Pronounce Nikon

[dmr]

I can't remember hearing anything other than "Ny Kon" ever.

 

[mooseontheloose]

I'm sure I've said this before, but I say Nye-kon when speaking to English speakers (the only way I've ever said it), but I will use Knee-kon when speaking to Japanese people. It's amazing how the differences in pronunciation can really impede understanding here in Japan - one thing I like to do is ask my students how to say Japanese words in English - like karate, karaoke, sake, etc. They are very confused by the English pronunciation.

 

[cooltouch]

This thread has been a really interesting read, linguistics is such a neat science. Personally, I generally pronounce it Nih-con and Nih-core, but if I'm talking with someone who pronounces it differently I'll copy their pronunciation. I know I'm "wrong" if I'm meant to use the Japanese pronunciation, but unless you pronounce Olympus as Orimpasu I don't think you're in a place to judge

I agree with you about Linguistics being a neat science. When I went back to school to complete my BA, I looked long and hard at what was available at Cal State Fullerton, the school I chose to attend, and I decided on Linguistics, mostly because I had already had a few classes in Japanese at the college level, which I'd get credit for towards a degree. Despite my being a musician, a published author, artist, and photographer, I set these preferences aside to study Linguistics. And, much to my surprise, I was fascinated by it. So not only did I get a BA in Linguistics, but I got an MA as well. And, btw, Japanese was my "specialty" language. Not only Orimpasu, but Pentakusu, Minoruta, Contakusu, Hasuruburado, etc. And having a quick snack at Makudonarudo Hambaagaa. I don't judge. I observe, which is what a linguist does.

<linguist hat>
There's a pronunciation alphabet, known as the "IPA" or International Pronunciation Alphabet, which greatly helps when one is wondering how to pronounce something. First thing I do is refer to the IPA, in which case 'Nikon' is pronounced "neekon." This is because, in IPA, the /i/ is pronounced like the 'i' found in "pizza." The way we pronounce the first vowel in the US, it is actually a diphthong -- /ai/. The /a/ is pronounced like the /a/ in "pizza." Combine it with the /i/ sound and we get the diphthong used in US pronunciation. The 'o' in Nikon is also not pronounced the way we pronounce it in the US. We pronounce it as IPA /a/. The /o/ is pronounced as the English "long oh" sound, as in the word "mode." So in IPA, the US pronuciation would be written /naikan/. The English and Aussies are closer with their /nikan/ pronunciation, sometimes /nɪkan/ with the "short i" as is usually found in 'Nikkormat', or 'mitigate'. Note the special character /ɪ/ I used, which IPA uses to show that "short i" pronunciation. The Japanese pronounce Nikon the way it is written, using IPA pronunciation.
</linguist hat>

So, most likely more than you ever wanted to know on the subject.

 

[cooltouch]

I'm sure I've said this before, but I say Nye-kon when speaking to English speakers (the only way I've ever said it), but I will use Knee-kon when speaking to Japanese people. It's amazing how the differences in pronunciation can really impede understanding here in Japan - one thing I like to do is ask my students how to say Japanese words in English - like karate, karaoke, sake, etc. They are very confused by the English pronunciation.

I've often thought that the American English pronunciation of many Japanese borrow words is just laziness on our part, but more recently I don't know if this is a totally justified way of looking at it. But we still manage to get many pronunciations very wrong. We don't say /sake/, we say /saki/. We don't say /kamikaze/, we say /kamakazi/. We say /karati/ instead of /karate/ plus we get the Japanese "r" wrong. And we butcher 'karaoke'.

 

[anfenglin]

Speaking of butchering, nobody not having trained in the pronounciation of chinese is able to get the names of Chinese politicians or others right. Some are easy like Lang Lang, don't get me started on Xi Jinping.
They even get the ping wrong.
Astonishingly, Americans are spot on when pronouncing feng shui (literaly "wind water"). In the ipa it looks like this: fɤŋ ʂu̯eɪ̯, it sounds like "fng shoey", imagine it having a very short e and shui sounds like shoe in the begining, sort of like the adjective to shoe. Shoey.
Most Germans butcher it, they say "feng shoo-e" with the e being like the e in "tell".

