Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 05/02/2016 05:49 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> Of course, the other great difficulty is the [Chinese] writing system, which
> requires the memorization of between 1000-2000 different glyphs just to
> be able to read with some fluency.

I'd argue that's really about the same as English:

It is, of course, mostly a myth that English is phonetic (it's what I 
would call "psuedo-phoenetic"). Partly because of that (and contrary to 
popular belief) reading/writing English is done per-word, not per-letter 
(much like Chinese) and requires memorization of thousands of "words", 
each one of which realistically amounts to a complex combination of 
several basic component glyphs (much like Chinese, see next paragraph 
below). And in English (unlike Chinese, to my knowledge) there can be up 
to six different versions of each word, depending on the combination of 
cursive-vs-print and lower-vs-capitalized-vs-all-caps (and that's 
ignoring the fact that there are two different versions of non-cursive 
lower-case 'g', which is a matter of font, not specific to the word itself).

What many westerners who haven't studied Chinese (or Japanese, which 
also uses the Chinese glyphs) don't realize is that all those thousands 
of Chinese glyphs are primarily built as combinations of basic 
"radicals". And there are only around 100 common radicals. That still 
sounds like a lot, but it's really about on par with English: While 
English is said to have 26 "letters", there can be up to four different 
versions of each one (uppercase, lowercase, and print/cursive versions 
of each).

So what we have between English and Chinese writing systems is:

- Both construct words as combinations of component parts.
- Both have around 100 symbols used as component parts.
- Both require heavy memorization of what components are used to 
construct each word.
- Both have alternate ways to write many words (Chinese: Simplified vs 
Traditional. English: Lower/Capital/AllCaps/Cursive/Print)

I say English and Chinese writing systems have roughly equivalent 
difficulty.

> But hey, that beats learning
> Japanese, which has *three* different writing systems, all of which you
> must master in order to be able to read at all!
>

That's not entirely true if you count English as having one writing system.

Two of the Japanese alphabets (Hiragana and Katakana) are phoenetic 
(much more phonetic than English, in fact), and while they're commonly 
called separate alphabets, it's more accurate to compare them to 
uppercase-vs-lowercase. They're exactly the same set of ~46 letters (not 
counting the ones like "d"/"p"/"b" etc that are treated more as mere 
variations on other letters), each one just comes in both a "Hiragana" 
version and a "Katakana" version. Much like how English letters come in 
an "Uppercase" version and "Lowercase" version (AND, "Cursive" and 
"Print" versions of each of those).

Granted, an alphabet of around 46 seems like a lot, but unlike English 
it has a grid-style organization (vertically: five vowels, then 
horizontally: each consonant combined with each vowel: 
http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/hiragana-stroke-order-chart.pdf 
). The organization makes it a lighter cognitive load than if you were 
to take English and simply toss in 20 more letters.

The only big difference here between English (upper/lower/cursive/print) 
and Japanese (hiragana/katakana) is *when* each character set is 
selected: For English, it's a matter a grammar (upper/lower) and font 
(cursive/print), for Japanese it's mainly whether the word is native or 
foreign. Note that, if anything, this makes English arguably more 
complicated, in that there's more variety in how each individual word 
might be written.

So if you want to compare to English, Japanese really comes down to two 
writing systems, not three: The phonetic "-kana"s and the Chinese set 
(And even then, depending on target audience, such as for kids, they may 
go easy on using the Chinese set or include the phonetic pronunciation 
right next to the Chinese character).

> Japanese and Korean appear to be language isolates, and their respective
> grammars are quite unique.

While I know nothing of Korean grammar, what I do find interesting is 
that the system of vocal sounds are very similar for those languages 
(also with Hawaiian, too): Both based largely on vowels and 
"consonant-then-vowel" combinations. I don't see that much in most other 
languages, but it appears to be a trait shared among Japanese, Korean 
and Hawaiian.

The geography suggests to me that Indonesian languages might also be 
like that, but as I have zero awareness of those, I wouldn't know.

> Both [Japanese and Korean]
> languages also sport a system of honorifics that mostly doesn't exist in
> European languages, and may be difficult for an L2 learner to pick up --
> addressing somebody with the wrong honorifics can sound extremely
> insulting or needlessly polite.
>

True, but those are pretty simple though, at least for Japanese (don't 
know about Korean). WAY simpler than (for example) word gender systems. 
There's really only a handful of common ones, and that's one thing you 
actually can pick up pretty easily just reading some English localized 
manga (pretty much all of them now even include a simple chart).

And anyone who's ever watched "The Karate Kid" already knows like 95% of 
what you need: Just always say "-san" (and don't omit it!) unless you 
know what you're doing. Hard to go too terribly wrong with that ;)