonese even it is written in simplified Chinese, not to say understand the spoken language. When I went to Hong Kong, I found it easier for me to communicate with the locals in English than in Chinese.
Most of the simplified Chinese characters are not created in 1950s but have been existing for long time(some over one thousand years) as variant characters(异体字 or popular form of Characters(俗体字）. The Chinese government used principle of passing on but not creating new (述而不作). The government simplified many radicals of Chinese characters which changed many characters while most of people who only know simplified characters still have no difficulty in reading the articles of traditional Chinese characters.
As a native speaker, I consider Chinese is a group of distinct language. The position of the language is just like the Germanic languages in Indo-European language.
Autumn Hong That is because you take the definition of European languages as the reference. Rules governing European languages are deficient when it comes to analysing Asian languages.
Living in China, I can tell you that the average person I met considers the varieties of Chinese to be dialects of one language, possibly for political reasons. My wife and I live in Ningbo where a dialect of Wu is spoken. My wife is from Zhuji, which has a dialect of the same language. Recently, at an airport in Beijing, I heard a group of tourists next to me speaking a sinitic language that was not Mandarin. I asked my wife if she recognized it because it sounded like how her family talks and she said no. I listened to it and guessed that it must be a southern language north of where Yue is spoken. Turns out that they were speaking Ningbonese dialect from a coastal town in Ningbo county. I guessed right, but the real surprise was that my wife did not seem to understand them at all. Therefore it would seem that the southern Wu dialects are drifting far enough apart to be considered different languages. I am a teacher and I often survey my local students to see if they speak Ningbonese. Sadly enough, it seems that the language that their ancestors have been speaking for countless generations may very well die within this generation or the next due to the northern language that is Mandarin.
You might want to read a professional book on this topic. What constitutes a language, exceeds the boundaries of politics. Have you ever asked a person from the Wu region what Wuyu is? Most people probably can't give an answer because they are only used to terms like "name of city + dialect". It is a fairly new classification by linguists, not a concept felt by the people who speak it. Southern Wu dialects (Ningbo is still considered Northern though) are indeed different, therefore they've already been classified as such. Nothing is drifting away. Mutual intelligibility is one of the worst factors to classify languages. Certainly, you don't understand everyone native in what you consider your "language". Chinese dialects aren't going anywhere soon, but they are evolving, which is just healthy for every form of speech, otherwise they really die out like Latin because an elite group of people were clinging to it. In the Wu region, even the grandparents of today's children's grandparents spoke what today's grandparents would call archaic because there hasn't been an effort to standardize pronunciation. Thus, the ancestor argument is not convincing since you would claim that the speech had been static for centuries and that change is recent. Don't forget that Mandarin is very diverse in itself. What we call Standard Chinese today is just merely the pronunciation fixed loosely around Beijing. And as you may know from other languages, standards are indeed important. Meanwhile, words from all dialects continue to influence the standard, making it a living language. Do you know that words like 沙发 originated from the Wu area where it's pronounced close to "sofa"?
this happened to many young people because the only language they know is Mandarin + (perhaps) the language of their city, they have such less experience to communicate in regional languages with people who come from neary counties. so the smallest difference might be unintelligible for them. In some area where Mandarin is not so dominated, there're many multilingual, also they have indeed a common language apart from mandarin, it might be a mix of regional languages, or the accent of a high prestige city. (sorry for my english)
Jaime Escalante I am from Chongqing-a southwestern city. The local tongue there which is a branch of Sichuanese is actually preserved quite well, and is spoken in daily bases by the majority of the young generation. The interesting point is that local languages are seemed to be better preserved in southwest comparing to east coast cities. Less emigrants from other regions and relatively disadvantaged economy could be a factor. Moreover, I reckon it's also due to the relative closeness of my local dialects to standard Mandarin comparing to other drastically distinct southern languages.
Brant Liu It is not not political reason. Politics mainly concerns politicians not the commoners. I speak or understand a few Chinese dialects. There are so many similarities in the dialects, even though the pronunciations are different, that you can make out how one dialect will sound from another after being exposed long enough and understanding some rules. Another thing, knowing one dialect helps in learning another dialect. If these are different languages, these will be undermining rather than reinforcing one another.
cestakou + They are dying actually. Language evolution is when a language is expanded upon to become functional in newer domains and develop new linguistic resources or when words undergo semantical changes, but in China many youngsters do not speak their venacular variety of Chinese at all, only Mandarin and perhaps English, so I don't think it can really be called evolution. It is indeed a real shame that venacular varieties of Chinese besides Mandarin are dying out due to a mix of globalisation and government policies. The best case scenario, I think, would have been if China developed a diglossia situation with Mandarin as the H variety and their venacular variety of Chinese as the L variety. This way, they can retain their venacular variety and still speak Mandarin, but I don't know if such a situation can develop or is developing at all.
I think there is a translation problem: “方言” is translated into “dialect”. But actually, “方” means "place" or "area". In this phrase, you can think of "方" as “a specific area”; And “言” means... "speaking", "saying", "telling", "language"…… In Chinese, a more accurate translation of ‘方言’ (the term that is often translated as 'dialect') would be 'the mode of communication of people in a specific area'. So, in pursuit of a simpler translation, "dialect" was used.
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Langfocus 8:51You are wrong It should be 9 tone I am a Hong Kong people At least 3 of my Chinese teachers say that there is 9 tones
Langfocus 你还行
共产党加油 ？
hey langfocus, thanks for making interesting and informative "question of the day"s instead of stupid "bonding" questions as I have seen so many times before in this format!
Hey Paul quick question, If China hasn’t simplified their script, would China be able to read Japanese kanji? Or Japan simplified their kanji as well? Thank you.
I've studied Chinese for years. In my opinion it might be one of the most entertaining languages to learn. When you learn new bigrams (which are words that are made up of two characters to present a meaning), it's always interesting to see why they chose those two characters. The one example you gave was 电话 (diàn huà), which means "telephone", but each character translates as "electric words". Another one would be 龙虾 (lóng xiā), which means "lobster", but each character means "dragon shrimp". In my opinion, it doesn't get boring to learn, that's for sure!
Alexander Stucky 電話(telephone), later simplified by Mainlanders to 电话, was a term created by Japanese via Korean. In Japanese, the pronunciation is "denwa". In Korean, the pronunciation is "cheonhwa." See how (話/话) in Japanese pronounced "wa" is derived from "hwa" in Korean?! There were NO, I repeat NO "reborrowings", from Japanese in Chinese terms, mainlanders appropriated it, meaning they just TOOK IT as their own.
Not exactly. "wa" for (話/话) is from China's Wu dialect. When the Korean and Japaneses adopted the Chinese writing system in ancient times, they also borrowed the pronunciation in China at that time.
What do you mean by "Via Korean"?
Well.... 电话 is more like "Electric tongue tongue" and 虾 is "Under bug" both of which illustrate the comedy of /radicals/ but yeah, calling lobster 'dragon shrimp' 龙虾 is also funny.
computer is 电脑, which literally means 'electronic brain'. hah
Fun fact: As Shanghainese speakers, when my parents traveled to Beijing in 1990s, other people (who speak standard Mandarin) on the bus thought they were speaking Japanese...
我还看见有人说粤语像泰语的。。。官话区蛮子不懂（确信）
seal solar 蛮夷说别人是蛮夷
呵呵呵
@@sealsolar2669 什么鬼哈哈哈哈哈，泰语也就有一些字像粤语而已
小时候碰到过 现在基本上不会了
Me before watching this video: Let's see if this guy really know Chinese.
Me after watching this video: I don't really know Chinese.
@Lullalalaby s Knowing linguistic facts about the language does not equal being fluent in it though
@Lullalalaby s not really, a lot of points and understandings are off and could lead to horrible misconceptions.
Let's learn chinese language with me
😂😂
Chinses is unified and diverse + 妙不可言 ! Amazing language!!!
I've only recently applied some thought to the matter and concluded that, if we're going to call Spanish and Portuguese two different languages, then by consistency the various Chinese varieties should also be called different languages. I'm told that Portuguese speakers find it… if not easy, then at least possible, to understand Spanish. Not so for the Chinese languages. I had a friend speak Shanghainese once, and even knowing both Cantonese and Mandarin, it was impossible to understand what she was saying. The same goes for what little Hokkien and Hakka crosses my path.
Interesting
Heck, Sinitic languages are like the “Indo” part in Indo-European. Bai languages are in a whole ‘nother classification altogether, like how you wouldn’t say that Albanian and English are the same except for the fact that they have mutual ancestors some 5,000 yrs ago. When you have Germanic languages for example, which could be divided into North, West, etc., you can divide the rest of Chinese languages into Ba-Shu, Min, Guang, Xiang, Huizhou, Wu, Yue, Pinghua, She, Yao, Tuhua, etc.
*Then* can we break in down even further into individual languages. Take the Wu languages, there is Wenzhounese, Shanghainese, Wuzhounese, etc, with as much mutual intelligibility as Eastern Dutch and Western German. Saying Cantonese and Mandarin are same languages is like saying Russian and Greek are the same languages.
China's ideology is "one people, one nation". The Han identity is an amalgamation of different peoples, like Chinese is with its languages.
Portuguese speaker here. Our phonetic is very different from Spanish, ours is more complex. As such, they have a hard time understanding us when we speak, but not the other way around. This could also be because Spain is our only neighbour and we grow up listening to Spanish (and English) content.
Written form is very intelligible both ways. Even for Italian and French. For Romanian is a bit harder.
@@ME-hm3tc Han Chinese as a concept can be scientifically defined, though. They came from the Northern parts of China proper, and then migrated to the south overtime, intermarrying with the locals. You can still identify them via genetics.
I live in China and my wife is Chinese... I have no problem speaking Chinese in the city where I live but when I got to my wife's hometown which is about a 4 hour drive away, I can hardly understand anything they say.... And they're also technically speaking mandarin.
well, they must have a different accent. Yes in China most of the people can speak Mandarin, but when we talk about accuracy, here's a big problem. Most Chinese in southern China find it hard to pronounce Mandarin in the right tone, well obviously due to their mother language's huge difference to the mandarin. While people in northern China find it kinda easy to say Mandarin as their mother language is either Mandarin or similar to it.
What you learnt is called Standard Mandarin
@@desperadoshao9733 yes, the accent is different and the vocabulary is also different as well. For example: If they say, "你给我二百块钱" they will say, "nia gei wo le bei kuai qianr" or if they want to say something like, "last night I ate some clams and drunk some beer" they'd say, "wo yelei(昨天) humshang(晚上) chi le gala(蛤蜊) he ha(喝) pijiu."
@@nubemuffin Interesting. Can you tell whether yelei is from 夜裡? It reminds me of how Spanish and German use morning to mean tomorrow.
@@YelDohan actually its 夜来 pronounced yelai, 来 lai means 裡, because ancient chinese common people consider sunrise as the begining of a day rather than 0:00 or 24：00. but yelai means yesterday, not just yesterday night.
