HANNI E LE LINGUE STRANIERE
Chi non e' interessato alle lingue straniere e' pregato di tornare indietro, anche perche'
quello che segue non e' scritto in Italiano ma in Hanni-English.
HANNI AND THE FOREIGN LANGUAGES
I was always intrigued when, as a child, I happened to listen to my father who,
from time to time, read loudly a misterious text. I think it was Eritrean or
Abissinian, it sounded a bit like Arabic. He had been as a soldier in Africa where
Mussolini tried to get his colonies. He had also learned a bit of English by himself
and tried it the rare times that English or American tourists happened to come
to our bar in the central square of Terni, Italy.
So I have always had a positive attitude towards foreigners and foreign languages.
For me, reading a book in a foreign language is like seeing the world in a different
way. I like these differences, they let me think about..well no, let us just drop it here.
Anyway, in my life I had the opportunity to approach some languages.
The ones that I seriously tried to learn were: Latin, Ancient Greek, English, German,
Spanish, French, Russian, Esperanto, Arabic.
I am presently on Modern Greek and Japanese. and also giving a look to Chinese
and ,lately, to Swahili
I am also finding Interesting analogies among these languages
The first encounter with a foreign language was after the primary school (at that
time it lasted 8 years). That language was Latin.
We never had the possibility of speaking it, as it was then the case in some priest-schools.
Nowadays , I think , only few Latin teachers could do that.
Latin was in old times what todays' English is nowadays : i.e. it was the language of
the Empire.
It was a practical language, it allowed the user to express his
thinking with a minimal amount of relatively short words, which was very rare
at those - and also at our - times..
The danger was however lying in the style of the writer. So for
example Cesar or Seneca are relatively easy to understand. In fact in my last Latin year
I could read Seneca without the dictionary. On the other hand, Tacitus was
a terrible beast, hated and feared by the poor students. Ten lines of a Tacitus
text coud require two or three ours of hard work to get the sense out of them.
In fact, normally the title of the Latin text to be translated was given
in Italian and that was very important because it gave you an idea of the
subject. Otherwise you run the risk of interpreting the first line wrongly and
then if you persisted in your error in the following lines, finding out in the dictionary
between the various meanings those ones that had a slight logical relation with
the first line, you ended up with a fully new story that had nothing to do with
the original text. (This happened even more often with Greek).
After the lyceum I had no opportunity to refresh my Latin, nor I was willing to do
that by myself. So I lost my Latin in perhaps 3-4 years, that is, by then I had difficulties
in understanding relatively easy Latin inscriptions.
In the same year and in the same school, I began also the study of English.
But, unlike Latin, at those times English was not considered very important compared
to Latin. So I did not take it very seriously. The grammar was so simple
and nobody demanded from us a good pronunciation or the slightest ability
in conversation. It was enough to know the grammar rules.
I only remember that our teacher , a tiny ill-tempered old lady, had diverging eyes.
When she asked a pupil: "You: stand up and answer this question!", invariably two pupils
much far away from one another stood up, amid the roaring laughter of the rest of
the class. Then we learned by experience, so the first who was asked to stand up
asked : "Who, I?". Then with a 50% of probability came the answer "Of course you,
you ass!" or the answer :" Who on earth is asking something to you, you silly ass!".
At the Gymnasium we only had two years (in each week two hours) of English, and
it was again grammar rules and complicated written translations (even from Latin
to English!) and of course much literature (on Italian-written textbooks!) but little or no
conversation.
In the second year of Lyceum I visited London for the first time.
I could understand very little or nothing at all when speaking with the natives.
When I asked for a direction the only sentence I could understand was the last
one: "You can't miss it."
This was my English at school and , as far as I know, things have not changed very
much in Italian schools after more than 40 years!.
In fact English courses are one of the most flourishing business in Italy nowadays.
Everybody feels obliged to learn the language of the Empire, the state schools
being the worst places where to do that.
