Greetings all. Recently, I'm gradually understand the importance of language in our life which I previously did not take note of this before.

Especially to people who are in sales or marketing line that requires a lot of communication on language with clients and customers.

With an extra proficiency in language would definitely bring no harm but extra benefit to us.

What is language?

Language is defined as the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. (Adopted from: http://www.answers.com/topic/language)

Without language, we can hardly can get others to understand us or our thoughts. However, many people (including myself) thinks that learning a new language is not easy and find it very easy to give up on picking up the new language.

For instance, one who is interested to learn Korean language would eventually purchase some Korean for beginners self-study texts to have a look or sign up for short courses aiming to learn about the language. However, we live in a country that do not have korean-speaking culture. Consequently, it will not have actual practice using Korean language except in the say 2 miserable hours Korean classes only.

I created a new topic & hoping to hear from the gurus to share some tips and essentials steps to take note of when learning a language.

Also, feel free to share what language do you think is important for today's world? For example: Japanese.

Thank you.

P/S: I'm not sure if I'm posting a new topic at the right section. Moderators, please moved the topic if this is not the correct section.

Im malay but looking forward to learn Mandarin since China will become economic giant very soon to replace US. But most of my Chinese friends and collegues doesnt or cant speak Mandarin. Believe it or not, even last time in my ex company(consulting firm) they wont allow any languages to be spoken during office hour except English and Bahasa. Ironically most of the employees in the company were Chinese and Indian(the bosses were Chinese and Indian), only 3 employee were malay including me. Mind to share which school or institution is good for me to learn Mandarin for business daily communication? Should I learn Mandarin or Kantonis? What language is widely used in China?
Thanks.

China usually uses Mandarin language
Hong Kong usually uses Cantonese language
Taiwan usually uses Mandarin + Hokkien language
Singapore usually uses Mandarin language

TS,
You are right this topic do not belong here. Base on your purpose, I think maybe it should be uder education essentials.

Anyway, my tips is first learn the grammar then build your vocabulary. As it is my chinese vocabulary is only about 500 words and it is enough for me to get by.

I've been trying to learn mandarin for a while, never got good at it. I guess I need to put more time into it - practice makes perfect. Faceless bro, ur a native speaker aa?

Hello Izdyharz, it's very nice to hear that you are interested on learning Mandarin. Despite of the matter of China becoming the giant of the world, learning an additional language would be an advantage to you. I'm sure people around you would be definitely be proud of you. Do you know who is Baki Zainal? He can speaks mandarin as well. Well, I think you can start to learn some basic mandarin on the internet before signing up for courses. Also, I do not know which school or institution is providing Mandarin for business communications and it seems very rare to hear about it. Maybe you should do some research bout it. I think if you can learn both Mandarin and Cantonese, then you can just proceed with it. But you can only choose one, go for Mandarin first. China speaks Mandarin. Cantonese is used by Hong Kong people but most of them actually can understand Mandarin as well. If there's a must to forgo one, please learn Mandarin first.

In addition, I have heard a lot of elderly said learning mandarin isn't really that tough but when it comes to the understanding the history and also the underlying moral of certain stories, that would take ages to comprehend and need a lot of contemplation + digestion. Personally, I'm can speak basic mandarin but still considered kind of poor in it. How unfortunate.

Kudos on picking up a new language, it is never easy to take the first step yet you did!

My aim is to try and learn all the main languages in malaysia, my next target is Tamil. Actually thought of learning Hindi but I think Tamil is more common in Malaysia. And maybe one day, I may get the chance to learn punjabi... but those are really long term goals, not thinking about it right now.

Language is a medium, and I call myself a Malaysian, so I would like to at least try, even though the learning road is not easy.

Seldom I see Malaysians are aiming to try and learn all the main languages in Malaysia. Sad to say, even me myself never thought of this before. Well, Tamil is indeed more common & widely used. I believe it will definitely is going to be beneficial to you some day in your life. I have mixed with all races since I'm young but unfortunately I don't really get to learn much other their language except some vulgar language.