To be honest, chinese it not that difficult, the pronounciation is tricky and it can easily go wrong, zhao for instance is a name (among other meanings), pronounced "dshao", while speaking, you slide from the a to the o, pronounce it as if it were written with a c, cao, it can mean the f-word.

Just as Monty Python said: I like Chinese, althought they meant the people.

 

[emacs]

We don't say /sake/, we say /saki/.

I wonder if this is a regional thing, because here in New York I'd never heard it pronounced in a way rhyming with hockey until someone I knew from the West Coast brought it up in conversation. The way we pronounce karate and karaoke is definitely not faithful to the Japanese pronunciation, though.

 

[cooltouch]

anfenglin, both my wife and daughter are native speakers of Chinese, and you'd think that i, being a linguist, would have attained some level of fluency, given that my wife and I have been together since 1988. And I've tried. I mean to say, I have tried. I even wasted over $500 on a Rosetta Stone Level 1 and 2 course on Chinese. What a waste of money that was. I've had better luck with language tapes and CDs. But there's no substitute for immersion, which, sad to say, I haven't been able to pull off yet.

I find Chinese pronunciation to be tediously difficult, which is only compounded by their refusal to use IPA when spelling out their language with the Roman Alphabet. And tones -- don't get me started on tones! Geesh, tones are difficult! When speaking, i have to exaggerate them to the point where I think the meaning has become lost. And when listening, the tones often glide by so quickly, I can't detect which is which. I suppose having a better command of a working vocabulary will help some in that respect. My wife is no help because she hypercorrects everything I say. And my daughter has moved away from home so I don't see her often enough to practice on her. It's very frustrating. Japanese is so much easier and logical by comparison.

 

[anfenglin]

Hah, yeah, the tones. Well, I don't want to sound like a bore, but practice really makes perfect.
Maybe, some other language native speakers have more difficulties than others, Americans, especially with accents like southern or such, tend to have more difficulties breaking out of their vernacular habits.
Also, since the english language does not have that many agglutinations of consonants, an American friend of mine always said, Germans sound like "GRRKTSCHRRKT", maybe that's the key to the chinese pronounciation of zhao, cao, qu, cu and others, maybe we have it easier, I don't know.

Immersion definitely helps, I studied for three years here in Leipzig and then went to Beijing for half a year, where I went to the Language and Culture University. We had proper language classes there and also, since almost nobody in BJ speaks english, your daily life consisted of having to talk to people in Chinese (apart from koreans, they stayed amongst themselves and went to korean restaurants).
The day I left for Germany again I noticed I could converse fluently with a Beijing taxi driver. As soon as I was back home my language skills started to decline.
These days I work at an analogue online camera shop funny enough and can still speak some chinese but don't ask me to write or read fluently.
"Wait, I know that one."

Chinese also is a context language, you really have to listen and then look for key words in the sentence, then you can start guessing what that old woman in the street in a hutong somewhere in Beijing said.
The question I heard most was "where are you from?" - Ni shi na guo ren?

Chinese is really not that hard, they have almost no grammar, the characters and tones are the real difficulty here.
Maybe it was easier for me because I am a music guy, I can remember melodies very easily and even learn number sequences like phone numbers with melodies.
Not intentionally but it just happens. When I was in BJ I also started intoning the way chinese people speak, especially those little particles at the ends of sentences like "a" "na" "ya" and those,
the ones that can roughly be translated using sentences like "oh why" - weishenme ya? - "where are you going now?" - ni qu nar a? etcetera.

 

[CMoore]

I am Not an educated person, but even i can appreciate many of your guys Stories/Anecdotes.. Funny you should mention Chinese and Grammar. I would have never thought that there would be a difference. That is to say (because i simply do not know) i just assumed "rules of grammar" would kind of be the same for all languages. WHY.? I have no idea.
I am very baffled by Mandarin Vs Cantonese....... are they really that different.....as much as between Spanish and English...??
Another interesting point you bring up is Speaking Vs Writing. English MUST have some nightmares all its own.?
A Lot...Allot
It's...Its (and that first one could be it is or it HAS)
Would...Wood

And then there are words that have more than one meaning.......Stay off the *shoulder* could be a street sign, or a warning from a first date if we lived in 1950.
Shoulder could also be a Verb i guess.? "I do not want to shoulder the blame for this."