As for me, after my first England experience I used a learn-by-yourself course on
discs. In fact , much more than German or the Latin languages, English needs to
be listened to . There is no other way because of its irregular phonetics.
So at least I had the first step done. Later, at the university, we Chemistry students were
practically obliged to learn Chemistry in English or American text books ( there were no
translations on the market at that time ) for the reason that Italian authors are simply
incapable to express concepts in a plain way and in few words.
It was, of course, only written English. In Switzerland where I worked, much of the literature
concerning my researches was of course in English, moreover, I attended to some
Chemistry congresses that were held in this language. I also wento to Cambridge
and there I attended to a three-week course and that..that was all, I fear.
The rest of my knowledge comes from English-written books that I read from
time to time. My level is not very high, owing also to the fact that I do not own
a television set with a satellite connection. That would be a good way of learning
and I always promise to myself to get a television set pretty soon..sooner or later..
maybe later..
Here is , by the way, a short story as a sample of Hanni's English. Title is:
At the classic Lyceum I had also five years of Greek (ancient Greek).
Greeks were not at all similar to the Latins, they had plenty of time for talking
and talking in the agora', the town square. For this reason, I think, they developed
a much more complicated language, full of speech particles that could give
the sentence a quite different meaning according to the situation and to the speaker.
In fact, we only learned to translate from Greek into Italian, never from Italian to
Greek, except for elementary sentences. A translation from Greek was a real
challenge to human intuition and intelligence, it gave you , if you succeeded,
a strange satisfaction. At that time I was already hating my school and I knew
perfectly well that with the same amount of energies spent for Greek and Latin
one had better learned Mathematics, Physics , a pair of modern languages
and so on. The fact was that at those times only this type of school gave you access to
all university faculties.
Nevertheless I loved Greek translations and I was rather good at them, much
more than with Latin. Just the same I forgot Greek quickly, faster than Latin.
I tried a couple of times to learn Modern Greek, a simplified version of the
old language, but when I encountered again the same hated verbs I was kind of
repulsed and let it be.( Now , after about 30 years, I am trying again..).
Instead my sister never dropped her Greek, in fact she is a Greek teacher.
She says that she could easily sustain a conversation in Greek, if she could find
one fool enough to love that.
In German I reached my outmost level , meaning that there were times when I
used to think in German instead of Italian, and I dreamt also in that language.
That's because I lived for 10 years in a German part of Switzerland, were German
( there they called it Hochdeutsch ) was the official language. Nevertheless, the everyday
speech was so far from German as, maybe, Latin from Italian. No German can understand
the Suiss dialect . Actually, there are several dialects , one can say so many as the Suiss
villages. So actually I had not so many opportunities to hear good German, except on
TV, where at least the news were given in that language. In my work, anyway, I was requested
to write my reports in German, which is the written language they use.
They learn German in the school, but they speak German only to foreigners.
With the time, I learned to understand the dialect, so they spoke to me and between them
in dialect and I replied in German. I could not learn to speak the dialect, it has a too difficult
phonetics. I also did not want my Suiss friends to hear me speaking Suiss and so to risk to die
with laughter. On the other hand Suiss people have a heavy accent when they speak
German and they all, more or less, are afraid of making mistakes, so German is only unwillingly
chosen as common language when foreigners are there, they often prefer to speak French.
They love French as much as the French Suiss hate German. It makes one laugh seeing how,
when Suiss people are together, the French speaking ones feel like their natural right to speak
their home language, while the German Suiss reverently listen to them.
When I returned to Italy I found at first some difficulties in explaining Chemistry to my pupils.
I found myself translating from German to Italian and sometimes I searched in vain for
an Italian word, or it could be that the construction of the sentence sounded odd in Italian.
I realized it was happening when I saw my pupils staring strangely at me.
That was because Chemistry was the field were I had used German for years.
In everyday life things were normal, except when in the street someone suddenly
asked me something..then I uttered :" Wie bitte?" (I beg your pardon?).
But then my German faded , as I had less and less occasions to practise it.