Yes, learning a new language is really not easy. It takes lots of determinations half way your journey. Furthermore, my friend had shared me that even you seems like can pronounce all the new words but you don't have an environment for you to practice (I'm referring language like Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean and etc). However, if you are picking up Tamil/Punjabi, you have the advantage of having practical rather than learning it only in class. Cheerio! Wish you luck.

pleasuresaurus,
What you mean by native speaker? Mother tongue? Yes, I am chinese.

I dont see why it should surprise you that I have a vocabulary of 500 words given that it is my mother's tougue and I used it since childhood. I dare say most "banana" would not even come close to that number of words.

Just open any chinese-engish (and chinese - bm) dictionary and run through it from beginning to end. When I started that exercise I could only identify 200 words that I know. Yet, I spoke enough cantonese to get by in KL. As to hakka and hokkien, which I learnt during childhood, I did not exceed 100 words. At that time I know a lot a bananas who were worst off then me, yet they got by just like I did.

For your information, there are only 5000+ single word chinese characters. Knowing 1% of it, is not that bad. Of course the list is uncountable for compound words. Considering chinese is a monosyllable lauguage, it has to build it vacabulary through compound words.

Compound word are two or more words combined to make a new word. For example electric is a word and so is brain. The compound word "electric brain" means computer.


p/s new avatar eh? Ultraman guitarist, nice concept.

This post has been edited by faceless: Aug 26 2010, 11:04 AM

Yeah languages like Spanish, Japanese, French and all that are hard to practice, but if there is a will, trust me, there is a way.

I've picked up Japanese as well, not using it in daily life or at work at all but I try to gauge my understanding from watching dramas, and also most importantly, I constantly look out for Japanese to talk to.

Like my Japanese class sensei, my colleagues who are in Japan support team, ex-colleagues who are Japanese etc. ^^;; (Maybe they just find me very annoying lol, but my colleague said she is happy to help someone who want to learn)

I believe, same goes for other languages as well!~

Japanese sounded like another chinese dialect to me but dont tell that to a Japanese. Since they will not admit their Kanji is chinese characters, they will not admit they are another chinese dialect. It is also not surprising that they do not admit their hiragana and katagana is "pofo mofo" (I am not sure if I spelled it right but it is a chinese alphabet, where each alphabet has a sound like the abc). Today the pofo mofo is replace by the Hanyu Pinyin to cater to a more international sphere.

@Faceless: Yeah Japanese does sound like Hokkien, in fact, it could well be originated at that time when the Tang dynasty is the strongest, and according to some theories, the people from Tang dynasty spoke Hokkien! Interesting though!

Lots of similarities between Hokkien and Japanese too, if you know a bit of Hokkien and Japanese you would see the similarities. I happen to understand both.

However Japanese is not exactly a dialect of Chinese language because Japanese has it's own writings and sentence structure and it's different from Chinese. Dialects do not actually have their own writings and sentence/grammar structure, hence it is different.

P/s: I think you mean "Bo Po Mo Fo" and it follows with "De Te Ne Le" ^^
Learnt it this way back in primary school with hanyu pinyin, not the chinese phonetics.

Audrey,
They dont have their own writing. Kanji, Katagana and Hiragana are chinese as mentioned. Their grammar is slightly different. Well they are separated by the mainly form a sea.

The chinese records the Japanese as the "wo" people because they were short. It dates back to Shi Huang Ti.

As to Hokkiens, they just love to live by the sea. Taiwan is Hokkien base and so was Macau. Macau was initially called Amoy (the hokkien sound for the chinese character of Macau) by western travellers. When Hokkiens came to Nanyang the settle by the sea too. Singapore, Penang, Johore Baharu, Port Klang were hokkien base. My theory is the Hokkiens founded Japan while fishing and decided to settle there.

I just don`t get it when people say that Japanese and Chinese are dialects/related. And those who makes this kind of ill-informed claim are Chinese who can`t even hold an elaborate conversation in Japanese (i.e does not know Japanese). And don`t start claiming that you know Japanese if you can only manage sentences like "watashi wa otoko desu".