Etc etc etc

 

[Sirius Glass]

Speaking of German pronunciation. In European movies and television Germans are quite capable of speaking any other language perfectly without any sign of a German accent. In American made movies and television, such as Stalag 13, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Day, Germans speak with a very heavy guttural German accent. I have never understood this. Please help me by explaining this.

 

[anfenglin]

Speaking of German pronunciation. In European movies and television Germans are quite capable of speaking any other language perfectly without any sign of a German accent. In American made movies and television, such as Stalag 13, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Day, Germans speak with a very heavy guttural German accent. I have never understood this. Please help me to this.

Well, if German actors speak a different language in a German film or if a German actor plays a roll in a non-German film, they really try not to sound German, "ze Germans", including Colonel Klink, Schulz etcetera really were German actors, they really were supposed to speak like that.
The actor playing Klink had family in concentration camps, he only played the part, provided the Germans are the idiots and always lose.
Even the fat one, the General was a German actor.
Also, this still was the time when very few Germans in Germany could actually speak German, this often can be heard in dubbed films from the fifties which sometimes are on TV over here.
Names and places are pronounced very German, especially names with R, the typical sound like "are" and such.
So, logically, Germans in General were not really good at speaking english, let alone other languages.
This changed in the sixties and then seventies until today, when globalisation happened and English became the first language taught in schools, in the East it was Russian.
I grew up in Western Germany so naturally, i learned english.

The tv shows you mentioned were supposed to portray the Germans as "ze Germans", they were supposed to be seeming to be as not as clever, as a little dopey.
To portray a not as clever individual, you start by letting him not being able to speak the language properly. Simple as that.

@CMoore:

Different languages have different grammar, it just is that way.
China also is the oldest still existing high culture, "China" is over 4000 years old, when we in Europe were sitting on trees, carving little bronze figurines, the chinese already had paper money and a full fledged society, including proper technical warfare, a class system of sorts and techniques for agriculture.

Why exactly is English so very different than Chinese? To put it simply - the distance between the peoples which became the English and the people living in the lands which are now the People's Repulic of China.
People in different places speak differently and people living together in groups start using their own vernacular. So, logically, local dialects start to emerge.
Starting from vernaculars, language mutates and eventually, a new language is born, just like Latin is the mother of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and even Romanian, believe it or not.
People in China were speaking differently than people in Europe, so, naturally, a different language was born, this included a different set of grammar rules.

For example:

In English or German, you say: I go, he goes, we go etcetera, a lot of languages use this system, others vary it a bit by adding more gender groups, meaning, the grammatical form of the word changes, depending on who is speaking or who is spoken to.

Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Mongolian and others are agglutinating (is that the correct term?) languages, meaning, they do not use more words for this procedure, the just take these pronouns, possessive pronouns and such and stick it to their words, so that if you want to say "I am coming out of my store" becomes one long word in Mongolian for example.

Chinese does not have that, they use infinitives. "I was was coming out of my father's store" in Chinese is literally: "I come arrive (past tense particle) my father his shop."
No need for tense or grammatical complication, by using particles, everything is clear at once. There are of course rules about the use of these particles, that is the real difficulty.
There is a particle "le" which has 13 uses and can mean a lot of things. I don't want to bore you with the details but that is how it is.

That is as short an explanation as I can give (and this in a photography forum *gasp*).

 

[Sirius Glass]

In high school my best friend's parent had fled Germany before World War II. In what became the OSS, they taught US soldiers dropped behind lines to pass as Germans. When we watched Hogan's Heroes, they would comment that it was a shame that the Germans were not that stupid during the war because the war would have been much easier to win.

 

[mooseontheloose]

Chinese does not have that, they use infinitives. "I was was coming out of my father's store" in Chinese is literally: "I come arrive (past tense particle) my father his shop."
No need for tense or grammatical complication, by using particles, everything is clear at once. There are of course rules about the use of these particles, that is the real difficulty.
There is a particle "le" which has 13 uses and can mean a lot of things. I don't want to bore you with the details but that is how it is.
That is as short an explanation as I can give (and this in a photography forum *gasp*).