German is for us Latins a difficult language. There are declinations, the order of the words
in a sentence is rather strict, you can never say if a word is masculine or neuter..but the
greatest difficulty remains the fact that many words have non-Latin roots and these are
more difficult for us Italians to remember.
On the other hand, German has fixed rules for pronunciation, so you can learn new words
correctly simply by reading some text. You can also hear a new word and write it down
correctly, as you may do with Spanish or Italian, but not always with French and even less
with English.
In the page:"Hanni's Sports: Windsurfing" there is a sample of my writings in German.
My wife did not know German when we came to Switzerland. Nevertheless she could live
a normal life using her school-French, and there were also times, when French Suiss guests were there,
that I felt myself outsided because I did not know French.
Where we lived, there were only two TV-channels you could get. One in German and the other one
in French. So I began from time to time to watch the French channel. At first only publicity, then
the news. Then I began to buy French-written Mickey Mouse books. I read and read them over again.
After about a year of this, we were at dinner with Suiss collegues, and they were speaking French of course,
because there were also some French-Suiss people there. Suddenly one of them, who did not know me,
asked me something in French and I replied and we kept on speaking....in French! My wife could not
believe her ears but it is a proof of how effective multimedial methods are in language learning
in comparison with the traditional school methods.
More than that, I found I was much better than my wife in colloquial speech and it all came from my
comic books readings!.
Then, for about a year, I had a French-Suiss collegue who shared my office and I improved greatly my
French.
Years went by, I used sometimes French on holidays in France or Corsica, sometimes I read something
in that language and that was all..until Internet came, and I began to web-chat with a couple of
French-Canadian women. Then I realized that I had never written anything in French and I did not
know the grammar rules. So I bought a serious French grammar with exercises and I studied that
for a month or two and I can say that now I am fast so good in French as I used to be in German.
In the page:"Sur le lac avec le sirocco" there is a sample of my writings in French.
See also "Sur le lac 2"
During my work as a research chemist, sometimes I needed tranlations of Russian papers or patents.
The translater was not a chemist, so I often found unclear passages and got angry about that.
So I decided to learn a bit of Russian, at least as much as I needed to read the papers by myself.
By chance, a Russian course began on the Suiss TV , so I followed it with pleasure.
Little by little I got involved with this complex and beautiful language.
One may say Russian is a kind of archaic language, a bit like ancient Greek.
It has a lot of grammatical difficulties, many declinations, much more than in German,
and the use of the past is sometimes complicated even for a cultured Russian.
More than that, the scientific Russian, just like its Italian counterpart,
tends to be pompous and plethoric, so translating scientific Russian was no pleasure at all.
On the other hand, the language has a beautiful sound and can express a lot of subtilities
and nuances, furthermore, Russian writers like Tolstoj or Dostojewski are not in the least
plethoric, on the contrary, their language is simple and pregnant.
I never went to Russia, but I followed some courses held in Milan and Bergamo, then I also took
private lessons. After that, I could sustain a everyday-life conversation and read papers and
books with the help of a dictionary.
Many years have passed since then, I forgot most of my Russian, but one can never
say, perhaps I'll find the time and the will to refresh it a bit.
When I was attending the university I had little spare time. I cannot remember
why at a certain point I decided to employ part of it in studying Spanish.
I began with a disc course, then I found a Latin-American guy who was working
in Terni , my town, and I did practise a bit with him.
Then I let it be, but when I lived in Switzerland, I spent my holydays in Spain a couple
of times. Once I even rent a car and visited Andalusia, speaking with the natives
in their language everytime I could. My bed lecture then was Cervantes' Don Qijote.
Of course, as all Italians, I had no great difficulties in understanding the speech or
the written language and the people understood well my horrible Spanish.
It must be said, however, that things can get complicated when you reach a certain
level, just because of the similarity of the languages. In fact, many expressions
that seem very similar may differ very much in the meaning. In other words,
even the Spaniards look at the world in a different way from us Italians.
On the other hand, I met Spanish people that had lived long in Italy
and had developed many doubts concerning their mother language.