Are you learning mandarin?
Me: Yes
What level are you on?
Me: ma, ma, ma, ma, ma
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Ma! 😁
Ma?? 🤔
MaaAaa?? 😳
Ma! 😠
American：Are you learning English？
Chinese：yeah of course
American：What level are your on？
Chinese：Wot are your nemu？
American：？？？？
@@王钦-y4f 为什么你能发语音哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
@@charlottebronte7944 经历过中国应试教育英语学习的学生，第一次鼓足勇气说英语应该都是这样。😂
I've been learning mandarin for almost two month now and I was actually surprised how easy it is to learn how to read. I always assumed that learning all those characters is super complicated but really, it just takes a little time and effort. Recognising the characters after seeing them a few times feels surprisingly natural.
Also, my native language is german and I learned some french in school. And I very much do not miss learning 20 variations and rules for one single verb to change it according to the sentence. Mandarin is very refreshing in that.
I agree, I've been learning for a month and I hope I can improve faster. Being Spanish my native language, English my second and German my third, I decided to completely change the way into east Asian languages and it's been VERY interesting
@@avril6922 Yeah, most languages Europeans/Americans usually learn work pretty similar. Mandarin has so many completely new concepts, it's really fun to learn
I have been learning it for a bit longer than you (3 months) and find the written Chinese to be extremely hard. I think spoken Mandarin is very very easy comparatively. English is my mother tongue.
@@avril6922 jajajaja, estoy estudiando español ahora. ha sido dos semanas. pongo leer, pero no pongo escuchar.
@@Teresa8bigsalad Mucha suerte, a mí me gusta más leer que escuchar.
Fun fact: teaching Latin American high school kids Mandarin will result in them relentlessly calling each other and their moms a Grape.
Not quite, grape is putao
Bro, latino here learning mandarin. The struggle is real, once you realize how hard is to pronounce mandarin; french, Portuguese and the rest of romance languages are like children's play to learn, well, for us as Spanish speakers.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@jking1329portugues es una pabada men
being a Mandarin Chinese native speaker, and speaks fluently English and Danish, and is learning Italian, I must say that the grammar for Chinese language is probably the easiest one! Anyone who wants to learn speaking and understanding Mandarin Chinese should go for it! Don't be afraid of the tones, it really doesn't matter if you can hit the right tone or not as long as you speak a sentence with several words, people will understand you. It only gives problem if you only speak a single word, then it is very important to hit the right tone. Once you have learned the very easy grammar, and get some basic vocabulary, you will be able to manage a lot of daily situations. But the next difficult thing in oral Mandarin Chinese is to learn the idioms - there are many idioms linked to some ancient histories and stories, very fascinating!
Holy Shit Jesus Christ! Du bist ein Genius!
The white arctic fox in purple northern light In order to be understood precisely, you cannot run away from expressing in Chinese script. There about 400 homophones in Mandarin and around 1700 different sounds if tones are included. The largest collection of Chinese characters is just above 100,000. Compare this to around 8000 different English sounds. Without tones, we are comparing 400 different Chinese sounds from 8000 English sounds. Many meanings would have been lost. Even when putting in the tones, it is still 1700 Chinese sounds against 8000 English sounds. As there are about 100,000 different Chinese characters, for each of the 1700 Chinese sounds, there is an average of 60 Chinese characters sounding the same. Therefore for those who recommend the use of Roman scripts to replace Chinese characters, we can just imagine how inadequate such a system would be.
Of course, for those trying to learn Chinese, do not be discouraged as a basic vocabulary of 1000 characters is sufficient to get through most conversations and a vocabulary of 3000 characters is good enough to read 99% of all writings - newspapers, most books, magazines etc. To read ancient texts, I understand a vocabulary of 6000 characters is required. And this is talking about characters, not words (which are compound characters). There are 3.5 to 4 times the number of words as characters. The total number of words is close to 370,000.
Yeah, Chinese grammar is easier because there are no conjugations and grammatical order is more consistent and logical. That said, when going from a language which has highly different grammar, Chinese grammar can still be tricky because of unfamiliarity.
Speak is easy but how about read and write Chinese characters? You need to handle at least 4,000 basic most frequently used Modern Chinese characters.
Forse un giorno imparerò un po' di cinese, ma nel frattempo è più facile imparare le lingue europee, ma allora sono fascinato del cinese!
Omg! I could not distinguish the Cantonese tones at all! they all sounded si si si si si si.
but any slight change in the tone changes the meaning of the whole sentence
OR
si1 si2 si3 si4 si5 si6
Actually Chinese characters are weird. You need to listen to the conjunction characters in order to learn and understand faster. Yes, tonal of a character has no meaning... as in, there are so many possible combinations. It is more like the logical sense, the next and previous characters that made up the meaning of that.
Same, it sounded all the same to me too
chinese characters have NO CONNECTION to spoken chinese whatsoever.
it's like Heptapod B in Arrival
the logography is totally separate from the spoken form
though, there are a list of characters that, if you memorize it, can help you guess a character's potential sound(s) due to some/most characters are composite. (i guess that's what you mean by conjunction characters)
if you don't understand what i mean, look at Vietnamese's Chu Nom, they can be read, given you know the character partially.
we call this 有邊讀邊, literally "if there's a side, read the side".
mandrin: i drink juice
cantonese: i drink juice
shanghainese: i eAT juice
and in shanghai when we speak mandarin we still say eat😂
Don’t mind me, just gonna go eat a cup of juice 😳😳
*We eat coffee*
the guy
We eat water
@@dear4208 no we eat your Hope's & dreams.
The special thing is that I had never been tough about simplified Chinese but I can still read it as a traditional Chinese user
Same for me but I’m reverse, 令人惊叹❗️
Vice verse ! 😌
Pffff heck nah, I can barely memorize the characters and I only know about 800
Can someone tell me Chinese dialects as Emojis?!
汉语为母语的人 一般都有繁简转换的能力
In ancient time, Chinese people could communicate with Japanese Koreans and Vietnamese by Chinese character even though these languages
are different language family
.In fact today the chinese and japanese can still partly communicate with each others by writing so i always think that the chinese character is a amazing invention。
「漢文」ということですね？
上古漢語を共通語として用いるのは本当に便利なのか、大きな問題だと思いますが。
タカテツヒコ 笔谈？
有理
I talked to a Japanese girl in a cooking class with Chinese characters. She told me a lot about her life just with Characters, lol. fun times.
Genn2102 我是看懂了你说的是什么意思，但不知道你知不知道我在说什么？
My grew up in a city near GuangZhou, and spoke Cantonese as my native language. My formal schooling was in Mandarin, and my mother is Hakka. Hence I speak all three fluently. I used to consider Chinese as a single language with different dialects (ie. variations of Mandarin). However, after moving to North America, where I met people who only speaks only Mandarin or only Cantonese, I realized how different the two are. Thank you for your video. It helped me with reflecting my identity and deepening my understanding of my culture :)
学不会广东话，听了很多歌，hei fu nei喜欢你….大概听懂比讲出来容易一点吧
@@Bill_here_USA 其實歡是讀 foon
Wow! you didn't notice the difference because you were fluent in all of them from the young age. You didn't notice because the difference never came across your mind.
I always jokes about how we were "almost" trilingual given we learn 2 dialects plus English when we were at school ages.
@@4IN14094 应该算不上trilingual，顶多bilingual。你应该知道国内的英语教育有多差
There have been numerous comments saying that Cantonese has 9 tones, not 6. It's true that there's a 9 tone system for Cantonese, but tones 7,8, and 9 are sometimes not counted for modern, practical purposes because they are not distinct in pitch, they are only distinct in length and the consonant at the end of the syllable. At least in materials aimed at learners, 6 tones are usually counted. It's two different ways of counting them.
Also, as some people have noted, I mixed something up and said that in Mandarin the adjective comes after the noun, but it normally goes before the noun, as in Cantonese. If it comes after that makes it a sentence like "The wind is strong". Sorry for the confusion there.
Langfocus I think adjectives go before nouns they modify in most Chinese languages. Moving the adjective after the noun makes the sentence a predicate (as if there's an indicated copula there). Correct me please if that's not true for Cantonese .
The Cantonese example you use 好大風 could be rendered into Mandarin 好大的風 (by adding a particle, meaning "strong wind").
I would perhaps argue that Mandarin has six tones, because if you count the neutral tone, which happens as a course of sandhi, then the "sixth" tone, which is the "falling" tone (similar to the Vietnamese hook tone) that occurs when a third tone meets a non-third tone, should also be counted. Some people say it's just the fourth tone, but the fourth tone is a sharp sound while this proposed "sixth" tone is a short, but noticeable, graceful fall.
Cantonese not the same language as mandarin .
For most of us , Cantonese speakers, mandarin just a language that bring to our homeland by some invaders from somewhere .
We are always been tough in school that the nine-toned Cantonese was the closest-related language from the official language used in the past , before Jin dynasty .Literature from the past was rhymed in Cantonese but not mandarin .They even cant pronounce some words in mandarin when they are reading classical literature.
What I think for first , for a native tradition chinese user , it is not possible to recognize most of the simplified scripts, vise versa. Cos they are simplified from the tradition scripts. So it is very different in the structure. And the simplified scripts merged some characters with similar structure into one single character. For example, we have distinct words for Pine (N.) and Loose(V.) .But in simplified script , it just used one word to represent both meanings ,which is hard for us to read their sentence without guessing what they mean.
Second, some history is saying that when mandarin first used as official language in China, they have their distinct writing scripts other than chinese characters ,which they adopted the chinese characters afterward. I'm not quite sure about that point tho. More research on that is needed for sure.
wouldn't 好大的風 be translated more like "wind strength"?
wind strength would be 風力 (lit. "wind power/force"). 好 in this context would be like an adverb "very", 大 "strong", 的 a particle linking the adj and the modified noun, and 風 "wind". So 好大的風 is lit. "very strong wind" and 風好大 the wind is very strong.
Personally as a speaker of a variety of Hakka found in Vietnam, I think that "Chinese" as a whole lingual family is made of many different Sinitic varieties all stemming from the one relation. For example, I learnt my Hakka variety (or dialect) from my grandma, who also fluently spoke Mandarin and Cantonese (Plus Vietnamese xD). Whenever she turned on a show or television program in mandarin or Cantonese, I wouldn't be able to understand a single word. This especially got bad when I was taken over to friends of my grandma or relatives that mostly only spoke Cantonese. Communication was impossible and they had as much trouble understanding me as I had with them. Once while they were talking, I heard them say a word that sounded like "door" In Hakka, and I was so surprised to hear something like the variety I was used to that I spent the rest of the day looking up the word "door" in Cantonese. So yeah, I personally think Chinese is a bunch of different languages under one umbrella.
wow, i didn't notice that in Vietnam , some people somehow speaks Hakka. Actually door in Hakka sound familiar to door in Cantonese.
many Chinese moved to Vietnam and SE Asia decades ago, they still speak Cantonese/Hokkien/Hakka today
My sister, a native northern Chinese.