Good explanation. Japanese has a lot of particles too, which is usually what stops me in my tracks when trying to speak - ga, wa, e, to, ni, etc. Luckily, I can by without using them because most people really appreciate me trying to use the language (as I should, since I live here).

 

[cooltouch]

I am very baffled by Mandarin Vs Cantonese....... are they really that different.....as much as between Spanish and English...??

<linguist hat>
This is a Historical Linguistics topic, and Historical was my specialty at both the undergrad and graduate level. I'll try to keep things simple. Mandarin and Cantonese are both member languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a large language family which contains many discrete languages. Let me insert a definition here: two modes of speech are considered to be separate languages when and if they are mutually unintelligible. This is a definition that all linguists recognize as being true. EXCEPT when dealing with Chinese. Now even though there are many which a linguist would refer to as separate languages spoken among the Chinese, a Chinese linguist would not refer to them as separate languages, but as dialects of the same language. So this means that Mandarin and Cantonese, despite being mutually unintelligible, are dialects of the same mother language. How can this be, one might ask? (I know I certainly did, until I delved a bit further into it). Well, it turns out that virtually all Chinese "dialects" share the same feature: they all share, more or less, the same grammar. So much so that it is possible in many cases for a person to read a passage written in Chinese calligraphy in one language, like Mandarin, and turn around and read the exact same Chinese calligraphic script in Cantonese. So, what this actually means is the chief difference between the Chinese "dialects" is their vocabulary, or to be more exact, the way each of the words in the vocabularies are differently pronounced.

But as an old-school linguist, I can't help but ask the obvious question. If all the various Chinese "dialects" are indeed dialects, which language are they dialects of? Where is this language spoken? Hmmm?

Now, you ask if Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as Spanish and English. Well, I hope I've answered that question, but just a few words about the relationship between Spanish and English. Both languages are members of the Indo-European language family. Spanish is a language in the Italic sub family and English is a member language of the Germanic sub family. So, from a linguistically genetic perspective, we have to go all the way back to the mother tongue -- proto-Indo-European -- to find a genetic commonality between English and Spanish. Now, of course, there are many more modern shared terrms, but most of these have been borrowed from the Latin into English, and since Latin is such a close ancestor to Spanish, these Latin "cognates" found in English and Spanish often appear strikingly obvious.

Another interesting point you bring up is Speaking Vs Writing. English MUST have some nightmares all its own.?
A Lot...Allot
It's...Its (and that first one could be it is or it HAS)
Would...Wood

And then there are words that have more than one meaning.......Stay off the *shoulder* could be a street sign, or a warning from a first date if we lived in 1950.
Shoulder could also be a Verb i guess.? "I do not want to shoulder the blame for this."

Etc etc etc

Here you mention occurences of both homophones and homonyms. Homophones are words that sound the same, e.g., read (past tense) and red. And homonyms are words that are spelled the same but are either pronounced differently (e.g. 're-cord and re-'cord) or have different meanings. Homophones and homonyms occur in all languages. Some more than others. For example, getting back to Chinese again, Chinese is a language in which homophones have run amok. This is mostly because almost all basic words in Chinese are single syllables. And when you have such a high concentration of monosyllabic usages, something has to give. And what gave, in the case of Chinese, was tones. Tones were introduced as a means of carrying additional meaning apart from the mere sound of the syllable. In Mandarin, you have four tones, plus one voicing that has no tonal emphasis, which can still be thought of as a tone, too. So each syllable in Mandarin has the capability of carrying as many as five different meanings, based on the tones that are employed.

Speaking of German pronunciation. In European movies and television Germans are quite capable of speaking any other language perfectly without any sign of a German accent. In American made movies and television, such as Stalag 13, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Day, Germans speak with a very heavy guttural German accent. I have never understood this. Please help me by explaining this.

The tv shows you mentioned were supposed to portray the Germans as "ze Germans", they were supposed to be seeming to be as not as clever, as a little dopey.
To portray a not as clever individual, you start by letting him not being able to speak the language properly. Simple as that.