Now and then I read something in Spanish so I did not forget it.
In the page:"La pipa" there are some samples of my writings in Spanish.
In the early years after my return to Italy, I worked in Intra (VB) as a teacher and in
the same school they gave evening courses of Esperanto.
I was of course interested , the simple idea of an artificial language was
exciting. I wanted to discover how flexible can such a language be in describing
the world. I was not expecting very much however, I had already heard of Volapuk,
one of the first artificial languages. It was developed at the end of the 19th century
but at the first Volapuk congress, nobody could manage to speak it decently.
It seems that it was about so difficult as Chinese, partly because the roots of the words
were completely new and their formation followed a too complicated logic..
Esperanto was a surprise. At the first lesson of the course there was a Russian experantist
as a guest. He came directly from Russia and did not know a word of Italian.
I was presented to him and we talked in Russian. I was a bit proud of this, Russian
being a difficult language. Nobody else there knew Russian. But then the guest began
to speak in an unknown language, which sounded a bit like Spanish to me, and our
teachers and other members of the Esperanto club replied to him and they talked
to him with much more fluency than I had done in Russian. I was the outsider now!
There seemed to be no difficulties of understanding due to different pronunciation or
accent. In fact, one of the advantages of Esperanto is its simple phonetics.
Another one is that the grammar is even simpler than in English. There are no exceptions
to the rules, no irregular verbs. Furthermore, you can always say if a word is a noun,
an adjective, or a verb o an adverb..you have only to consider its ending. For example:
varmo = heat (name) varma = warm varme = warm (adverb)
malvarmo = cold varmigi = to heat varmig^i = to get warm
mi varmigas = I heat (something) li varmigas = he heats li varmigos = he will heat
varmigu! = heat! estas varmege = it is hot estas malvarme = it is cold
estas malvarmete = it is a bit cold.
Esperanto would be an ideal language for interacting with computers and for air traffic.
It has its literature, its authors and poets. I did not believe it, at first, but Esperanto
is a real complete language, with its own character.
As one can see above, it constructs words using a littlle number of roots and prefixes
and suffixes. The roots were taken from Latin (about 70%) therefore Esperanto is
very easy for us Italians as well as for any people speaking a neolatin language.
The rest of the roots comes from German and Slavic languages.
The genius who developed this language at the end of 1800 was a Polnish physician,
Ludwig Zamenhof. He was convinced that the use of a common language could help
peoples avoid wars and race discriminations. This ideal is partly still cultivated
by esperantists of all over the world. As for me, I think people will go on fighting
with or without a common language. The common language , as history and the
present developments show, is always the one used by the winners and conquerors.
I am using it this very moment and I am not particularly happy about that, even if
I like English as a language.
If you care about a small foretaste of Esperanto just click here.
Late in my life I was visiting a big book-shop in Milan and I found two cheap
language courses in cassettes. One was Serbo-Croatian and the other one
Egyptian-Arabic. Serbo-Croatian was easy to learn, owing to its similarity with
Russian (the slavic languages strongly resemble to each other, a bit as Italian and
Spanish do). I let it be after a while, however, because I feared to loose my Russian
even more, to confuse it with the new language.
Arabic on the contrary was totally new .
It has been a conquerors' language, like Latin and English. In its written form, it is
used by a big part of the islamic world. Also the non-Arabic speaking Muslims know
some Arabic prayers and salutations and it is not rare that someone learns the
Holy Quran by heart without knowing Arabic.
What impresses me is the fact that it is an old language. It is not much different from the
one spoken by the Profet.
On the other hand, I discovered that only cultured Arabians can use literary Arabic.
The everyday language is a dialect which varies from state to state. There are no big
chances that you could make yourself understood speaking literary Arabic on the street
there, even less that you can understand what people say.
Anyway things are changing fast. Now literary Arabic is used more and more in the
radio and TV-News as well as in political debates in a little simplifed form, known as
Standard Arabic, which may well become the real common language of the
Arabic world.