Years ago, when she first took an international flight, her English was really bad at that time.
An attendant (not Chinese) asked her: "Do you speak English?" - "No..." - "Well, do you speak Mandarin?" - "No..." So they had no dialogue any more.
Problem is, my sister just never knew "Mandarin" means "Common Chinese / Putonghua".
The attendant should ask in mandarin directly 你会说中文吗？
满洲话
@@haoyuluo9845 Mandarin means 'official language' or 'language used by officers/clerks'
Haoyu Luo 你是滿洲人？
@@denispasanen9237 Suomalainen?
Wow. As a Chinese, I had no idea of the development of the language itself. This is pretty insightful!
I am sad, I did not see Hokkien being included.
I saw a video that read a poem in evolving Chinese and I was surprised to know that it was barely understandable until the middle Ming Dynasty
You should say "As a Chinese person"
@@Weiweisunn No, the OP is correct. Generally, the word “Chinese” can be used as a noun or an adjective. The OP is using it as a noun, and you are using as an adjective. You’re both correct :) (source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
@@EvergreenOliviaTV 3:04 Hokkien is part of Min Chinese, also called Southern Min.
The example at 11:50 is not so accurate. We would express "Strong Wind" by "好大的风", where "好大" means "Strong" and "风“ means "Wind". Adjectives usually go before the nouns. Actually "风好大” is a full sentence, which means "The wind is strong."
From my little understanding of how Cantonese work (I don't really speak it), in Cantonese that can be either a sentence or a phrase. It does not have to be a sentence.
一般情況怎麼說都是對的...不會影響理解 最多是習慣的問題
For those who can’t read Chinese characters, 大means big. So it actually means “big wind” although English speakers tend to say strong wind instead.
Yes, I was about to type this. Usually in Mandarin its adjective then noun. Its only noun then adjective when there's an adverb (in this case 好 is similar to the adverb "very"). People would look at you funny if you said 苹果红 instead of 红苹果
Also Chinese has a character for strong but it doesn't fit in this context.
I'm native Mandarin speaker, and my mother tongue is Taiwanese Hokkien. I would consider them completely different languages. Even though we can understand different languages from the written words, there's no way you understand what people are actually saying without learn it as a different language. I have to actively learn the vocabulary of Taiwanese Hokkien to understand what my parents are saying when they are saying Taiwanese Hokkien to each other.
Also, learning the tones and the rules of it of Hokkien is pain, even I'm already familiar with the tones, I'm still struggle to change the tones correctly lol.
Agree! Also is your name written in peh-oe-ji? I wanna learn Hokkien so bad but it feels like there's so little resources online
The CCP claims that Cantonese and Hakka are dialects of mandarin.
Everyone else knows they are languages.
I'm learning Chinese right now as non-native. And tones are just pain in the ass. To even thinking other dialects have more tones just blow my mind. People just have to have it as mother tongue..
They say these are dialects to make everyone United , the difference between these "Chinese languages" is same as different Dialects of Hindi which are actually different languages but considered single to make northern India United the same way China has done @@LMB222
Please speak in Taiwanese hokkien to your parents and when in future you have kids and your own family teach all of them Taiwanese hokkien as native language because that's your mother tongue preserve your mother tongue.
I'm Chinese but I think this guy knows wayyyyy more than me.
Maybe the stuff I researched. But you speak it, and I don't! :)
同
FEMINISTS and SJWs are terrorists haha ha, are you kidding me
because the teacher is too boring, i also often fall slept in chinese lesson
中華民族永垂不朽 No he didn’t
我是个中国人，我觉得你的视频讲解的非常细致，汉语从几千年前流传到今天，经过了几千年的演变，形成了我们的基本文化，我为我的国家感到自豪，为我的语言感到骄傲，非常感谢你的视频，能让其他国家的人也了解中文和中国文化。
I am a Chinese. I think your video is very detailed. Chinese has been passed down from thousands of years ago to today. After thousands of years of evolution, it has formed our basic culture. I am proud of my country. The language is proud, thank you very much for your video, and let people from other countries understand Chinese and Chinese culture as well.
你是中国人或台湾人(也许新加坡人)？
他山之石可以攻玉，我们自己研究自己有时候受到惯性思维影响跳不出来。
Satan's Coin Damn communist
@mitä äijä Clearly we can use vpn to get here.
GRGplays 你是哪里人？
Here's a strategy for anyone who's learning Mandarin: the basic word order in any statement sentence is "STPVO" - subject, time, place, verb, object. For example:
我昨天在公园打篮球。 (I played basketball in the park yesterday.)
Word for word it's 我 (I) 昨天 (yesterday) 在公园 (in the park) 打 (play) 篮球 (basketball).
Basically, in Mandarin, we set the listener up with the scenario first (by giving them the time and place) before telling them what's happening. It's very logical.
打篮球？？
鸡你太美
Thanks, that's a very helpful rule to know.
@@jacksonlee8300 有毒哈哈哈
@@jacksonlee8300 律师函警……oh，对不起，走错了。
ZhangtheGreat The thing is that many of the components of the sentence can be leniently placed in different positions and it would still logically make sense lol.
They are definitely different languages. Other languages such as Spanish and Portuguese (I speak both) are almost completely intelligible without prior exposure, yet they are never seen as dialects of Romance/Iberian/etc. On the other hand, with Mandarin and Cantonese (I also speak both) you can't understand one by only knowing the other.
Mutual intelligibility is not the only factor that determines whether different "tongues" should be considered different languages or dialects. Infact in most cases it isn't even the primary factor. What can be considered a dialect or a language is often dependent upon politics, power dynamics and self identification.
For example you may consider two languages as different based upon mutual intelligibility but people speaking those languages may have a united identity even across those spoken languages. Like for example Kurdish people who speak different mutually unintelligible Kurdish languages yet identify themselves as one people. Some of them even speak non-Kurdish languages like Zazaki which belongs to entirely different sub-family yet even they see themselves as Kurdish as others. On the other hand Hindi (India) & Urdu (Pakistan & India) are basically two different official standards of the same dialect yet speakers of these languages vehemently identify them as being seperate despite extreme level of mutual intelligibility. Infact some "dialects" of Hindi are much more different from the standard language than Urdu itself which mostly differs only in technical and literary vocabulary. Thier arguments have a lot of truth though when seen from the perspective of politics and history as these two languages have seperate literary traditions and seperate populations to cater.
What linguists at best can determine and put forward is the level of mutual intelligibility between languages. They can determine the relationship between two languages or dialects based on that. To determine which ones should be seen as dialects and which should be seen as seperate languages isn't upon them to decide. It is dependent on the people speaking those languages and with what they identify with.
Mutual intelligibility is a gradual scale not a strict boundary. In reality every tongue spoken is a dialect. But it is politics, power dynamics, history and self identification that determines which part of that scale should belong to a particular chosen standard dialect which then becomes a language.
Note:-
This particularly applies to "dialects" which are closely related to each other. In these cases we need to be careful of strict classification.
It doesn't apply to languages which are clearly different enough although there are exceptions even to these. However even in these cases we can linguistically consider them different enough on mutual intelligibility scale however we should leave classifying people speaking them in terms of thier identity. Unfortunately people especially outsiders often end up mixing these two & it can have serious consequences in the long run.
"a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy"
@@Aws895 this is really interesting and you brought up points i had not thought of. thank you for sharing
@@Aws895It doesn't have any sense , many people consider themselve as united identity , polish and lithuanian also consider themselves as united identity , so does it mean that polish and lithuaniani are the same language ? In Ussr we also consider ourself as united identity but does it mean that all 100 languages spoken in that country is just one language with many dialects ? In caucaus they also consider themselves as united identity but they never say that their languages are the same .Such a strange logic
@@Aws895Considering it same and being same are two different things , and the example of Hindi & Urdu is totally wrong because Hindi and Urdu speakers aren't ethnic Hindi or Urdu , 99% of native speakers of Hindi/Urdu are non-ethnic speakers it is used as a lingua franca in India and Pakistan and most people in big cities only speak Hindi/Urdu and in medium sized cities many are only speaking Hindi/Urdu but yeah you can give example of Hindi language Dialects speakers of India , Government says these people are speakers of different Dialects of Hindi but actually they are different culturally, Ethnically , historically and by language also the reason it is considered one because of lack of education and awareness. Urdu/Hindi was the first Language I learnt but still I can't understand most of the languages considered Dialects and some I could Hardly understand some words like 30-40%.
I'm a native Chinese speaker, to me Chinese is not just one single language, it's consisted of about 10 languages, cuz you'll find out that each language is different in both pronunciation and grammar, and Mandarin is my second language, I speak Teochew as my first language(it shares the same roots with Hakka mentioned in your video 06:33), and Cantonese as my 3rd language. if you are not native in any of those languages u r not gonna understand nothing when people speak, like my mom, she only speaks Teochew when people speak in mandarin she doesn't understand anything, and like my classmates who don't speak Cantonese, they won't understand anything when I speak Cantonese even tho they do speak mandarin.
Teochew is also my mother tongue. Lots of Chinese immigrants in Malasya , Singapore, Saigon especially Thailand speaks Teochew. It is significant therefore should be mentioned in this video. Teochew is much closer to Taiwanese but shares different system with Hakka. Teochew is one of the most orthodox ancient Chinese languages. Many ancient Chinese terms can be found in our dialect.
@@calebhuang1421 胶己人😏
这个世界上，任何一种方言都可以算作一种独特的语言。。。照你这么说江苏省十里不同音，所以“江苏话”这个概念不存在？？？所以“吴语”这个概念不存在？？您算老几？您会普通话和粤语吗？您大放厥词说这些方言之间语法“完全不同”，您是瞎子吗？？？我知道，您作为高等的海外华人大陆和您一毛钱关系都没有，大陆在你们眼里只是邪恶的美国敌人，是不是给你们的黄皮肤带来困扰了？？？华人不了解中国大陆是一个怎样的世界，麻烦滚远点不要造谣好吗？？老子说的是安徽方言，北京人听不懂，广东人更是听不懂，我们隔壁一个市的方言我也听不懂，所以“中国话”“华语”这个概念是假的？是虚构的？？海外华人如果对大陆的汉语一知半解，麻烦不要来说自己是“native chinese speaker”好吗？？？拜托了。。。建议您不要觉得自己祖上多少代会说汉语然后就自以为自己很了解汉语OK？？？
@@s-asw1360 @Jun Allen 黑人问号.jpg，你是看不懂英文吗，我翻译一遍给你看，我是中文母语者，中国话对我来说不只是一种语言，而是很多种语言的统称，因为这些语言之间的语法和发音都不一样，我的第一语言是潮汕话，我也会说普通话和广东话blah blah blah。正是因为我会说这三种语言我才知道中国话的多种多样，吴话江苏话我了解的不多，但当然也是一种语言，我说过不是了吗？你还真是戏精，还扯到什么美国的敌人，海外华人不一定就住美国，也不一定就不爱国，也不一定喜欢谈论政治，你的玻璃心在我这里一文不值
Jun Allen 哈哈哈哈哈哈你是疯子吧哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
it's been quite a while since I've attempted to learn Chinese, but I took it as a language class in middle school and again in college. Something this video dug up from my memories is my mandarin teacher in middle school would sometimes stumble a bit with the language herself, at the time I didn't know why but now I realize it's because she was teaching us mandarin, but her first language was Wu, and she had even mentioned this to us but had a hard time explaining the differences between the two. I had no idea how much she was juggling in her head switching between her first language, the second language she was teaching us, and the third language she was teaching us in.