Well, I suppose that's one take on it. But I've never really looked at it that way. For example, I never got the impression that the Germans in The Longest Day were "dopey." But it's always bothered me that they spoke heavily accented English. And here's the conclusion I've arrived at. The idiots in Hollywood didn't want to bother with subtitling dialog, perhaps because they thought their audience was too stupid to be able to read, I dunno. But the idiots in Hollywood made a conscious decision for the TV show's or movie's German characters to speak with these accents so that the viewers would think they were speaking German. And that's the blatant, cheap, idiocy of it all. Somehow these boobs think we're stupid enough to think without really thinking that the characters are speaking in their native language, when in fact they aren't. I think this stupid mindset is probably very similar to that which decides that a TV comedy needs a laugh track. Yech.

China also is the oldest still existing high culture, "China" is over 4000 years old, when we in Europe were sitting on trees, carving little bronze figurines, the chinese already had paper money and a full fledged society, including proper technical warfare, a class system of sorts and techniques for agriculture.

I think, if you do a bit of anthropological research on this subject, you'll find China's current contiguous culture to date back to at least 5,000 years. But if you use certain yardsticks for determining the age of a culture, if we look at jade carvings (dated as early as 4,900 BCE) and especially pottery (dated as early as 18,000 BCE), we see we're dealing with a truly ancient culture. Second place would have to go to India, which has a written history that spans some 5,000 years, although, interestingly enough, India's earliest writings remain undeciphered and perhaps undecipherable.

You ask why English is so different from Chinese. To put it simply, language parallels the genome. The more distantly related two peoples are, the more distantly related their languages are. Why is this? It's because language is a biological trait. It is an instinct, and language particulars tend to be most closely associated with the groups who develop them. Okay, so that means that there was once a single "mother tongue." Yep, but way too much time has gone by for us to be able to determine anything useful as to what this original mother tongue was. Or so the received wisdom would have you believe. I, for one, am not so sure about that. Here's what I mean, the famous Cavali-Sforza chart of what they're calling the Eurasiatic Super-Family, which clearly shows the relationship between diverse peoples and their languages:

</linguist hat>

And that's all I have to say about that.

 

[MattKing]

And that's all I have to say about that.

Fascinating post cooltouch - thank you.
I'm tempted though to borrow the above phrase as a new signature line.

 

[anfenglin]

<linguist hat>
This is a Historical Linguistics topic, and Historical was my specialty at both the undergrad and graduate level. I'll try to keep things simple. Mandarin and Cantonese are both member languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a large language family which contains many discrete languages. Let me insert a definition here: two modes of speech are considered to be separate languages when and if they are mutually unintelligible. This is a definition that all linguists recognize as being true. EXCEPT when dealing with Chinese. Now even though there are many which a linguist would refer to as separate languages spoken among the Chinese, a Chinese linguist would not refer to them as separate languages, but as dialects of the same language. So this means that Mandarin and Cantonese, despite being mutually unintelligible, are dialects of the same mother language. How can this be, one might ask? (I know I certainly did, until I delved a bit further into it). Well, it turns out that virtually all Chinese "dialects" share the same feature: they all share, more or less, the same grammar. So much so that it is possible in many cases for a person to read a passage written in Chinese calligraphy in one language, like Mandarin, and turn around and read the exact same Chinese calligraphic script in Cantonese. So, what this actually means is the chief difference between the Chinese "dialects" is their vocabulary, or to be more exact, the way each of the words in the vocabularies are differently pronounced.

But as an old-school linguist, I can't help but ask the obvious question. If all the various Chinese "dialects" are indeed dialects, which language are they dialects of? Where is this language spoken? Hmmm?

[...]

And that's all I have to say about that.

Fantastic explanation, thanks!

Funny enough, when you watch TV in China, everything is subtitled with Chinese characters. All Chinese people can read these characters (well, not everyone can read all 30000 but the 1000 to 2000 needed for newspapers for example) and no matter the dialect, the characters newer change, it is just a matter of uttering them.
There are so many minorities and dialects in China that this is the only way of understanding each other. A Han from Beijing and a Yi or Mioa from Yunnan would not be able to converse with each other or it would be at least very difficult.
They would have no problems having a written conversation, though.