I began studying Egyptian, then attended an introductory course of written Arabic,
then took private lessons first from Mamadu, a friend from Senegal, then from
Aziza, a girl from Morocco. After that I worked at it alone.
I can say it is hard, much harder than Russian, maybe even harder than Old Greek.
I shall not annoy you with the grammatical difficulties or the fact that vowels are not
used in the written language. The greatest difficulty is that all Arabian words are
constructed with 3 consonants, and many consonants have a similar sound for
our european ears. Because of that many words sound similar and it is terribly
difficult to retain them. It is also to be said that Arabic is "uaasi' giddan", as they say,
it is very wide, meaning the fact that for one concept there are invariably not less than
three or four different words and they are all used, apparently without any inherent
logic.
Only the Quran, as I found, is a masterpiece of pregnancy and conciseness and
no translation can render the atmosphere of power and force that pervade it.
There are in Arabic some sounds that make it rather harsch for an unused
european ear. With the time I get used to that (which did not happen with the Suiss
dialect after ten years!). On the other hand, Arabic hand writing is a real aesthetic
pleasure. I was never fond of hand writing in my life, often I had difficulties in
understanding my own, but the Arabic is really another thing and sometimes
I like to write down some Quran verses that I know by heart only for the
pleasure of doing it.
Some years ago I received , as a birthday present, a Modern Greek course
I said to myself: "It is now or never". I must admit that, after Arabic, Modern Greek seems rather
simple, at least at first level. Many words are of easy comprehension for us Italians
and many others , although unknown, seem like long forgotten relatives to me.
There are , of course, the expected difficulties with the verbs. Greeks have developed
much fantasy in transforming the verbs in the past tenses so I think I am not fool enough
to begin learning the transforming rules as I was obliged to do at school. After all I am not a grammatician
I think it is better to learn the verbs by heart, I mean only the ones used in everyday's life.
30 years ago I visited Greece. I fell in love with the Greek songs . Now thanks to Internet I discovered
that the same songs were not forgotten by the Greeks. I am going to learn a couple of them.
In the second world-war, we Italians tried to invade Greece starting from Albany. We were defeated
so the Germans, who were our allied, conquered the little land. I discovered the Greeks celebrate the day
when they answered "oxhi" (no) to Mussolini's ultimatum. Well, in spite of all this, Greeks do love
us, as I discovered by myself, and as I am told by my sister who visits Greece each year.
This is a thing I shall never understand.
Recently I visited Greece on vacations twice. The first time I was in Crete and it was before the Greek course.
I was only able to say few words but I noticed that the people I talked with were enormously pleased
to hear me speaking in their mother tongue and did their best to help me.
After that I studied my Greek course, but then came Japanese and I had no spare time for other
languages.
Then I visited my sister in Syphnos. She has now a little house in a village of that beautiful
small island . She speaks and reads New Greek rather easily. I listened to her talking with
the natives and I could understand her, whereas with the natives I was not always
successful because of their speed of talking. Anyway I was pleased that I could exchange
some (the most obvious ) sentences with them.
My intention now is to slow down a bit with Japanese and resume some Greek.
This year (2007) I received as a present a small Japanese conversation manual. At first I laughed at it
and put it aside. Then one day, having nothing better to do, I began to leaf through it. It was
a very bad manual, but the language was so intriguing that I was compelled to buy a small
(and very bad) dictionary and a small japanese course (it was ill conceived too) and
a compact but well done grammar. I only wanted to understand a bit the mechanism of this
language, but then I got involved and now I am studying it rather seriously.
Actually Japanese is both very easy and very complicated. I read somewhere that even
the Japanese hate (and love) it and now I think I can understand that.
In comparison to other languages, spoken Japanese is rather simple. One may even say it is
a rough language, despite of the many courtesy forms it uses. In fact there are no articles,
no declinations, no possessive adjectives, shortly, it is a very undetermined language.
In a lot of cases only the context can help you to discern the meaning of a given word.
