In Malaysia, I lived near a place called Kampung Sungai Kayu Ara. That means Fig Tree River Village. But in Malay the word order is actually Village River Tree Fig. All because English is left-branching and Malay is right-branching. Mirror images of each other.
That’s not even close. There are literally a different set of numbers for each kind of thing you’re quantifying. It’s not a “murder of crows”, it’s like saying you have “tuv crows” instead of “six crows” because when talking about crows you have a completely different set of numbers.
And in formal Japanese language studies I didn’t learn a character for each word. Holy crap at that rate I would have never learned the language. Native Japanese speakers usually know about 2,000 characters on average, while a highly-educated person may know 3,000. There are more than 50,000 characters in a modern Kanji dictionary.
Japanese has only two sets of numbers, one native Japanese and the other Sino-Japanese. If you count with the Sino-Japanese numbers, you have to insert a classifier appropriate to the noun being numbered. The closest equivalent to that we have in English is “ten head of cattle” instead of simply “ten cattle.” If you use the native Japanese number set, you get to skip the classifier words.
Itchy knee, sun, she go… coconuts.
I wasn’t replying to your post, so I’m not sure why you think the conversation is going in circles. I was replying to someone who asked for clarification of your post and only included it for context.
Two words with the same spelling but different meanings are called homonyms.
It’s a common misconception that this is something characteristic, or even unique, to English. Most languages in fact have a large number of homonyms, and some have far more than English.
I agree with your conclusion (that English should not be considered particularly simple) but not for this reason.
(Speaker of Japanese here; learned it while studying for my Ph.D. in Tokyo)
there are only 2 sets of numbers in Japanese, and even then, nowadays, this only applies to the numbers 1 through 10: an “original Japanese” set (hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu, etc.) and one that was borrowed wholesale from Chinese (ichi, ni, san, etc.). In modern times, the Japanese set goes only to 10; the numerals that come from Chinese are the ones used for numbers in general.
What happens it that (like in Chinese, or in other languages) you are obliged to add a special “counting word” that indicates some characteristic of the object being counted. There are LOTS of counting words, but with just a few you are going to end up covering up 90% of the cases.
Now - the problem is twofold: (1) the counting word may introduce phonetic mutations when put together with the number (mutations which, fortunately, though rather complex, are relatively predictable) and (2) there may be “fossil” forms using the original Japanese set that have drifted with time and ended up becoming irregular forms nowadays (I am looking at you, “20th day of the month”, and also at you, “1st day of the month”!).
Examples of (1) would be, for instance, when counting, let’s say, cats. You use “ichi” for “one”, and then you have to add the counting word “hiki” for “small animals”. When you put “ichi” and “hiki” together, there is a phonetic mutation that makes the whole thing sound like “ippiki”. for “two cats” it would be “ni” + “hiki” that sounds like “nihiki”, but then you want to say “three cats” and you have “san” + “hiki” that becomes “sanbiki”. Same with “long objects” (counting word “hon”): “ippon”, “nihon”, “sanbon”.
Examples of (2) would be some of the days of the month (especially the 1st and 20th of each month), hybrid systems like the one used to count people (“one person” is “hitori” [this also has the meaning, nowadays, of “being alone”], “two persons” is “futari”, but from three persons onward you use the Chinese numerals and the counting word “nin”: “sannin” (3), “gonin” (5), “juuhachinin” (18), etc…), and a couple more “special cases”.
But, again, it is not that Japanese has a bunch of different numbers for different things: it has only 2 sets of numbers (one “fossil”, one borrowed from Chinese), combined with a heap of “counting words” and fun phonetic mutations that appear when you put the two together.
Awesome. 
Korean also has a similar situation, indigenous and Chinese character numbers which by custom apply to different situations, indigenous still used to higher numbers where applied, but almost never more than 100 nowadays.
This is one of many aspects where it’s strange for students of those two languages to hear linguists say they aren’t or mightn’t be ‘related’ at all. Besides sharing many common words derived from Chinese (often Sino-Korean words actually coined in Japan in 19th/20th century, sometimes Sino-Japanese words coined in Korea earlier) they share various patterns like this one.
As you said, counting qualifiers are a feature of Chinese too. Another feature of the Chinese system used in all three now is ‘myriad scale’ names for large numbers each being 10^4 as big as the previous after 1,000, eg. 萬=10,000, then 10 10,000’s, 100 10,000’s, 1,000 10,000’s then 億=100 mil and so on rather than the 10^3 interval predominant in current Western system (both had other older scales now rarely used). Another small thing to keep straight that doesn’t apply between Western languages. I find it pretty common for people who grew up with Chinese or Western systems to keep muttering to themselves to count up what number to say for a large quantity in the other system, that’s pretty symmetrical.
Besides spoken language, there’s at least one additional set of Chinese numerals still sometimes used which replaces the simpler normal ones with more complicated ones to counter forgery, eg prevent forging a 3 by adding a stroke to a 2 in the normal set, 二 v 三; in the the formal set it’s 弐 v 参. And there are other older sets of Chinese numerals and some regional and special purpose ones in Chinese.