Additionally, being German means having the German nationality first, adapting to cultural conventions second. There are so many regional differences in Germany that a Bavarian and a Hanseatic person have the same problems conversing properly, in the rural areas it is even more separated into small language groups. People from a village 20km away have a slightly different accent and some even have other rites.
Also, adding the 40 year separation of Germany, there is an even bigger difference between Germans from east to west, although that is slowly starting to dissolve.

Being Chinese means adopting the language first, no matter the dialect, no matter the regional vernacular. Chinese is the characters, they have been used for thousands of years in almost all of Asia, Korea, south-east Asia, even the Japanese have their own sort of Chinese characters, the Kanji. They are minimally different from the original traditional characters and very often even have the same meaning.

I don't know why it is that way but that is just how it is.

 

[CMoore]

1. I WAS going to ask about Cantonese Vs Mandarin and the written language, but you just answered that for me. Thank You

2. Earlier, Somebody had mentioned "Guttural" to describe spoken German. I have Read/Heard that many times over the years when people discuss different languages and the way German sounds.
I was just watching the Sophie Scholl movie, and was commenting to my wife how beautiful her German sounded. NOT "guttural" for a change.....but damn near beautiful. Like listening to a young Girl/Woman speaking French.

 

[anfenglin]

Well, then you are one of few that find German attractive.
It is not as guttural as say turkish or even mongolian but we have lots of consonants.
Additionally, the German languange is able to create "zusammengesetzte Hauptwörter" which means "combined nouns", so basically you can just take nouns, stick them together and there can basically be no end in sight.
That is why there is a longest word in English, pneumoultramicroscopicvulcanoconiosis, and no such thing in German.
"Fußbodenschleifmaschinenverleih" or "Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" are perfectly valid German words.

As a side note, my favourite english long word is "antidisestablishmentarianism".

 

[pentaxpete]

Haben sie ein Bockwurst mit Kartoffel Salat bitte ?
my German I learnt in the British Army, Munster, Berlin and Iserlohn . I used to stop people in the streets and ask the time and they all jumped to attention when they saw a British Soldier ! ( and we got FREE rides on the trams in Berlin -- I used to take Number 54 tram from Spandau where was our Military Hospital -- all those years ago -- 1957 ! )

 

[Sirius Glass]

<linguist hat
...
Well, I suppose that's one take on it. But I've never really looked at it that way. For example, I never got the impression that the Germans in The Longest Day were "dopey." But it's always bothered me that they spoke heavily accented English. And here's the conclusion I've arrived at. The idiots in Hollywood didn't want to bother with subtitling dialog, perhaps because they thought their audience was too stupid to be able to read, I dunno. But the idiots in Hollywood made a conscious decision for the TV show's or movie's German characters to speak with these accents so that the viewers would think they were speaking German. And that's the blatant, cheap, idiocy of it all. Somehow these boobs think we're stupid enough to think without really thinking that the characters are speaking in their native language, when in fact they aren't. I think this stupid mindset is probably very similar to that which decides that a TV comedy needs a laugh track. Yech.
...
</linguist hat>

And that's all I have to say about that.

I did not say that the Germans were stupid in the movies. Hogan's Heros portrayed the Germans as stupid. When I watched the Longest Day when it first came out I went went with my friend and his family. During the scene, all in German with English subtitles, when the German pilot told his superior officer how many Allied planes there were in the sky, the officer order to pilot to go up there and shoot down every airplane he could. The pilot responded with a long statement in German but the subtitle said "You are crazy!" I could tell from the family's reaction that the translation was a cheat and that the language was quite colorful. I never got a good translation of that. I think that it may have had something to do with family genealogy.

 

[cooltouch]

Funny enough, when you watch TV in China, everything is subtitled with Chinese characters. All Chinese people can read these characters (well, not everyone can read all 30000 but the 1000 to 2000 needed for newspapers for example) and no matter the dialect, the characters newer change, it is just a matter of uttering them.
There are so many minorities and dialects in China that this is the only way of understanding each other. A Han from Beijing and a Yi or Mioa from Yunnan would not be able to converse with each other or it would be at least very difficult.
They would have no problems having a written conversation, though.