Moreover, it sounds very monotonous so that the intonation is of no help to your comprehension.
Phonetically it is very poor, even poorer than Italian. Wovels are pronounced nearly like in Italian
("e" and "o" are always closed ) only "u" sounds a bit different and sometimes is difficult to discern.
Some consonants are lacking, like "f "or "v" .
In addition, Japanese is extremely rich on homophones, that is words with the same sound and
different meaning.
As to the Japanese construction, it is like in Italian, only reversed. For example
"I give a book to the teacher" becomes: "teacher to book object give" . The subject
of the phrase can indifferently be I, you , he, her us .. there is no way to know it.
May be there is more of one teacher, or more then one book. Only the context
can tell it.
So far, Japanese does not seem very appealing, but wait! There is also written Japanese!
To write Japanese you have to learn two syllabic alphabets (107 sounds each) and at least
about 2000 ideograms (there are 60000 of them!) which were taken from the Chinese language.
The alphabetic signs are ideogram-derived. The less complicated alphabet is used for imported
words, the ones from Chinese excepted. Imported words (mostly from English) tend to substitute the
Japanese ones. They are adapted to Japanese and sometimes are not so easy to recognize.
For example "HANKACHI" stands for handkerchief , "RAMPU" for lamp, "BIRU" for
building.
The more complicated alphabet is mostly used for the ending of a word, whose root is usually
an ideogram.
The ideograms (KANJI in Japanese) are the real challenge . Their pronunciation is normally double.
There is a Chinese-derived pronunciation (ON) and a Japanese pronunciation (KUN). KUN is used when the
Kanji stands alone, ON when it makes part of a more complex ideogram. For example the ideogram used
for the word: sky sounds SORA when it is used alone. The word: aeroport is formed by two ideograms.
The first one is the ideogram of sky . Here its ON pronunciation will be used and that sounds: KUU.
The second ideogram is that of port. Its ON pronunciation is KOO and its KUN pronunciation is
MINATO. As a result the word : aeroport sounds : KUUKOO and not : SORAMINATO.
The problem is, most ON sounds are monosyllabic so they are common to a lot of different words.
This explains the great number of homophones in the Japanese language and it is the reason why you
cannot do without ideograms.
The funny (but obvious) thing about ideograms is that you do not need to know their pronunciation
to know what they mean. So maybe you can understand a new word because you recognize
the ideograms by which it is composed, but you cannot pronouce it because you do not
remember their ON-pronunciation..
I'm going on now (end 2007) dedicating about half an hour a day to Japanese.
The disturbing thing is that I cannot find anybody, I mean a Japanese, whom I can try the
language with. In my area I could not find anyone, except a lady who is working at a petrol station.
Unfortunately she is very busy, has two children and she is not disposed to give me lessons.
So now and then I fill my tank there and exchange with her but a few words in Japanese and
that is all.
Recently I went to a Japanese restaurant in Arona, but, as soon as I entered it, I realized
that the waitresses were Chinese. Nevertheless, I tried to write down some ideograms because
I know that Chinese can understand the Japanese Kanji (the reverse is not true because the Chinese
ones are generally more complicated). The waitress said " I am sorry, I cannot remember them.
You know, I was born in Italy, I never was in China.."
Presently I am developing some Javascript programs for learning Kanji .
Up to now I have introduced more then 900 Kanjis in my programs. If you are by chance
fool enough to be interested, just do not be ashamed and write to me!
By the way, this
sounds: HIKOOKI and means: aeroplane. So simple.
Developments.
I eventually found a Japanese teacher. He lives in a very nice place in a wood about half an hour by car
from here. He sells natural products, knows many types of massage techniques, teaches tai chi and
has been in America and in China. His wife is Italian . He has been in Italy about 30 years, so his
Italian is very good, considering he is a Japanese. The funny thing is, he wants to learn Chinese. He
has bought the same Chinese course as mine and pretty soon I found myself teaching him Chinese!