Inception
Wow
lol
Mad respect to multilingual language teachers
hahahaha, actually it would not be that hard, all the Chinese have no trouble using mandarin because people started use it since first grade.everyone studied all subjects in school with mandarin and all the writing and speaking on internet are mandarins. So like Wu speaker never know how to write an article in Wu, even the character of Wu. The mothertone and mandarin are like parallel as first language, one for local chatting one for official use.
Catonese: Si si si si si si.
Romance: yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Spanish*
@@cueiyo6906 portuguese as well if you put an "m" in the end
司是屎時？
Romanian: da da da da da da
😆
I discovered this language when I watched Chinese TV series. By the way, I think Mandarin is a very beautiful language. I'm sure other Chinese languages have nice phonetics. Really good job Paul! You always enlighten those who love to learn languages ! Greetings from a language savvy that speaks Turkish as mother tongue
Tskler ederim burdan
Sa
I can teach you Chinese.
I can teach you Chinese.
Your picture looks Greek, not Turkish LoL🤣🤣
You must be a Turk on the west coast😇
This video really represent the best of TH-cam. You are producing genuine value. Good for you.
It's also nice how people generally aren't being assholes. For example, you can watch a video about Chinese and/or Japanese on this channel and not have to see a lot of very Xenophobic, nationalistic comments.
True
True
To be precise, the character 汉 in 汉字 does not mean China, it means Han Dynasty or Han ethnic group.
Harvey Yeahwo 是的
Harvey Yeahwo 汉朝是中国历史上的骄傲
that is almost used exclusively by southerners, because that because of the Tang expansion
I think you might misunderstand something. 汉 does not directly mean Chinese. 汉 could mean Han dynasty or Han ethnic group. 汉人 means people belong to Han ethnic group. You can think Han ethnic people are Chinese people.【小姐姐你是中国人吧？看你关注了敖厂长才发现的，怎么会有汉人表示中国人这种理解。。【话说厂长在youtube上的关注量真多啊，都有b站关注的一半了。
i personally think that it can mean chinese but not china
I once learned maybe 100 Chinese characters in order to catalog some coins in my collection. Discussing this with a Chinese co-worker, I was surprised to learn that she could look at the two characters I read as "change-study" and only see "chemistry". In fact, when I called her attention to the separate characters, she was surprised as she had never thought of them that way. It's easy to understand how an English speaker might not know that "geometry" means "earth-measure", but I found this woman's reaction fascinating.
The "chemistry" example it's a specific term. We were taught the word that way just like you do not separate week and end in "weekend". In fact, most modern Chinese words/terms are built this way and you have to learn them one by one. Like mathematics is "counting study", physics is "objective theory", English is "English language", French is "French language". They all have two or more characters. A single Chinese character often has multiple meanings and it will combine with other characters to create a specific word.
@@alexng704 Yes, but any native English speaker recognizes that "weekend" is made up of "week" + "end."
@@RadicalCaveman how about words like "mayday" "understand" ...The chinese word for chemistry 化學 literally translates to transformation study ...whereas the english word Chemistry came from Greek meaning cast together. This is how language evolves, nothing new..
i think this is because 化 meaning change as standalone character is rarely used, so seldom would anyone come to the word formation, but as the word like 物理physics, both characters here are not so obscure in their seperate meaning
I think they are a group of distinct languages. We normally don’t question whether Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French are different languages, even though speakers of the different languages can somehow understand each other. But speakers of different Chinese languages can’t understand each other.
As a chinese I never learned that much of my language in 20 minutes
That is because the government of China pushes Beijing Mandarin as the "correct" language and tries to eradicate local languages by pretending they don't exist.
Bonnie Hu That's prob true what you said. But I know 3 dialects tho, I was just trying to appreciate the content of the video☺️
My city have more than 8 languages, I can speak two of them, but each one has different accent.
Bonnie Hu that’s not the truth , My city have more than 8 languages, I can speak two of them, children are encouraged to learn mother language
Mandarin was introduced before 1949. Taiwanese speak Mandarin too.
you have no idea of how i've been waiting for this video
I hope it was worth the wait!
Langfocus Hey man, love your videos. I'm currently studying French and I know you have some background in it. What are the best ways to learn French and what path did you take? I'm currently using Pimsleur and taking lessons on Italki. Any thoughts?
probably by going on with your life?
Me too, me too.
NO NO NO YOU HAVE NO IDEA
I am studying Chinese, and I was surprised to find out that there are some words from English- loanwords, is that what they are called? The words for t-shirt, chocolate, and coffee, for example, all sound very similar to their English versions. Chinese is easier than English in some ways- no plurals and fewer number and tense changes. It's really fun to learn, and while writing is still intimidating, speaking it is not as incomprehensible as I thought it would be!
Findingthe3truths I am Chinese, I want to find a partner to learn spoken English,do you want to find a partner to learn spoken Chinese? if yes,I think we could help each other
@@jectcheninchina7933 that's desparate
Also tofu, sofa, bus...the best way to practice Mandarian is to communicate with your Chinese friends. Good luck!
@VonSway I didn't even perceive he used the word partner. But in general the message. Men approach women this way usually for only one purpose lol
There are a fair amount of loanwords and transliterations in Chinese from other languages, esp. English. Canadians are, for instance, Jia na Da ren (forget the characters, but sounds much like 'canada'). The pronunciation is of course pretty different, but it sounds like the English version. There's also interesting parallels, like Bei Bei means baby (and one bei means shell), and mao is cat as well as the sound cats make in China, quite similar to 'meow'.
The Wu dialect is a very fascinating one. It is soft, delicate, sing-song like, earning itself the name "吴侬软语“ which literally means the "soft words of Wu region".
That language is for girls.....
Wu language
ProTip, given to me by a Brit who had had dealings with China in industrial sales.
You will need bilingual business cards which include a phonetic Chinese version of your Western name. It is auspicious if that phonetic version has three syllables and consists of auspicious words. Because Chinese is a tonal language and Chinese characters are based on meaning not pronunciation, more than one version will be possible. So, ask a native speaker to suggest something suitable.
Before having your cards printed, ask a different native Chinese speaker to translate that proposed version into English, without explaining why you're asking. It is a bad mistake to assume that only native English speakers can have a sense of humour. It is much better to have business cards which read (invented example) 'precious jade dragon' than 'man who cleans toilet bowl with own head'.
People used to have me proofread their Chinese tattoos before they got them, and I had to constantly remind them that I know only a little Japanese, so I don't know if anything they're doing sounds natural or normal or has any grammatical accuracy. I only know how to look up the characters. But even at that low rate, I was able to catch several people before they put utter nonsense on themselves.
Jade dragon was the name of one of my friends in Taiwan.
I'm an English speaker with some background in Vietnamese from my parents. When I took a few years of Chinese in college, I was struck by how many loanwords Vietnamese had from Chinese. Learning Chinese actually helped reinforce some of my Vietnamese vocabulary, and knowing some Vietnamese made it easier to remember some Chinese words.
because Imperial China conquered and occupied Vietnam form 200BC to 1300 AD thus Vietnamese is heavily influenced by Chinese languages
Albert Nguyen The Vietnamese official script was written with Chinese characters and Vietnamese characters until 1915.
I studied korean for a while, they have a lot of loanwords too.
Liangben Huang Yes, that's right! But it's no surprise since Chinese characters were once used as an official script in both Korea and Vietnam for a very long time.
Do people still use chinese characters in Vietnam? I thought they switched to romanized alphabet, which in my humble opinion, is not so wise.
This must have taken a long time to make. I appreciate the work, and I appreciate all the new things you teach me
Yes, videos like this almost kill me.
respect
You are not scary at all! Shame on you!
The difference between Chinese languages is as much as that between Roman languages. It’s reasonable to count them as different languages since we won’t say French and Spanish are just dialects of Latin. If Chinese uses alphabet, not characters, its diversity will be more visible.
Agree
agree, we can also imagine a parallel case where latin and its descendant languages used a logographic system like the chinese languages
@@suomeaboo That's very fun to imagine! I guess latin languages would be much more similar than they are today, not only because the writing system's restricted representation of trivial differences in pronunciation, but also because because using logographic systems itself will limit the evolution of pronunciation
I mean, like Chinese, in the ancient times there was no tones in Chinese. If logographical characters hadn't been applied in the ancient times, perhaps tones would not have exist either, or at least tones would been used less often. The application of logographic system itself makes people pay less attention on the trival pronunciation, resulting in people blurring the pronunciation differences, thus many words thet were different in pronunciation finally sharing the same sounds. In this way, tones are kind of forced to be put into use, in order to distinguish different words.
这就不得不提到秦始皇了，秦始皇统一了文字，统一了文化。使得相距十分遥远的中国人都承认对方的合法性，认为都是一家人。秦始皇的政治遗产一直保留到了现在。。。而欧洲走了相反的道路。自罗马帝国开始走向分裂，现在你说让欧洲合并成一个国家，会有人说你疯了。
As a Chinese from mainland China, I think your introduction is very precise. I think the reason why China can continue to be one united culture for more than 3000 years despite the spoken languages are no longer intelligible to each other, is the written system. If the written system was phonogramic like Europe, there would be several Chinese country and nations rather than one united Chinese culture now.
china must be separated into several countries as each language from each province is entirely (only the same characters)different. I wish china no longer to be a bully or a ganster to its neighbor and for that, china must be separated
김요한 I think Korea should be separated into several parts.One belongs to USA,one belongs to China,and the last one controlled by Japan! That’s your fate!Right!
@@김요한-l2e If you think China is a bully. I'd say if China break into more nations, those nations will still bully on Korea. Right, It's because Chinese people are bully, even the Korean ethnic people live in northeast of China do the same, I met a lot of them who go to South Korea for higher salary, send their money back to their hometown in China, and talk shit on South Korea. So you'd better give up that thought because it only turns 1 bully into more bullies.
@@김요한-l2e Bully? Old Korea had existed
for more than 1000 years, but China never conquered Old Korea. There are many different cultures in China, but all the Chinese people have the common self-identity. So, united China is not formed by the power of control or conquering. But china did influent its neighbour, since you Korean didn't have language of your own and had to use Chinese as Old Korean language. Besides, Japanese kanji is acutal Chinese character.