Now let`s see. I`ll make a preposterous statement in the same likeness too. Malay and English are dialects and are related. Why? Because both languages uses ABC in their writing systems and they both share a lot of vocabulary for e.g "produktif", "komputer", "sains" and so on and so forth. Oh ya and to make it even more absurd, let`s just ignore the fact that the two languages have anything in common only because of the long contact throughout history between the peoples speaking these two languages. Come on man...have you even done any research regarding "Sprachbund"? Hope you learn something from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

Japanese is in Japonic languages under Altaic language family. Japanese language have similiarities with Mongolian, Manchurian in terms of grammar, but high volcabulary similiarities with Chinese because of most vocabulary of Japanese language is based on loanwords from Chinese language they imported during Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties.

Chinese language is under Sino-Tibetan language family. Some Chinese can't learn Japanese well because of word order. Japanese language is Subject-Object-Verb, while Chinese language is Subject-Verb-Object. While Japanese language is not as flexible as Chinese language because Chinese language is isolating language, Japanese language is agglutinative language under synthetic language group. That means Chinese language do not have any inflection and tenses, while Japanese have.

Japanese kanji readed in two forms, kunyomi and onyomi. Onyomi is based on reading of Tang people and Wu people (Shanghainese and Hangzhou-ese). Some Chinese even confused when writing Chinese simplified characters instead of Japanese Kanji for some characters, which only used in Japan.

If want learn Japanese, learn Japanese through Japanese lingual habits, if learn through Chinese or any other lingual habits, it will end up suffering, except Korean, because these two language have very similiar grammar system. I have friends asks his Japanese teacher for what is the meaning of "wa", "wo”， “de", "dewa", "ja"... I think all of these can't be explained in Chinese, it only can learned through language experience.

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Added on September 16, 2010, 7:31 amKanji is based on Chinese characters, but there are Japanese exclusive Kanji also, created through Chinese character creation method.

Japanese civilization have two origins, one is local called Jomon civilization, another one is foreign, I forgot what is the name, is based from Choson peninsular residing in western Honshu and Kyushu. Modern Japanese is blend of Turkic blood and Chinese blood. From linguistics, Japonic languages are set into Altaic languages and share similiarities with Mongolian and Manchurians. Japanese people have archeological artifacts to prove these. While there are quite number of Chinese immigrants since Han dynasty, which some surnames can tell they are Chinese descent like Hata, which is descendant of special envoy of Shih Huang Ti of Ch'in dynasty sent to Mount Horai to find him elixir of life. Branch houses of Hata includes Haneda, Chosokabe, Kawakatsu, Jinbo, Koremune, etc.

This post has been edited by alizcielblutmond: Sep 16 2010, 07:31 AM

i personally think that learning french or spanish is a great idea.
not only it is used a lot in the world,
its kinda sexy too.

but then again, chinese language is the most spoken language right?
i feel like learning but i'm not really sure either cantonese or mandarin is better.

malaysian chinese speaks cantonese right?

Base on this line of arguement, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia are two different languages. For that matter it American English and British English are also two different languages.

Are you referring to Turkish? How far back can are the artifacts traced?

This post has been edited by faceless: Sep 17 2010, 01:19 PM

Oh trying to play wih words eh.. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It is very important to note that the drive/motive is political rather than academic when it comes to distinguishing Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia, American English and British English as separate languages rather than dialects. Since this is a political classification/definition, and not an academic one, I`m going to stay out of it.

Ok let me rephrase what I`ve said.

Now let`s see. I`ll make a preposterous statement in the same likeness too. Malay and English are related (i.e belongs to the same family). Why? Because both languages/dialect (bear in mind that the line between language and dialect is very fine) uses ABC in their writing systems and they both share a lot of vocabulary for e.g "produktif", "komputer", "sains" and so on and so forth. Oh ya and to make it even more absurd, let`s just ignore the fact that the two languages/dialects have anything in common only because of the long contact throughout history between the peoples speaking these two languages/dialects. Come on man...have you even done any research regarding "Sprachbund"? Hope you learn something from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

When lay people claim that "Chinese and Japanese are dialects", I assume that it is from a cultural, historical and academic sense, not in the political sense where nationalism comes into play.