< . . . >

Being Chinese means adopting the language first, no matter the dialect, no matter the regional vernacular. Chinese is the characters, they have been used for thousands of years in almost all of Asia, Korea, south-east Asia, even the Japanese have their own sort of Chinese characters, the Kanji. They are minimally different from the original traditional characters and very often even have the same meaning.

I don't know why it is that way but that is just how it is.

This is another aspect of Chinese that is unique to Chinese. There is a basic overriding principle in Linguistics that the spoken language is always primary because it is naturally derived. Instinct, in other words. And that the written language is always secondary because it must be taught and learned the way any other subject is acquired. But the Chinese begin associating the written and spoken language at the earliest levels of instruction. I still clearly recall rather heated discussions I had with my daughter's Chinese teachers. We had enrolled her in Chinese classes meant for very young Children so she could begin to acquire the spoken language. And what are the teachers doing? They're teaching these four-year-olds the written language as being primary, or at least co-equal to the spoken language. I mean, being four years old, my daughter hadn't even learned her A-B-C's yet, and here these Chinese teachers were, already trying to teach Chinese characters to these kids. I dunno, maybe that is indeed the way they do it in China, but when I explained to these people that the spoken language is primary and that's what we wanted our daughter to learn, it was like I suddenly began speaking a language that they didn't understand. They couldn't fathom teaching Chinese apart from teaching the written language along with it. Even when I explained to these people, who were all native speakers of Chinese, that they acquired their language naturally during their second or third years of life, it was as if I were explaining something that they just couldn't -- or wouldn't -- comprehend. It was very frustrating. And my daughter got very little out of these stupid classes because it was very frustrating for her also.

What I finally did to get her to acquire Chinese with some level of natural fluency was I essentially shipped her off to Taiwan to live with her relatives. She was nine years old. I told her relatives that they were NOT to speak English to her -- at all. She didn't go to any special language school when she was there. She just "hung out" with her relatives and especially kids her own age. She was over there for about three months. And when she returned, she was fluent. I can still recall on the trip back home from the airport, her commenting that it was strange, thinking in English again. When I heard this, I mentally said Yes! I knew I was successful. That's all it took -- three months of immersion.

Well, three months of immersion, but what was most critically important was that I had her exposed to another language while her "language acquisition window" was stil open. The window is essentially any human's natural ability to acquire a language and speak and understand it like a native. The window remains open until puberty. Once puberty has passed, acquiring another language becomes a matter of study, the way any other subject is.

Yes, she did learn the written language also. We enrolled her in a language school here in Houston where she began learning the written language. The classes were taught in Chinese, so because she was fluent by then, she understood the content easily. She attended these classes for several years and graduated from the school during her senior year in high school. At that point, she had acquired a basic level of written competency in the language. But this school did things the right way. They had classes where fluency was assumed, and classes where fluency was not assumed, so the spoken language was taught first, and then the written language.

2. Earlier, Somebody had mentioned "Guttural" to describe spoken German. I have Read/Heard that many times over the years when people discuss different languages and the way German sounds.
I was just watching the Sophie Scholl movie, and was commenting to my wife how beautiful her German sounded. NOT "guttural" for a change.....but damn near beautiful. Like listening to a young Girl/Woman speaking French.

I have never cared for the term "guttural" when it is used to describe German. This description is employed, I believe, because of a single consonant found in German that doesn't exist in English -- the velar fricative /ch/, as is found in the German word for the pronoun 'I' -- 'Ich'. JFK's famous quote, "Ich bin ein Berliner" shows it in use. Anyway, I don't consider it appropriate to characterize an entire language as "guttural" because of a single consonant. Besides! In some dialects, the /ch/ isn't even pronounced. It has become the /sh/ fricative, softening the overall sound of speech considerably.

I'm not familiar with Sophie Sholl, but I wouldn't be surprised if she speaks in a "softened" dialect where the /ch/ is not pronounced.