@@김요한-l2e Korea please stop bullying and playing dirty to other countries in Olympic, and get separated in olympic games lol
As a native Cantonese speaker , I can’t understand other dialects at all. 😂 I simply think all dialects is different languages and need to pay efforts to learn.
I'm glad I know Cantonese, Mandarin or 普通话，Hokkien and some teo chiew. Most of it are quite similar.
@@Vachalen man I'm a half Hokkien but can't even speak it 😭 maybe after my Japanese becomes good i would start to learn it lol
Cuz u duuumbbbbb!
@Paul Li 南部吳語母語者學閩南語不會更容易嗎?
While taking a taxi in Shanghai, a group of us from Singapore were engaged in an English conversation (more accurately, 'Singlish') with some chinese words thrown in the mix. The taxi driver who was apparently listening to us asked us which province we were from and what 'dialect' we were speaking.
zzajizz as Singapore is 79% ethnic Chinese one can give Singlish honorary status lol
is that 80% of your people is ethic Chinese？
sam stock Yeah
zzajizz I lived 7 years in 大陸， with some other 留學生 we ended up speaking 老外ish chinese between us 😂😂😂 the more seniors we used more Chinese words, and the younger ones mixed more words from their native languages and english. I remember me asking a friend from Germany: hast du das schon ge概括t? Because 那個太麻煩了！ Dios mío!
In those times it was rare to see a 老外 like me in the markets, I always said I was from 新彊 or from 西藏 and they were o.k. with that and I was treated like a local ....
That's really interesting. Do you think it might be because he recognised some dialect words in your Singlish? Singlish has a bunch of Hokkien and Cantonese vocabulary.
Maybe he recognised a few Singlish words of 'dialect' origin and thought you were speaking a Chinese dialect.
I'm a native Chinese speaker, specifically a Mandarin speaker.
Before watching this video: I'm a native Chinese speaker, I'm pretty sure I can introduce my native language correctly and perfectly.
After watching this video: am I a native Chinese speaker?
:D
他研究语言学而不是学语言
不过我觉得他真的很厉害
Yes you are.
哈哈，就像是范伟遇到赵本山卖拐了。
@@arthuryang5652 被拐瘸是吧😂
Aver, Responde con lo mismo que escribiste pero en chino mamdarin
12:20 that newpaper says Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes Californian governor
Must be an old article. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the government of California anymore.
@@Theringodair I think that was OP's point: that the newspaper is really old
Let's learn chinese language with me
草 cher shuoer 王
Cyclpian city dweller That is from the 9th of October 2003
“...because in many cases they are unintelligible.” 😂😂😂
I know you meant “mutually unintelligible,” but it still gave me a chuckle.
Awesome video, as always! And thank you!
Following the same theme, changing the tone doesn't change the meaning of the word. It's just a different word
I also thought it was funny when the narrator said "unintelligible " instead of "mutually..."
Two guys speaking to each other with different dialects.
In their heads: "It's like you are speaking Chinese to me."
@@zeflute4586 actually no, they usually dont understand other dialects, thats why they use common mandarin as their national language
@@Key-oh5fd Man that's what I meant.
Would you consider doing a video on the Roma languages?
Not the Romance languages (you did a video about those), but the language of the Romani people ("Gypsies").
Imho they and their language are kind of brushed off to the sidelines by Europeans, and most probably don't even know that Roma have their language.
YakuzYah #staʟe_memes They sure do. It is a Indo-European language and a brither to Hindi and a far cousin of Persian. I also suppose that Romani also has different vocabulary and pronunciations depending of the location of the speaker. I am half Romanian and Half Iranian and Romani people are very intresting but the hate they get is caused by a lack of education in their own community. Spread peace,not hate dear people. Sir,your Idea is very intresting. Paul,I would also love to see a video about the Greek language as I just made a couple of Greek friends and git into Greek culture and stuff like that. Peace
YakuzYah #staʟe_memes they have no standard language to be analyzed so it's pointless. As far as I know the language is passed down through generations and most educated romanis don't speak it a lot or at all...
LifeSaver996 You are mostly right. They don't have any standard language and most of the times even Romanis don't speak it. In Romania for exaple they would just mess around with the Romanian language but wouldn't add more than an accent and 2 or 3 funny words. They also don't have any written language and like the old jews of Europe they would just adopt the language of the country they live in.
As far as i know there are different varieties of Romani, am from Colombia and the Rom people here speak a variation called Romanesh Calderash it is not written and though they speak spanish, they use their language a lot with their family and romani friends, i even went to a romani church and the cult was almost completly in their language.
wow,that sounds very intresting,In deed there are lots of varieties of Romani but If I am not wrong they are all dialects of the same indo european language based on an indo-iranian one when the Romani people migrated from the Indian subcontinent fearing the Persian invasions in the area. I am actually happy to hear that as I never knew they had communities that well established abroad. Have a great day sir.
I spent a little time learning Italian, which I very much enjoyed. After that, I took just a few basic classes to learn some Mandarin. The thing that struck me was the polar opposite approaches to verbs and their conjugations. In Italian, learning to conjugate the verbs is the most complex part of the language, whereas in Mandarin, verb tense is done more through context rather than conjugation. I'm a complete novice in both languages, this was just my impression. PS I think both are beautiful sounding languages.
What I noticed about Italian and Spanish when compared to Japanese and German is that the location of the verb in each sentence sort of reflects the stereotype of the temperament of the culture. The verb is the action of a sentence. In Italian and Spanish, the action is up front; with the rest of the information tossed to the back. In Japanese and German, the audience is forced to sit through the entire sentence to get to the verb / action, which is in the very end of the sentence. LOL!
Being an Italian I can confidently say that we change the word order in base of how we feel in that specific moment. I'm happy you enjoyed learning my language!
This channel is inspiring. I love learning about languages so naturally I love this channel more than any other similar ones.
Yeah, I agree :).
His videos make me want to learn more languages.
Really glad to see the video as a native speaker of the Chinese language. But there are actually two mistakes in the video though:
1. At 10:22, "给我本书" means "give me a book" instead of "give me the book". Here the measure word “本” is used while the numeral “一” (one) is omitted. In this situation the noun is not definite. (We don't have articles like a/an/the in Chinese!)
2. At 11:33, the placement of adjectives in Mandarin is before the noun. The example in the video is actually a sentence rather than a phrase. In Chinese languages, structures like subject+adjective are grammatically correct. We just tend not to use ”是“ (the word for "be") here and the sentence would sound weird if ”是“ were placed there.
Harsha Ayyagary or even 我很好
好厉害的感觉，不错。牛B
来数数看有多少个华人在说：“为什么我在看这个我是华人！”
這個博主比我們這母語者還瞭解的多，不多對於普通話瞭解不夠。
Daisy Chan agreed
广东話为母语，普通話为third language，可算吧……？ (HK)
M NG 不对，脱离了文字
他懂我不懂的😂
I love the way you think every dialect as a distinct language. It’s frustrating when you know in this period of time, people still judge one another by their accent. I genuinely think that every language has its beauty and value to be appreciated. But as we are in a time where almost everything should be standardized, some of these languages are vanishing in an overwhelming speed.
如果不是播音主持这种职业需要特别标准发音的工作，日常交流有口音其实也无所谓的，只要交流双方能听懂就行了，语言只是交流的工具而已，如果交流双方都会某种方言，那就可以用方言交流
To answer the question, I would consider Chinese as a group of distinct language. My native language is Southern Min under the Min Language subgroup and we had to learn Mandarin from Grade 1. Our way of the pronunciation from Southern Min is way too different from Mandarin although grammar-wise is similar to Mandarin. It feels like Italian and Spanish has the same grammar structure but different in pronunciation and some vocabularies. After I moved to Canada, I started to make friends from Hong Kong and I learned Cantonese through them. Some of our grammar structure and pronunciation is similar but also different in many ways.Let's say if a Shanghainese person speaks Shanghainese to me, it will be very hard for me to understand, vice versa.
Rex Lin
我也是閩南人，其實上海話/吳語比起粵語會比較接近閩語方言。
Chinese is more complicated than I thought. I really hope you get to read this, what makes a language a "language"? I wonder this because Castilian and Portuguese are totally mutually intelligible in the written form, the big difference of both languages are the pronunciation. They're considered two completely different languages, and to be honest they're closer than those Chinese dialects. Greetings from Spain
This is what a wrote in Castilian and Portuguese so you can see my point:
Spa: El chino es más complicado de lo que pensaba. Realmente espero que puedas leer mi comentario, qué hace que un idioma sea considerado un "idioma"? Me lo pregunto porque el castellano y el portugués son mutualmente inteligible en su forma escrita, la gran diferencia es la pronunciación. Ambas lenguas son consideradas diferentes, y para ser honesto están más próximas que estos dialectos chinos. Saludos desde España
Pt: O chinês é mais complicado do que pensava. Realmente espero que possas ler meu comentario, que faz que um idioma seja considerado um "idioma"? Pergunto-mo porque o castelhano e o português são mutuamente inteligível na seu forma escrita, a grande diferença é a pronúncia. Ambas línguas são consideradas diferentes, e para ser honesto estão mais próximas que estes dialectos chineses. Saúdo desde Espanha!
A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Iker Berasategui The views are different from the Chinese linguist and the western linguist. Yes according to western linguist definition, Castilian and Portuguese are two different language just because they are both separate by politics. I would say that the languages of Chinese are luckier to be politically and culturally united by the people.
Had Visigoths succesfully reunified, maybe you would have similar view of dialects as Chinese do.
Actual there's a more precise terms for this kind of situation for Chinese language, it's call "regionalect"(方言). I don't know if western linguist had this kind of concept in their mind or language, but in Chinese vocabs we have it.
11:36 If you wanted to say strong wind, you'd probably say 大风. 风好大 is an expression like "The wind is really strong" in English
I'm native mandarin and my dad is native cantonese. I just wanna share that if you grow up in china with somewhat level education, the knowledge here is pretty much common sense for us because you will always hear or read other dialects in real life, and some facts about Chinese language(s) are taught in school. But you explained really really well! I appreciate that
I have a question, doesn't it feel weird to call your country China when in your native language it's spoken and written differently and actually means another thing? I started thinking about it when I discovered that Greece is actually called Helinic Republic in their language and I felt lost in translation, I don't know, I feel like when we try to translate it, it looses the meaning and the essence of the name, like, I'm brazilian and Brazil is actually how we call it, but we write it with an S, so, it feels quite accurate, but also in portuguese we call Netherland "Holanda" and the literal translation would mean another thing. It just feels wrong.
I really enjoy philosophy and I felt betrayed to know that all those people that I read about didn't call the space they lived the same thing I called to them Greece is actually Hellada, that to them it would seem something very weird and senseless. We should call countries how they actually call themselves.
The Chinese "漢" was typed incorrectly in the video. That character is modified by Japanese kanji (漢字). This adds another layer of complexity of "Chinese characters". Not only we have Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, there is also Japanese kanji (Chinese characters).
