Chinese Characters: How exactly does it work?

[Maccleduff]

Is it possible to enable this without a multi touch trackpad, as I have a tablet I can use instead.

 

[klee1987]

Wrong. If you study multiple languages, culture, and history you'll know that the Japanese adopted the Chinese language as their own a long time ago. Since then, they've modified it to fit their own needs. It was an understatement to say a few changes, but to say Japanese is a totally different language from Chinese is a blatant lie. French is much different from English or Spanish even though it shares an alphabet. Spanish is different than English too with different sounds and pronunciations. Japanese:Chinese as US English:British English is much closer.

Anyway, my first post about that was intended to be a culturally biased joke. If you don't understand, then just skip the post.

so, do you actually speak either Chinese/Japanese?

Your logic is Japanese: Chinese is something like US English:UK English

I am sure a lot of people will disagree with that.

 

[niuniu]

Think it'll be possible to write on this faster than use a pinyin converter? Or will it be limited to the older generation who don't know pinyin (most of whom wouldn't be anywhere near a Mac anyway lets be honest)

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

so, do you actually speak either Chinese/Japanese?

Your logic is Japanese: Chinese is something like US English:UK English

I am sure a lot of people will disagree with that.

I speak mostly Chinese but my mom is a linguist who studied Japanese and German at one of the top 3 universities in China (not saying which due to privacy concerns). She knows much more than I do.

 

[ddiogyn]

Wrong. If you study multiple languages, culture, and history you'll know that the Japanese adopted the Chinese language as their own a long time ago. Since then, they've modified it to fit their own needs. It was an understatement to say a few changes, but to say Japanese is a totally different language from Chinese is a blatant lie.

The Chinese languages and Japanese share no genetic link whatsoever. The Japanese adopted Chinese characters to write down their own language despite it being poorly suited to the sounds, grammar and cultural context of the Japanese language.

What you probably meant to say is that WRITTEN Japanese bears a SUPERFICIAL similarity to WRITTEN Chinese.

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

The Chinese languages and Japanese share no genetic link whatsoever. The Japanese adopted Chinese characters to write down their own language despite it being poorly suited to the sounds, grammar and cultural context of the Japanese language.

What you probably meant to say is that WRITTEN Japanese bears a SUPERFICIAL similarity to WRITTEN Chinese.

Stop picking at the straws. That's exactly what I stated.

 

[zorahk]

Stop picking at the straws. That's exactly what I stated.

If you don't speak Japanese, please don't talk.

Japanese and Chinese are not related at all. The only thing that ties them is Japanese adopted Chinese characters, and SIGNIFICANTLY modified them. At this point, many characters which are the same no longer look the same between the two languages.

Japanese is in a different language family, which is an isolated family that only includes languages from Japan (Japonic family: includes Japanese, Okinawan, Ryukyuan). Also, it is an agglutinative language while Chinese is a tonal language.

In short, there is NO relation between them EXCEPT certain vocabulary and the writing system.

 

[klee1987]

I speak mostly Chinese but my mom is a linguist who studied Japanese and German at one of the top 3 universities in China (not saying which due to privacy concerns). She knows much more than I do.

It really doesn't matter who your mum is, but who YOU ARE and what YOU KNOW. She's not the one making comments on this forum, YOU ARE.

It's like as if my dad were Stephen Hawking/ Einstein; they maybe geniuses in the world of physics, but that does not automatically make me a genius in physics.