 

[Sirius Glass]

"guttural" sounds are sounds from low in the throat. If you did not hear guttural sounds when your were very young [a baby] you will never really be able to say them correctly. I lost my ability to make proper guttural sounds when I had throat surgery to widen my throat.

 

[cooltouch]

I did not say that the Germans were stupid in the movies.

And I wasn't implying that Germans were stupid anywhere. I was making the claim that the Hollywood types who produced and directed these shows were the ones who were stupid -- or who assumed stupidity on the part of their viewing audience, which I've always found insulting.

 

[anfenglin]

@cooltouch:

When in Beijing, we were given little booklets for very young children, primary school kids, if not even younger.
These were thin books where children could start writing characters and practice them. I should add, that Chinese characters are all the same size, no matter how many strokes are used to write them.
Yi for instance, meaning the numeral "one" (among other things, depending on the character) is just one horizontal, if not slightly tilted stroke, where as "cang", one on my favs to write, meaning in this instance "treasure chamber" (and also is the second part of Xicang - Tibet, literally "the western treasure chamber") has lots of strokes, but they all take up the same space.
Children start writing by learning to write different parts of characters like the so called radicals, parts of characters that can define a certain field of meaning, for example "sea" has the radical for water, "cat" or "dog" have the radical for "animal". This system btw. only works partly, mainly because the characters are so old and meanings have shifted or some characters mean a totally different things today as they did back in the Han dynasty for example.

Anyway, using this 3x3 grid, children learn to write in school at a very early age, mainly because there are so many friggin characters. That is the one big disadvantage over having a simple alphabet.

Now, I don't know how your daughter's teachers did things, maybe they tried to teach her the most used 2 or 3000 by just giving them to her with the order to learn them by heart, that certainly is the wrong method.
It takes time to fully grasp the system of the characters, but as I keep telling people (provided they ask), chinese characters follow a simple system of parts, they are like a construction kit, once you've grasped how they work,
learning them is just a matter of studying.

"Cat" by the way is very easy to memorize. On the left is the radical for "animal", on top is the radical for "grass" and the main part consists of the character for "field", which incidently, looks like a field.
So: the cat (which is an animal) runs through the grass on a field. Easy peasy chinesy.
Roughly.

Fun fact, "cat" is mao, spoken in the first tone which is slightly above your speaking pitch, the pitch of the tone does not vary, it does not go up or down, it just stays there. Just, well..mao.

cat:
貓

Tibet:

西藏

One:

一

 

[mooseontheloose]

[...]
Well, three months of immersion, but what was most critically important was that I had her exposed to another language while her "language acquisition window" was still open. The window is essentially any human's natural ability to acquire a language and speak and understand it like a native. The window remains open until puberty. Once puberty has passed, acquiring another language becomes a matter of study, the way any other subject is.

This is what happened to me (in reverse). French is my first language, and I guess I learned English from my playmates at daycare around 3 or 4 years old. I went to French Immersion school until 9, when we moved to my father's hometown. The town's population (512 people) was half French and half Ukrainian, and except for the old folks, everyone spoke English. My brother and I wanted to fit in with our friends, so we started speaking English at home too (usually it was always French at home). Eventually my parents caved in and started speaking English too and it was all downhill from there. In grade 4 I had better French than my French teacher (who was Ukrainian), but by the time I graduated from high school, I was no better than any of my classmates. If I had been just a little older when we moved, I may have been able to keep my ability in French, but it's terrible now. I had a slight uptick when I lived in France for two years, but the past 7 years in Japan has gotten rid of most of those gains. I think I do speak with a better accent than most people, but I do hate it when I hear my own English pronunciation colouring my French - it usually stops me in my tracks. I have the most French name possible, yet even I can't pronounce it properly, not like I used to as a kid (I have recording of myself saying my name - it's shocking how different it is to what I say now). Luckily at work there's a French guy who always talks to me in French, so I'm slowly getting my head around it again, but Japanese often gets mixed in (and English) so I would imagine it would be quite confusing to anyone listening to our conversation. However, having grown up in a bilingual home with lots of "Frenglish" being spoken, I have no problems with code-switching.