漢汉漢 (Chinese character in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese Chinese)
The character you typed appears exactly the same as the Japanese one on my screen, so it must be an issue with the way my computer renders the fonts. When I made the video I definitely used the Chinese character, but it seems to have been rendered as the Japanese one.
+Langfocus
You can see more clearly in pictures:
Traditional Chinese: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Hanzi_(traditional).svg/220px-Hanzi_(traditional).svg.png
Japanese Kanji:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Kanji_furigana.svg/100px-Kanji_furigana.svg.png
This probably due to both Japanese Kanji and Traditional Chinese sharing the same Unicode (or maybe I'm wrong). I posted an image to illustrate the difference. See here: drive.google.com/file/d/0ByQa6q7cUcwkc2xtSzNHeGZGamM/view?usp=sharing
And other than that, there is the Korean Chiese character: 한자 or Kanja. They used to use Chinese too, and they are still using them in some places like locations.
Also I think Japanese have the tranditional kanji and simplified kanji too...
Great video! I am a native Mandarin speaker. And I learnt Cantonese when I moved to Hong Kong several years ago. I’ve reached I would say a decent B2-C1 level but the tones are still a bit of a challenge. Clearly I was learning a language with 9 tones with a Mandarin knowledge of only 4 tones. Native speakers could tell I’m not native in Cantonese when I speak longer sentences. Something worth noticing from your video was when you said the Min dialect (which later developed into Hokkien/Taiwanese etc.) had a different base than most of the other dialects. This explained why my Cantonese speaking friends could not understand a word when I spoke Taiwanese but I could somehow guess what they were saying in Cantonese with my Mandarin knowledge. Again, very informative video and thank you for your hard work!
Min and Cantonese are two different branches, Hokkien is the closest to Old Chinese today
中国語が 好きです！ I love Chinese! I learn Chinese for 1years !
我可以免费教你，我还会上海话呢，而且我还研究昆曲，喜欢的话可以一起交流。
日本語が好きです^_^
_山田ケント 谢谢你的赞美，爱你too
😃
私今は日本語を勉強します、でも難しですね。Not sure if I'm making any grammar mistakes in here lol. 日语的各种过去式好烦啊 -。-
I have been learning Chinese (Mandarin) casually for 6 or so months. I found the tones relatively easy to overcome and the grammar is fairly straight forward and logical (although different from any other language I've known), but it can be difficult to remember every single hanzi character and tone for every word and then say/understand them quickly in spoken conversation. I think it takes a lot of steady practice and having a fluent speaker friend around to help is a great idea. I'm really enjoying the journey and most days I make some small progress - it's very rewarding! Patience is key. I already am a speaker of multiple other (easier) languages and I think those have prepared me with a general language-learning mindset that has been invaluable for me developing the skills necessary for now tackling one of the hardest languages for native English speakers. Learn Chinese! But don't underestimate the difficulty of learning such a different language from English!
Chinese and Asian languages are completely different, you have to learn the characters and structure, that's why a lot of people struggle when trying to learn, and each character has its own tone and correct pronunciation
Paul,
Really appreciate your work on this subject.
As a native mandarin dialect(Beijing dialect with a little Beijing-metropolis accent), most of the mandarin dialect are intelligible to me. I can understand over 80% in most mandarin dialect speeches. Yet, basically all other Chinese languages(dialects) are not intelligible to me.
With respect to intelligibility, I consider Chinese languages as distinct languages. However, since we all share one formal writing system, it makes sense to suspect if all the "languages" are distinct with respect to languages in other language families(like Italian to Spanish).
And after all, it is hard to imagine that one fifth of the global population are speaking a single language, even if they have been under the same sovereignty for thousands of years.
Some comments for the vid:
1:Though the simplified writing system is created recently, lots of the simplified characters had been created in quite ancient time, which for some reason are not officially used in the formal writing system.
2: Wu languages has more than 2 tones. In Chinese linguistic literatures, most of dialects in Wu languages have 5-6 tones.
3: The tone systems vary in basically every Chinese dialect. Take mandarin for example, in the 8 major dialects of mandarin, every single dialect have its own tone system, and within every dialect, the tones vary with respect to subbranch dialects.
4: Even within the "major languages", the native speakers of different dialects can be unintelligible to each other. For example, the southern Wu dialects are hard to understand for the northern Wu speakers, especially the Ou dialect, which is spoken in Wenzhou area recognized as a Wu dialect. And Min languages are sometimes considered as different languages, since the eastern(Fuzhou), southern(southern Fujian and Taiwan), central, northern Min dialects are not mutually intelligible.
Looking forward to more vids in Chinese languages and other eastern Asian languages, like Japanese and Korean.
In a strict linguistic sense, I believe Chinese is best thought of as a language family, composed of several distinct languages.
(Traditional characters with Pīnyīn ahead. I'm American born and raised w/ family in Taiwan).
Much like how Greek has different words for "love", Chinese has several words that get translated as "language." 文(wén) refers to a writing system, as well as the body of classic literature that was written using such a system. Since there is a standardized writing system used throughout China (even if that standard has evolved over time), Chinese is often called a single "language."
On the other hand, 語(yǔ) and 話(huà) refer to the spoken word. As your video points out, there are many varieties of Chinese that are not mutually intelligible. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and Italian, both derived from Latin but indisputably different languages today. 語(yǔ) is closer to the linguistic definition of a "language" (the English word comes from the Latin "lingua," which means tongue) which can be further broken down into several variant 話(huà), best translated as "dialect".
Chinese also speak about foreign languages in the same way. For example, if a Chinese university student were to major in French, they would typically say 我學法文 "I study French (writing)." However, if they were to simply tell someone that they can speak French, they would say 我會講法語 "I can speak French (speech)." 我會講法文 would be incorrect, because you can't "speak" a 文.
So why is 語(yǔ) almost always translated as "dialect" instead of "language?"
I believe the main reason is purely POLITICAL. Chinese leaders have a very long history of preoccupation with territorial integrity and political unity (not without reason). To be able say that the country is unified by a single "language" is a powerful political tool. Even though the 文(wén) these days is diverging in certain claimed territories (traditional vs simplified characters).
Being an Indian but belonging to one of the Sino-Tibetian language speaking community, I couldn't agree more about your "not dialect but distinct language" thing!! You are such a 💎 in TH-cam. 😁
Whats also interesting is that in English your sentence actually says that you dont agree with him , you did up until a point then you stopped being in agreement '' could agree 'no more' ..... '' Of course in context its understood what you meant .
@@rippedtorn2310 Hahaha 🤣.. thanks for pointing out... I didn't even read it... Just frantically did ninja typing! And funnily it went unnoticed by all... Thanks for the reply... It came to my notice.
@@TruthBeToldbyBab kaha se ho tum?
Are you from Sikkim or NE India? What state are you from and what is your mother tongue?
which language do u speak?Tibetan?
风好大 means The wind is strong, not "strong wind". Strong wind in Mandarin is 好大的风.
Mandarin also place the adjective before the noun.
げろ げろ, how about 刮大风?
that's a phrase for big(strong) wind blow. The 刮 means the verb 'blow/blowing'
Minghao Liang, ok, 谢谢!
Strong wind in Mandarin is 強風(风) ,it's only a word with further describe .
好大的風(风) is already a sentence only some parts are removed. It means : The wind is strong .
刮大風(风) is same as the sentence upon this (some parts are removed) ,wich means wind is blowing strongly .
Both are valid, and the use depends on the context. 風好大 stresses on the wind, 好大的風 usually is used to describe other things when the strong wind is part of the context.
Very very informative video. As a native Chinese speaker and also speaks Shanghai dialect I didn't even notice there is such a difference in both gramma and writing characters. New subscriber confirmed!
As a Cantonese speaker, Shanghainese's phone sounds like FUCK in Cantonese. LOL
Benjamin Wu HAHAHAJAHAGAHAHAHAHAJSJA
HOLY *FUCK*
Benjamin Wu 我媽媽的DIU
你老母嘅diu係边啊？ XD
there is a county in Canton named “江门”。it's super funny when you speak it in Shanghai dialect..
Desmond Lu what does it sound like
There actually has always been a common dialect throughout Chinese history, except it changed over time. When Confucius (551 - 479BC) went to different states to promote his teachings, he had no problem communicating with rulers of those states. This is because there was a form of common speaking dialect for aristocrats of all states. At the time written characters varied in different states. They only got standardized around 220BC.
Something I love about learning Chinese is that the characters are great for visual learners! A lot of the radicals within the characters have meanings and you can create little stories to help you remember what the character means.
many characters were adapted from earlier ones, that's why they all have the same radical
So when someone says "he speaks Chinese" it's as vague and ignorant as saying "he speaks European"
Kind of. I guess it’s more like saying “He speaks Romance” or “He speaks Germanic”.
Someone famous responded to me on youtube, Noice
I’m just some guy. 👍
China is bigger than Europe
He speaks Indian
He speaks African
Finally a video on Chinese. I can understand why it take so long for you to get this video out. As a native speaker of Mandarin and partial Taiwanese. I find it really difficult to tell if all these language family languages are different or a dialect of one language. I can understand Cantonese (but cannot speak it myself) and find a lot of similarities among Cantonese (Yue family) and Taiwanese (Min family) but my parent who are native Taiwanese speaker understand nothing from Cantonese. And I have Cantonese friend who can speak Mandarin mostly but with some difficulties with the some vocabularies.
I've been studying chinese for several years and even though I already knew most of this, it was really interesting to actually see and hear the differences between Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese.
Personally I don't think all those Chinese dialects should be considered just dialects and not completely different languages. They all have their own grammar structures, phonetics and vocabulary, so even if they use the same writing system, they might not be able to communicate everything properly, just as if a french person spoke or wrote me something (I'm Spanish).
The difference between languages and dialects is merely political, so the reason why the dialects are considered as such is probably just because China wants to maintain its unity and not because the dialects don't have the characteristics of a language.
as a Chinese, i agree.（and i want to learn Spanish during collage, what a surprise.）
@@silviag2886 Really? If you ever need help you can contact me here :)
@@Eva-co5zh thank you:-D
I've just found this channel and I can't wait to explore it. Sinitic languages are intimidating but beautiful! I'm tempted to try to learn a little.
jamiedoesthings precisely intimidating. A huge challenge for most people. Although very interesting, I'm not sure I'd accept It.
Chinese languages family has a lot of languages and hundreds of dialects waiting for you to learn and explore (I bet you will not have enough time in your lifetime to learn the whole Chinese languages and their dialects) 😁😁
@@張於哥 It doesn't matter.There is no need to learn them all.
I am a Chinese and if you need any help, I am glad to help you
Part of my responsibilities includes teaching English to children whose families have migrated to California.
Many of these children come from the various regions of China.
It is interesting to note that, for many of them, English provides an easier means of communication than trying to work through the many differences in their regional usages.