Among the three languages it seems to me written Japanese might use Chinese numerals as often or more than Chinese does now, as opposed to Arabic numerals. Korean pretty rarely writes Chinese numerals now, sometimes writes their Korean phonemes in the hangul alphabet, sometimes writes Arabic numerals.
For sure, some words are spelled using more than one character, and some characters are “recycled” as elements of different words (if you want more words closer to 1 character you have to look at classical Chinese, where these characters originate, or stuff like kanbun). What is notable is that the same character may have multiple readings and be pronounced differently depending on the word in which it appears. So, not phonetic (even though it’s not completely random, of course), some things you just have to memorize. Definitely reminds me of English.
As I mentioned, the government learning-difficulty list linked above is very misleading. If we ignore phonology and the written language, Thai must be one of the simplest of all languages, and therefore very easy to learn. There’s no inflections at all; the grammar is even more isolational than Chinese. Pronouns and prepositions are avoided.
I have an example sentence that consists of thirteen words: a pronoun followed by twelve verbs! My wife tells me it sounds like quite ordinary Thai, not contrived at all. It’s possible to get 4 consecutive verbs in English (“In another minute I will have been singing for an entire hour”) but 3 out of 4 of the verbs here are “helping verbs.” In the Thai example, all 12 verbs are ordinary meaningful verbs in their own right. I’ll present this example if there’s interest.
Of course there’s interest!!!
Someone once pointed out to me up and down are antonyms but “slow up” and “slow down” are synonyms.
I’m interested. Can you write it in Thai as well (if you can)?
As is clear from Old English, go and yode are from completely different Proto-Indo-European roots.
Go < Middle English gon < Old English gan < Proto-Germanic *gāną < Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰeh₁-.
Yode < ēode < *ijjē < *h₁ey-.
That crazy yogh letter Ȝ was invented by fiendish Middle English scribes just to confuse us Modern English speakers. It has no justification for existence that I can see and only serves to muddle two different letters (three if you count Scottish Z). Yes, sometimes yogh is a G, but not in this case; here it’s a Y, descended from Old English ē.
Here’s the Thai sentence with 12 consecutive verbs. I found it in a linguistics paper on the 'Net. (Without any context, and knowing I’m a zany guy who asks her about weird hypothetical Thai, my principal informant Mrs. Septimus assures me it sounds like a perfectly normal Thai sentence.)
Thai: เขาตั้งใจเดินไปจัดหาซื้อมาเก็บไว้ใช้ให้สนุก
Paiboon phonetic transcription: káo dtâng-jai dəən bpai jàt hǎa sʉ́ʉ maa gèp wái chái hâi sà-nùk
Word-by-word translation: He/she/they intend walk go arrange seek buy come collect keep use give enjoy.
Translation: They plan to go (on foot) to arrange a purchase, bringing it and keeping for (future) entertainment.
Thank you for all those responses from people who seem to know so much. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for the OP.
My area of research is memory systems. Unfortunately, many readers of my books asked about learning foreign languages - a real hassle for me. I failed all attempts at school (French, German and Latin) because I just couldn’t remember vocabulary. My English vocabulary isn’t great either! My natural memory is really bad, but logic was good, so maths, physics and IT served me well.
To test out the memory techniques I now had available, I returned to French and then, in a stupid moment of over-confidence, took on Chinese. French went fine, but it is Chinese that has shocked me. I am still in the early phases, so may be making a fool of myself, but I am used to that! The initial struggle - pronouncing Mandarin and the tones - was a big hurdle. But I am through that now, and loving it!
Just looking at Mandarin in pinyin, there is a massive advantage when looking at memory systems. There are a limited number of possible syllables.
This may not make much sense to anyone who hasn’t done Mandarin, but here goes anyway. I have allocated a given creature for the initials along the top (animal or person, such as Zeus for Z), and a given action for the finals (such as ant for an, so the action is biting). So any word can have a specific image associated. zan would be Zeus biting something. I then include the indication of the meaning in the little story and have easy way of including the tone (s) in the direction of the actions. I end up with little drawings which are incredibly memorable and come to mind as soon as I want the word. It takes more explaining than that, but it is working a treat for me. Every aspect of the word or expression - spelling, pronunciation, meaning, tones - are in a single image. I can recreate the image and therefore everything about it, from memory if I need to. Of course, using the word eventually makes it familiar and so reduces the need to ever imagine the image again.
I know my images for the initials and finals really well because i drew on a method I have for memorising names and other things involving words, but it wouldn’t take long to memorise them anyway. I can create the image in my imagination very fast. I draw them because it is fun.
I can not do this fo French or English or any romance language. I know too little about other languages to know if this would be possible for any other Asian languages.
For those who understand what I am talking about - are there other languages which have such a defined set of possible syllables and words and rigid pronunciation so a memory system would work so well?
<tangent about Chinese follows…>
If it works for you then great, but let me give a warning anyway.
Most foreign learners of Mandarin, including me, thought at first that they had a great system for memorizing words, but abandoned it by HSK3 level or so (I don’t know your level).