Of course, he is much better than me in understanding the characters, he says he understands about
80% of a Chinese text. However, he has great difficulties with the spoken language. Unlike Chinese,
and very much like Italian, Japanese is a phonetically poor language. Intermediate wovels are for
him a big problem. The fact is, pronounciation is of outmost importance for the Chinese (see below).
With his help, I have begun to read the Japanese manga (comics). There I found the language,
Japanese people use among friends and relatives. Without my teacher, I could never decript it.
This year (2008), inevitably, I began to give a look to the CHINESE language. I choose a 40 lessons
course by the University of Rome. As for now, I do not want to get too much involved , but I am
curious about the things Chinese has in common with Japanese.
In fact, recently I was on a train and up came a Chinese woman, who did not know a word
of any other language apart her own. She was in distress because she was not sure of having
taken the right train and the right seat, she could only show me her ticket.
Well, I took my pencil and began to draw some Japanese signs meaning China, train, seat
hour, number and so on. She could understand all of them (except the sign for: station) and she
felt enormously reassured. She switched on her mobile phone and could pass the informations
to her husband who was waiting for her. Sign after sign, I could understand that she was going
to Prato to work in a factory, and that she was pregnant with a male child...I felt that after all
I had not wasted my time learning the Japanese Kanji (see above)!
For a better understanding of what follows, you should better read the Japanese part above.
Well, after few lessons I am already in a position to realize how fool the Japanese were to transfer into their
own language, which practically has no tones, the ON sounds (see above) of the Chinese syllables
which may have up to 4 tones (5 including the neuter tone).
Chinese is a syllabic language like Japanese. . Each syllable corresponds to a
simple or complex ideogram, called Hànzì (it means Han sign). There are not so many syllables as
Hànzì first, because , as already said, a syllable may be spoken according to four tones, and
secondly, because there are lots of homophones as in Japanese. This is why the Chinese could not,
up to now, drop the Hànzì and pass to the Latin alphabet.
Things that are (relatively) easy
Taking Hànzì into their language, the Japanese tried to simplify them up to a certain degree.
So cultured Chinese people can understand Japanese Kanji, but Japanese have much difficulty
with the classical Hànzì. Fortunately, in the last 50 years there was a simplification of the
Hànzì. In fact, today's simplified written Chinese is more simple than actual Japanese!
For example, this means aeroplane (please compare it with the Japanese Kanji above):
Anyway, any good Chinese dictionary will report both classical and simplified Hànzì.
As a result of all that, I find myself relatively at easy with written Chinese.
Chinese seems to me simpler than Japanese also because there is no inflexion of the
words (that implies no accessory alphabets), moreover, the construction of the phrase is normally as follows:
subject-->complements--->predicate--->object
which is much more similar to European languages then the Japanese one.
First difficulties
The pronunciation is surely not easy (anyway easier then, say, English or Swiss Deutsch),
but the real new thing for me were the tones of the syllables.
For example you can pronounce the syllable "ma" in four tones and also with no tone.
-first tone: mā is rather plain and high pitched It means: mother
-second tone: má is ascending, a bit inquiring. It means: hemp
-third tone: mă first going down, then ascending, rather low pitched. It means: horse
-fourth tone: mà short, closing. It means: to insult
-no tone or neuter tone, always attached to a foregoing syllable at the end of the sentence.
It renders a sentence interrogative.
It does exist a Latin transliteration of Chinese , called pinyin. You can learn it
and so you can speak Chinese without knowing the Hànzì. Unfortunately, as already said,
pinyin cannot replace the Hànzì because of the existence of a lot of homophones.
For example, the syllable WŬ third tone may have the following meanings:
military, nice, folk dance, five, to cover, midday, disobedient.
For each one of them there is a different Hànzì.
However, pinyin is used in the primary school to help pupils learn the Hànzì pronunciation.
In Japanese, it is difficult to discern the intonation of a sentence (assertive, interrogative etc.)
because the pronunciation is very monotonous. Now I am finding the same difficulty in Chinese,
but this time because there are so many tones!