我竟然看老外研究自己国家语言(づ ●─● )づ
你不是一个人
隐机 我也是。
瓦大西も
Same bro.
隐机 我们也是，感觉没救了
As a native Chinese born in Beijing, it's fascinating to learn the roots of Chinese and its first time learned the term "Sinitic". Thanks!
Hi Paul, love your vids, and happy to see a non-Chinese tackle the complex subject of Chinese languages!
To me, Chinese is made up of different languages as you explained. However, since official 普通話 is based on northern dialects, I would say that nowadays the northern varieties have somewhat lost their language status to become dialects of Mandarin (for example, I'm a native Cantonese speaker, learnt Mandarin and I can still understand Shanxi dialect or Dongbei dialects, for the most part).
If I may though, you should have talked about Min Chinese a bit more, as it is the closest to the Chinese that was exported to Japan and Korea (ex: 世界 is shijie/saigaai in Mandarin/Cantonese, but sekai in Min Chinese, just like in Japanese): to me it is the historical link between these 3 countries, something we should reiterate in these conflicted times :(
Keep up the great vids, you're an inspiration to us all!
Thanks! The Min connection with other countries is something I might talk about in the future.
These countries include Vietnam, Korea and Japan right?
crimsonwires I'm a northerner, as I found out the dumplings in Turkey is Manti which was our Mantou in the history. Historically a lot of things moved from the north to the south. Your accent is more traditional Chinese. Northern dialect has been incredibly influenced by northern minorities. But that's what changes the history.
I have a friend who is a native Min speaker and can understand most of speaking Thai without learning much of it.
My mother tone is Min-nan, and I consider it a separate language. The difference between Taiwanese (Min-Nan) and Mandarin is like German to English. Perhaps more.
Now, I know why Japanese and Korean have so many words from Taiwanese.
The word for junk (flat bottom boat) also comes from Min.
As a native Chinese speaker from Taiwan, I think most of us are "educated" that Chinese is just a single language with different varieties of dialects. As a result, most of us will consider those dialects as varieties from the "formal" or "standard" language, which is "Mandarin" of course. I suppose this is true to people living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. However, as I grew older and traveled to multiple provinces in China, the fact that these so called dialects are not just "dialects" started to emerge. Although all the varieties of Chinese are connected by 漢字, but in reality, no one can fully understand the meaning of the written language in the dialectal form without learning the dialect in the first place. Of course we can guess the meaning just by reading the characters or phrases we're all familiar with, but the truth is that all the varieties of Chinese are separate languages. The only reason reason we think that all the varieties of Chinese are some form of dialects from the standard language is that 普通話 or 國語 is taught in every school to every student. If we were to stop teaching 國語 one day, we'd not refer to these varieties as dialects any more, i suppose. It's just like reading Japanese! Chinese speaker can guess the meaning of the written language but can not fully understand it. This is why I consider all the varieties of Chinese as different languages.
I think the reason why we're educated that way is that both Taiwanese and Chinese government tries to picture themselves as the ruler of "the whole Chinese". Given this fact, it's easy to understand why they make students in school learn a lingua franca, which is to create a sense of connection and bond within us to construct a imaginary community. Otherwise, the land will start falling apart. No government will ever want this to happen.
Your videos are amazing! Keep it up!
Chen Jesse I don't think the writting system is different in Wuhannese even Wuhanese is different from Mandarin. I think your example about Japanese and Chinese is not very suitable. Because Japanese use some of Chinese characters, but most of Japanese is syllabaries, and grammar is totally different. Also people in China will not write with pronunciation. In ancient times people from different place in China also haven't use dialect into writting system. Even the time people use Vernacular to write, they are not using dialect to write.
真他妈蠢。只要音一致，全国的话都通，这不是方言是什么。
I am from a small place in southeastern China, having no idea which dialect/language that I can speak (Gan or Hakka or between). Before I discussed this with my bf (he is Norwegian), I took it for granted that it is only a dialect. That's the recognition of the Chinese mainstream society, regardless the political reason or whatever.
The time when I was educated in China (90s-10s), it is well recognized that it is a shame if we cannot speak good mandarin. It is believed only people from small places or low status cannot speak it well. I felt lucky now that I was born in a family that they teach me their language first even though I am not a good user anymore. I also have a young brother, who barely speak our own language but is able to understand. It's sad to think about so many kids being proud speaking good mandarin and looking down on their own language (at least I did feel that way during my teenage time).
China is a big country and an official language is important. It is hard to preserve things exactly same as what it was. But still it is important that people realized that it is not a shame to speak dialect/own languages and teach their kids it. No matter where you're from, you should be proud of your identity and cherish it.
Very interesting. Hope China can preserve the Chinese languages in a similar way to Europe, where the language of each country is well preserved while everyone can communicate with each other (for the most part) through English.
Zhenying Wu It is not just a question of dialect and language but also regional cultural differences often represented by the dialect of region as in e.g. regional operas. Those cultural elements, if lost, would be such a pity.
Hi,
Most of my friends which comes from small cities/rural areas told me that they learned mandarin when they start to go to primary school. I'm lucky to have chance to visit their families and stay in their homes some times for a month. I can say that all of them have different languages. After a while I can learn to distinguish difference between mandarin and local dialect. In some cases I can learn some simple sentences. I can tell you even rice different part of chine likes is different. The only thing that doesn't changes is great hospitality which in some cases require me to sleep in rock hard bed, which is not so comfortable for western people.
Zhenying Wu I am forever thankful to have been able to speak Cantonese! ^^ It would be a shame if all these wonderful Sinitic languages were lost for the sake of unification and nationalism. For example just today I learnt about the Yi script and it absolutely blew my mind! Have a look here, it's like they took syllabaries to a whole new level:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_script
Thanks, I consider that a compliment xD
Native mandarin speaker here.
11:37. In mandarin, we actually place the adjectives behind the noun if you are using it as part of a larger sentence (not sure if its called a nominal), but if you put the adjective after the noun, you are stating that the noun has the attribute/adjective.
To select a noun with the attribute, put the attribute behind (left-hand side).
To state the noun has the attribute, put the attribute after (right-hand side).
This guy is very detailed with his stuff, just my kind of guy.
The Vitruvian Man haha i agree
I think the most useful thing (for other learners) that I can relate from my journey learning standard Mandarin (普通话) and living in mainland China would be regarding the relative importance of tones. In my experience, most people who take on the challenge of learning this language fall into one of two camps: 1) tones are super-important and you have to drill them and nail them down and pronounce them clearly for all syllables pretty much always, and 2) tones aren't that important because most native speakers are used to foreigners not being able to produce clear tones or getting them wrong and because context usually makes it clear which meaning was intended.
My experience is that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes. My observation of native speakers (admittedly only in a few parts of the country) is that when the tone is crucial to avoid ambiguity, it is very clearly pronounced. When the meaning would be clear regardless of the tone, then the tone is either pronounced "lazily" or converted to a neutral tone, especially for the latter syllables in a word. (Most of Chinese-language lyrics would be incomprehensible if it weren't possible to be understood without clear tones.)
My supposition is that some of this "tone dropping" actually has to some degree been codified into the "standard" Mandarin pronunciation in many words where the second syllable is explicitly listed as a neutral tone, even when the character it is written with would normally be pronounced with a clear non-neutral tone.
Exhibit A: (not what I'm talking about)
舌头 shétou = tongue
Every source I've checked explicitly lists the second character/syllable of this word as a neutral tone. Pleco also has an separate entry for this character in its neutral tone pronunciation as a "suffix for nouns" (like 子 zi). This is definitely not "lazy" pronunciation or dropping of the tone that rightly ought to be there. It is the standard way to pronounce words that use this character as a noun suffix. I include this first example just to be clear that this is *not* what I'm talking about. (But, perhaps, long ago at some stage in the evolution of Mandarin the second syllable was pronounced with a rising tone? I don't know.)
Exhibit B:
窗户 chuānghù/chuānghu = window
While in some sources (and Google Translate) the second character/syllable is listed with a falling (4th) tone (hù), my Pleco dictionary lists it with a neutral tone (hu), which agrees most closely with my observations of how most native speakers say the word in natural everyday speech. Note that there is no other word in Mandarin that uses this sequence of syllables, even disregarding tone, so it introduces no ambiguity to drop the tone on the second syllable.
Exhibit C:
热情 rèqíng = warm/enthusiastic/passionate
While no dictionary I've ever seen has dropped the tone on the second character/syllable, I've observed that it's perfectly fine to drop this tone in practice (rèqing). I think this is because there is no other word that shares this sequence of syllables, regardless of tone.
Another anecdote relating to the importance of tones comes from the pronunciation of the numbers 4 (四 sì) and 10 (十 shí). While some Mandarin dialects will swap or conflate the /s/ and /sh/ sounds in the initials of a syllables, the tone for 4 is always falling (4th) tone, and the tone for 10 is always rising (2nd) tone. If you were in an elevator and you accidentally used the wrong tone, it wouldn't matter whether you got the /s/ or /sh/ "right" or not. The person asking which floor you wanted would hit the button corresponding to the tone.
My takeaway conclusion is that tone matters a lot more than a lot of the "camp 2" people would like to admit, but that you don't have to always get them all right in order to be understood. You can be a little "lazy" with your tones, especially once your vocabulary is large enough to know whether doing so might potentially introduce confusion/ambiguity for the listener.
Great observations and analysis, especially the part about the lyrics in Chinese songs. I've always subconsciously noticed that too, though never given it much thought.
This is some impressive theory ! You should formalize this into a thesis on something.
I'm from Beijing and just one funny little fact here. Even as a native Chinese speaker the language is fascinating for me (picking up Cantonese and Shanghaiese right now :))
Although Standard Mandarin pronunciation is said to be based strictly on Beijing dialect, its grammar, vocab and even some pronunciation are based on Northern Mandarin in general plus Written Vernacular Chinese, and Beijingese has a quite different set of local vocab, grammar and pronunciation (like adding "er" and extensive use of the neutral tone). YET I didn't know that till a few years ago and I believed I was always speaking STANDARD Mandarin. It pissed me off when I was talking in Beijingese with other people using Standard Mandarin (usually from other areas of China where Mandarin is not the first language) and people couldn't understand me :(
I love ALL Chinese dialects cuz they are so fascinating (especially for a Linguistics major). But it's still good to have Mandarin as a lingua franca otherwise it would be too gruesome to communicate with solely written language...
Cantonese native speaker Hong Kong here~ I have a hard time understanding Beijing Mandarin, but it's more of not understanding the accent. for example, it throws me off when Beijingese roll their r sound. To us, you guys also tend to speak faster. Slowing the pace of speech can actually help us understand better, since we do understand Mandarin in the first place, just not Beijing style.
The 兒 is not much of a problem to us, but maybe vocabs like 胡同 might trick us since it's not a vocab in Cantonese
Julius Caesar Now you know that a lot of things said about China is fake news.
