Re: Chinese-Japanese false friends


"Ray" <raymondaliasapollyon@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1147577654.198750.191330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cindy wrote:
> Dylan Sung wrote:
>
> > No, I meant teaching standard written Chinese. The standard written
> > language can be taught using pronunciation of Mandarin, Cantonese,
> > Hakka, or in any dialect of Chinese. It is a formal written langauge,
> > and differs from the spoken languages of Cantonese and Hakka quite a
> > bit, but tends to mimic putonghua. For instance the Japanese sentence
> >
> > watakushi wa gakusei desu
> > I am a student
>
> chonun hakusei imunida -- (I hope it's right) It's "I am a student" in
> Korean.
>

Bart has answered, as I don't know any Korean.
>
>
> > In spoken Chinese dialects you'd hear and see transcribed in hanzi
> >
> > Mandarin wo shi xue sheng 我是學生
> > Cantonese ngo hai hok saang 我係學生
> > Hakka ngai he hok sang 崖係學生
> >
> > (崖 is used phonetically. The actual character is found in Unicode at
> > codepoint U+2028E or decimal &#131726;)
>
> Hanzi = kanji (in Japanese?)


Yes, but sometimes, like Japanese kokuji, the dialects have their own characters for dialectal words. The Hakka ngai U+2028E (= I, me) is one such.

>
>
> > which are dialectal sentences. However, in standard Chinese, it is the
> > same in Mandarin as it is in Cantonese, and Hakka
> >
> > Mandarin wo shi xue sheng 我是學生
> > Cantonese ngo si hok saang 我是學生
> > Hakka ngo si hok sang 我是學生
>
> In "standard Chinese", they are written same. I thought so!



I hope you're not getting the impression that Chinese "dialects" differ
only with respect to pronunciation. Cantonese and Mandarin are as
distinct as standard German and standard Danish, if not more.
It is more accurate to say the speakers largely employ Mandarin as the
common written medium. A speaker of Mandarin generally cannot
understand Cantonese faithfully written down.

Although standard written Chinese coincides mostly with spoken Mandarin like putonghua, you have to remember that Cantonese writers using standard written Chinese do so thinking the sounds in Cantonese. That is a person whose own spoken language isn't Mandarin is using the sounds of his own dialect to write words and sentences which look and read like Mandarin, but can be read aloud in his own non-Mandarin dialect. The upshot of this is that the writing becomes a literary medium, which is artifiicial in the sense that it is very different syntactically, sometimes grammatically, and often in vocabulary from their own spoken dialects as I showed in the sentences above. When writing Cantonese with hanzi in its own vocabulary, syntax and grammar, it can often be very hard to understand if you've only learnt Mandarin.



> >>> On the internet, there are resources like Adam Sheik's Cantodict > >>> site
> >>> where I sometimes post.
> >>>
> >>> http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/index.php
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I need some concrete example. Which Chinese does Ziyi Zhang speak?
> >
> >
> > I don't rightly know, Mandarin, by the look of the romanisation ;-)
>
> She played Sayuri in "Memory of Geisha", "House of Flying Dagger", and
> "Hero" You don't know her? She is very popular now.

I've not seen the movie, and only know her through trailers but vaguely. Living in an isolated spot in England means I don't come into contact with much Chinese entertainment (don't have a satellite dish now) .

>
>
> >> Mandarin right? I guess Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan speak Cantonese.
> >> How about Jet Li? Since he was bone in Beijing, he must be speaking
> >> Mandarin?
> >
> >
> > That's pretty much right. I do know that Jackie Chan is able to speak
> > both Mandarin and Cantonese.
>
> What? Jackie can speak both? May I ask why?

Because he will have learnt it for convenience, as I believe he has worked in the mainland and in Taiwan before.


>
> Kinda like Stephen Yunfat Chow, who is
> > basically a Hong Kong Cantonese speaker, but uses mandarin in > > Crouching
> > Tiger IIRC.
>
> I guess switching from Cantonese to Mandarin or vice versa is not very
> difficult, is it?


I think it's difficult, because a Mandarin speaker doesn't always find
it easy to distinguish the Cantonese tones correctly and is not used to
closed syllables with /p/, /t/, and /k/.

If you've learnt a language as a second language, it depends on how much you use it. I can remember how to speak a little french and german from my schooling a couple of decades ago, but I would really struggle if I was dropped in France or Germany without a dictionary.

For Cantonese speakers, the general trend nowadays in Hong Kong is to learn Mandarin, because a lot of people are making shopping trips through the border into Shenzhen and sometimes day trips to Guangzhou. The syllables ending in /p t k/ can be approximated with a /?/ the glottal stop, and in fast speech, listeners can gloss over the inaccuracies anyway. I think it is the tonal element which is the most difficult.

Dyl.

.

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