And there are no shortage of books and webpages that promote even badly-flawed methods (IMO) like trying to link Chinese words to similar-sounding English words or imagining every chinese character is a pictograph.
Most of these systems don’t work well beyond the initial stages of learning. The problem with using the visual story approach is that, firstly, many meanings don’t have an obvious visualization. The other is that you’re going to end up with almost every permutation of your different mental images used at some point, and it becomes difficult to keep them separate in your mind.
I guess my advice is just: fail fast! Don’t prop up a mnemonic technique beyond the point it’s actually costing time.
More specific advice is: 1. Link Chinese to Chinese. I remember *this *Chinese word because I remember *that *Chinese word and they have a character or pronunciation in common. Similarly, when looking at characters, what radicals look familiar? On Pleco and Hanping, it’s possible to break a character down and see its components and then see which characters those components appear in.
There’s a lot of self-similarity in Chinese and you want to be using it to your advantage, not avoiding or resisting it.
2. Test yourself often. Test yourself on vocabulary you learned 1 hour ago…it sounds ridiculous, but it’s necessary to really bed those memories down.
This is a wild stab at the answer, so I could be completely wrong, but…
Cherokee has a defined syllabary writing system so perhaps that’s another language with a defined set of possible syllables. But I don’t know much about Cherokee beyond that.
I really appreciate the warnings. I hope I have them covered in the way my system is developing. I am an academic and science writer and my field of research is memory systems, particularly those of indigenous cultures, but also classical and medieval and memory champions. I have spent the past year exploring all the memory systems I could find for Chinese and have pinched bits, added from all the systems I already use for other stuff and created the new one to suit the task at hand. Systems which fail are also of use to me for my research. I have a list of those which have already failed for Chinese - including those you list as that is where I started because they are so widely promoted.
My system is far from fully tested, so I may well abandon, or refine it as I learn more. I am still HSK level 1, so a long way to go. But it is working a treat for me at the moment.
Agree totally. I very soon gave up finding similar sounding English words, although, pee-juice for beer works nicely. And ‘de’ is the same for French and Mandarin. But they are about all I have managed. I don’t have trouble visualising for abstract words, but I have been implementing memory systems for a decade now. I won’t bother explaining here because I would waffle on for too long and may yet be proven wrong. I have put in lots of abstract words with no trouble using actions, not just images. The Person-Action-Object system used by many memory champions does this all the time for cards and numbers and word lists. I have competed a number of times, so am used to this.
I hit the issue about the many permutations of the images fairly quickly, but again, that isn’t proving to be an issue because I only use the images when I am first learning a word. I am working to about 70% recognition with no reliance on the image before I go onto new vocabulary. I use a spaced recognition system for revision. So I don’t have lots of the same actors (initials) and actions active at the same time, although sometimes I do find it useful and they reinforce each other. I am finding it interesting as I am picking up links because of repeated images. But I haven’t experimented far enough to know the implications. I think the radicals are showing their significance. Ask me again in another year!
But it is the limits on the language evident from the pinyin chart which shocked me and offers a totally new way of approaching a language, not possible with French or English.
Excuse me re-ordering your comments:
I think this is essential, and much more so with Chinese than other things I am memorising. I have 40 different memory experiments on the go of which Chinese is one. Your advice might sound ridiculous if I hadn’t already found it to be essential. I am moving slower than I have with other fields, including French, but loving it so much more because of my system. I use the indigenous concept of tiny stories much more than just images, especially for two syllable words, or three or four syllable expressions.
Absolutely. I hope I can recognise if that happens.
This is wonderful advice. I have already glimpsed the significance, but expect I will appreciate it more when I have gone further. My starting point in my research is the memory systems of indigenous cultures and the link to archaeology and other stuff. I chose Chinese partly because it is the only script for a language that is still spoken and we can trace the evolution from Neolithic pictographs and non-literate times.
I am not learning Chinese to travel or use it as much as to understand how such a different language and writing arose from those which are already familiar. I am also keen to explore the differences in memory systems for learning two very different languages in French and Chinese. But without some kind of system, I would fail as I have always done in the past with languages because I could never recall vocabulary, no matter how hard I tried.
A bit of reading soon led me to understand the importance of radicals. I have set up a memory palace for them (it is 5 km long and is a great morning walk!). So I am associating words with the location on the memory palace for the radical. I made the palace very large because of the amount of information I may want to associate with some of the radicals. Plus I need the exercise. Although I am getting to know enough locations to be able to do it in my imagination and not go out walking.
I have Pleco and also use this site:
It is the way the characters are composed which is intriguing me most. I cannot get enough of it. I’ll look into Hanping. I also have close friends who are Chinese and helping alongside the YoYo course. It is really interesting comparing their experiences learning English with mine learning Chinese.
Thank you so much for the advice, Mijin. I have copied it into my notes to make sure I can review what you have said when I am further into this.
You are brilliant,** Broomstick**. I have written about the Cherokee syllabary but not thought of it in this context. I was more interested in the idea of developing a script from scratch. I must look into it again. Thank you!