I'm born/raised in San Francisco to parents from China and I always argue that Chinese is a group of written language while spoken Chinese is a large group of many different languages that I still refuse to call dialects. I picked up Cantonese from my parents growing up which my dad spoke the Hong Kong variety while my mom spoke the Canton or Guangzhou variety, though both are pretty much the same with some subtle differences like English commonly spoken in San Francisco vs. Boston which I've been to. My grandma and relatives primarily spoke native Toisanese (臺山話) and what I meant by "native" is genuine Toisanese that is pretty different from standard Cantonese, not "Cantonese spoken with a Toisan accent" which was also pretty common when I was growing up. So that's my justification that spoken Chinese is a large group of many difference languages that I often compare the differences to Germanic and Romance languages of Europe. Romanize each spoken Chinese variety and they no longer have a common written language but will prove they're as distinct as French vs. Italian vs. Portuguese vs. Spanish and Dutch vs. English vs. German.
The word "Earth" from Google Translate, for example:
French: Terre
Italian: Terra
Portuguese: terra
Spanish: tierra
Dutch: Aarde
English: Earth
German: Erde
I speak these languages and these romanization do not include their respective tone marks:
Mandarin: Diqiu (地球)
Cantonese: Dei kau (地球) [pronounced: "day" "kow" where the 'ow' is pronounced like the 'ou' in house by saying "kouse" without the 'se'.]
Toisanese: Ei kiu (地球) [pronounced: "ay" "kee-u"]
As a native speaker, Paul brought me the new angle to treat Chinese as a group of languages instead of a single one. It's interesting to think that way! By the way, as a native Shanghaiese speaker, I would suggest that if '吾‘ is chosen as I, same charater shall also be used in the expression of 'I go first'.
从外国人的角度来分析中国话，很有意思，这位外国专家比我们绝大部分中国人还要清楚我们的语言体系和历史
因為人只會用，不會去追本溯源。就像手機一樣，不去查資料，根本沒人回答得出來誰發明的。
@@marcusy7421 華人平均智商世界前三，亞人前五含日韓。所以這種事就跟日常作息一樣不值得特別提出來。不然外國人會很難過。
@@kholmsk20 哇，你的中文水平就让我佩服了
Domino Sniper 他的意思显然是在中国大多数“中文使用者”对中文没有研究，而非中国没有“中文研究者”。
过誉了，可以读读徐通锵
8:19 I speak Cantonese, so I burst into laughter when I heard the Wu for telephone. It literally means Fuxx in Cantonese.
You are not the only one who heard it wrong! XD It is really interesting to hear the same word from other dialect tho.
It's a bit different. Wu has a stop in between whereas 屌 does not.
Lmao me too
kono dio da!
first listen "屌"
me : )
I only started learning Chinese in March, but it’s quickly become my favorite language to learn. The history of every character is incredibly interesting, as people had to find ways to signify abstract ideas as well as real world objects.
For example, 我, “I/me”, is a composition of the radical of 手, “hand” and 戈, “weapon”, symbolizing someone defending themself.
I also saw another comment mention how 电话 means “electric words” or “telephone”. I think my favorite translation is 电影, “electric shadow”, aka “movie”.
I earned in oct for me
Yeah, I think it's because the original feature.
Chinese always want to present the meaning of reality object.
Sure, a lot of words us present just sound, like Buddhism character name
many characters were adapted from existing ones, that's why they have the same radical on the left, they evolved to meet the demand of needing new characters
You are a true professional, got our shock. I didn't hear that detailed yet, globalization is so unbelievable. Hope more people come close to we Chinese.
I bet this gentleman is the most knowledgeable linguistic expert! I watched his video about Japanese and other language years ago. Now he surprised once again!
@Noose McGoose talking shit about someone who's smarter than you over the Internet. You must be such an alpha huh
As a native Cantonese user, I would like to add some information about the word order in Cantonese.
For the case "我走先" mostly be used under a context: You want to empathize that you have to go NOW.
Sometimes we use "我先走" for just describing the order of the action "going". For example, "我先走，之後到你走。" that means "I go (first), then you go."
我就觉得他在粤语解释这个的时候有些不对
i think its how Hong Kong people speak then. When we say "I walk (e.g. on the road) first, u after me 我行先，跟住到你" in your example, it's still like in the "I - walk - first" order
@@koffron9696 Agree! As a local hker, never heard anyone said "我先走".
I also love how playful mandarin is handled, sometimes new words were created along the sound of an old sign or just by combining the meaning of signs as Alexander Stucky mentioned here in the somments already
Damn, Paul. Another fan-fucking-tastic video! Keep it up, man. You keep me inspired for my Linguistic classes!
As a Mandarin user from North China, it's hard for me to read Cantonese even it is written in simplified Chinese, not to say understand the spoken language. When I went to Hong Kong, I found it easier for me to communicate with the locals in English than in Chinese.
有没有可能是因为你蠢呢，中国的任何方言慢慢说的话一般人都能听懂，广东话尤其是最接近普通话的方言之一，发音不同但也很相似
@@美滋滋-d1flol no its not. Speaker of mandarin have to learn to understood cantonese and no both are them are not the closest as they are far apart
Armenian anytime soon? would love to hear your thoughts
Anthony Grigorian I would like to hear Paul speaking Armenian
As an Iranian I would also love to see Armenian as it is a very old and uinque language of the Caucasus and of the world. Greetings neighbor :)
Bob Trucker Jr. Dorud)
And Georgian too. All those languages from the Caucasus with weird alphabets in one video ^^.
Հայերեն գեղեցիկ լեզու է:
Most of the simplified Chinese characters are not created in 1950s but have been existing for long time(some over one thousand years) as variant characters(异体字 or popular form of Characters(俗体字）. The Chinese government used principle of passing on but not creating new (述而不作). The government simplified many radicals of Chinese characters which changed many characters while most of people who only know simplified characters still have no difficulty in reading the articles of traditional Chinese characters.
As a native speaker, I consider Chinese is a group of distinct language. The position of the language is just like the Germanic languages in Indo-European language.
Autumn Hong That is because you take the definition of European languages as the reference. Rules governing European languages are deficient when it comes to analysing Asian languages.
Fascinating insight + 妙不可言 !
12:29 漢 is the correct form of Tradition Chinese Character. The one shown is Kanji, the Japanese form.
Vinvininhk 漢 Typed on my japanese keyboard, I don't think there is a difference.
Cauko yea it's the same word just different pronunciation in Mandarin and Japanese.
廿 and 艹 maybe? In Chinese it's 氵廿中夫 and in Japanese it's 氵艹中夫
Unicode problem
truely，there is no difference between 漢 in both Japanese and traditional Chinese.
Living in China, I can tell you that the average person I met considers the varieties of Chinese to be dialects of one language, possibly for political reasons. My wife and I live in Ningbo where a dialect of Wu is spoken. My wife is from Zhuji, which has a dialect of the same language. Recently, at an airport in Beijing, I heard a group of tourists next to me speaking a sinitic language that was not Mandarin. I asked my wife if she recognized it because it sounded like how her family talks and she said no. I listened to it and guessed that it must be a southern language north of where Yue is spoken. Turns out that they were speaking Ningbonese dialect from a coastal town in Ningbo county. I guessed right, but the real surprise was that my wife did not seem to understand them at all. Therefore it would seem that the southern Wu dialects are drifting far enough apart to be considered different languages. I am a teacher and I often survey my local students to see if they speak Ningbonese. Sadly enough, it seems that the language that their ancestors have been speaking for countless generations may very well die within this generation or the next due to the northern language that is Mandarin.
You might want to read a professional book on this topic. What constitutes a language, exceeds the boundaries of politics. Have you ever asked a person from the Wu region what Wuyu is? Most people probably can't give an answer because they are only used to terms like "name of city + dialect". It is a fairly new classification by linguists, not a concept felt by the people who speak it. Southern Wu dialects (Ningbo is still considered Northern though) are indeed different, therefore they've already been classified as such. Nothing is drifting away. Mutual intelligibility is one of the worst factors to classify languages. Certainly, you don't understand everyone native in what you consider your "language".
Chinese dialects aren't going anywhere soon, but they are evolving, which is just healthy for every form of speech, otherwise they really die out like Latin because an elite group of people were clinging to it. In the Wu region, even the grandparents of today's children's grandparents spoke what today's grandparents would call archaic because there hasn't been an effort to standardize pronunciation. Thus, the ancestor argument is not convincing since you would claim that the speech had been static for centuries and that change is recent. Don't forget that Mandarin is very diverse in itself. What we call Standard Chinese today is just merely the pronunciation fixed loosely around Beijing. And as you may know from other languages, standards are indeed important. Meanwhile, words from all dialects continue to influence the standard, making it a living language. Do you know that words like 沙发 originated from the Wu area where it's pronounced close to "sofa"?
this happened to many young people because the only language they know is Mandarin + (perhaps) the language of their city, they have such less experience to communicate in regional languages with people who come from neary counties. so the smallest difference might be unintelligible for them. In some area where Mandarin is not so dominated, there're many multilingual, also they have indeed a common language apart from mandarin, it might be a mix of regional languages, or the accent of a high prestige city. (sorry for my english)
Jaime Escalante I am from Chongqing-a southwestern city. The local tongue there which is a branch of Sichuanese is actually preserved quite well, and is spoken in daily bases by the majority of the young generation. The interesting point is that local languages are seemed to be better preserved in southwest comparing to east coast cities. Less emigrants from other regions and relatively disadvantaged economy could be a factor. Moreover, I reckon it's also due to the relative closeness of my local dialects to standard Mandarin comparing to other drastically distinct southern languages.
Brant Liu It is not not political reason. Politics mainly concerns politicians not the commoners. I speak or understand a few Chinese dialects. There are so many similarities in the dialects, even though the pronunciations are different, that you can make out how one dialect will sound from another after being exposed long enough and understanding some rules. Another thing, knowing one dialect helps in learning another dialect. If these are different languages, these will be undermining rather than reinforcing one another.
cestakou + They are dying actually. Language evolution is when a language is expanded upon to become functional in newer domains and develop new linguistic resources or when words undergo semantical changes, but in China many youngsters do not speak their venacular variety of Chinese at all, only Mandarin and perhaps English, so I don't think it can really be called evolution.
It is indeed a real shame that venacular varieties of Chinese besides Mandarin are dying out due to a mix of globalisation and government policies. The best case scenario, I think, would have been if China developed a diglossia situation with Mandarin as the H variety and their venacular variety of Chinese as the L variety. This way, they can retain their venacular variety and still speak Mandarin, but I don't know if such a situation can develop or is developing at all.
I think there is a translation problem:
“方言” is translated into “dialect”.
But actually, “方” means "place" or "area". In this phrase, you can think of "方" as “a specific area”;
And “言” means... "speaking", "saying", "telling", "language"……
In Chinese, a more accurate translation of ‘方言’ (the term that is often translated as 'dialect') would be 'the mode of communication of people in a specific area'. So, in pursuit of a simpler translation, "dialect" was used.