? about Asian languages

[Drew]

My wife is Japanese, but lived in Korea for many years and is fluent in Korean. Korean sentence structure is similar to Japanese, as they generally place the verb at the very end of the sentence. In that sense, it's basically easier for Koreans and Japanese to learn each others' languages as compared to westerners trying to learn. I can be very frustrating to have to wait for the speaker to finish the sentence to understand whether what they are talking about already took place or will take place in the future!

Korean written language is basically a phonetic language. However, over the years they've had various attempts to introduce Chinese characters. During the Japanese occupation, students were forced to learn and study in Japanese. More recently, different Korean governments have tried to introduce Chinese characters as a system of reading. So, there are generations who might have gone to school in the 1960s or 80s who can read a Korean version of Chinese characters, while those who studied in the 70s and 90s (for example) can only read the phonetic characters. Korea is an interesting mess! They have experienced rapid growth, but came from a much poorer recent history than Japan as well as other mitigating factors, so development has been much more spotty.

[Drew]

My final overlong verbiage for the day, about the position of China (thus the influence of language) in Asia. My well-educated Japanese friend explained China this way.

Imagine four concentric circles. The middle, prominent circle represents China (the word in Chinese characters means middle kingdom), the center of the world. In the next circle outside of China sit nations that are considered friendly to China (Korea, Vietnam, etc.). These generally have good relations with the Middle Kingdom. In the third circle sit nations that are not and never will be on good terms with China (Japan, Mongolia, etc.). In the fourth circle are the barbarian outsiders (Europe, Americas, etc.). Interestingly, since Japan and Mongolia (remember Ghengis Khan?) are mutually disliked by China they have a historically good relationship with each other.

China has been at the center of the world (at least in Asian thinking) since the beginning of time, and most things of culture and thought flow from them. The recent century of poverty as a result of communism and other events is actually quite short in the grand scheme of things.

That is a rather broadbrush look at it, but revealing nonetheless.

A quick internet search found this article which says similar things.
http://www.businessinsider.com/understan...ves-2014-7

[Todd's keyboard]

Thanks for this interesting thread. Might I add a tangential topic?

After World War II there was a small, brief attempt to change the national language of Japan from Japanese to French.

"Another such broker was Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), who in 1946 proposed that French be adopted as the national language of Japan."

This link is to page 107 of "The Making of Monolingual Japan: Language Ideology and Japanese Modernity" by Patrick Heinrich.

http://tinyurl.com/pz75bxn

The full URL is below:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=4wrPBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA107&dq=%22The+Most+beautiful+language+in+the+world%22+shiga&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-jOq47KHJAhUP02MKHQ-8BOMQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Most%20beautiful%20language%20in%20the%20world%22%20shiga&f=false

[GuyGene]

Makes me old head tired, and I speak Japanese. Pretty good answers above, so I'll save my fingers. When I go to China, I can read a lot of the kanji for meaning, but dont always know how they're pronounced in Chinese. One kanji in Japanese can have many different readings and meanings. Sorejya...sayonara...

[dk62]

My Japanese friends say that they can read Chinese (understand the meaning, not sound it out). The reverse is more problematic as Japanese use additional groups of characters. Korean is different, and there is no ability to cross-read.