Lately (summer 2008) after 12 lessons, I could take my revenge (Rambo II)! I went first into the
Chinese shop to buy glasses , but this time I spoke in Chinese ! (And they did understand me).
Then I went to the already said Japanese restaurant and I could sustain a brief conversation
with the waitress.
Developments
Last year I was looking for some Chinese person who could teach me a bit. Nowdays , Chinese people
are relatively easy to find, but there are two problems: first, most of them are not cultured and
secondly, they all come from the south, south-east regions of China so they do not speak the so called
"mandarine". Just now, mandarine is becoming the standard language, a "must" if you want to find a good
job. So eventually I found a Chinese boy who was freshly arrived from China. He had learnt "mandarine"
at school and could teach me, but, alas!, he could not speak Italian and needed much more help with
Italian than I did with Chinese. So we ended up with me teaching him Italian by means of my Chinese course,
the text of which we began to translate into Italian.
So I realized how difficult can be for a Chinese to learn an European language. Genders, declinations, conjugations,
articles are for him a full mistery, it will take him years and years of practise to master the use of them.
On the other end, when one thinks that young Chinese, starting from primary school up to the age of 15 , spend
every day about 5 hours learning by heart the 2000-3000 characters needed to read a newspaper, one
can well give up any hope of mastering this language in few years . As for me, after about two years spending for Chinese
give or take two hours a week of my time, I guess I can recognize about 900 characters
For my 68th birthday my sister gave me -way of pulling my arm- a SWAHILI course, just like she had done with Japanese.
Again I first laughed at it, but then curiosity overran me and I gave a look into it.
It was only a couple of months ago, so I only can tell about first impressions.
First the good news.
We are speaking of a language (you know? Jambo Bwana) which is rapidly expanding from East Africa where it
was born towards southwest up to Congo. It has good chances to become the official language of the African Union.
Its phonetics, just like Japanese, is very simple. Apart from a slightly aspired H there are no sounds unknown for us
Italians. T is pronounced like in the English word: "to" and that's all!
What's good for me and for all who have studied Arabic , Swahili (more correctly: Kiswahili) has imported as many
as 30% of its word treasury from Arabic, for example:
SAFARI SALAMA = Have a good trip!
The frase construction is also rather linear: subject + verb+ object+other complements:
Maria ana mtoto mzuri = Maria has child nice
Maria ana watoto wazuri = Maria has children nice
End of the good news.
Nouns have a prefix that depends on the class a noun takes part of . There are several classes of nouns
for example "mtoto" (child) is a member of the class M/WA, in which we found nouns of
persons, nations, religions, "Kisu" (knife) comes from the class KI/VI (mostly inanimate beings).
For each class we have prefixes that apply also to the predicates and adjectives referring to the noun:
Kisu changu (ki+angu= my) kirefu kinafaa= Knife my long is useful
Visu vyangu (vi+angu= my) virefu vinafaa = Knives my long are useful
wavulana warefu wanafaa = boys tall are useful
Moreover there are suffixes and infixes:
vifungo asivyovinunua = the buttons which he (or she) does not buy them
kifungo= button a-si-vyo-vi-nunua
a=verbal prefix for the subject;
si= infix for negation
vyo= infix relative pronoun subject (in the plural form)
vi= infix pronoun object (in the plural form)
nunua= verb (to buy)
So simple! After having studied studied about one tenth of the course I think I
can say that Kiswahili (class KI/VI !) has its own difficulties , but on the
whole it seems to an Italian like me more simple then Russian or, say, German.
Interesting analogies among languages
We are now convinced that the human race has one origin , most probably
in Africa. I am no linguist, but I am convinced that some basic words or pieces of them
have survived the differentiation that inevitably took place following the expansion
of the human tribes all over the world. I encountered several affinities among words
of very distant languages such as , for example, Swahili and Japanese.
Surely most of those resemblances are due to mere coincidence , nevertheless I decided
to write them down. I am too lazy to begin a study of linguistics, but I hope some of my
readers may contribute with their observations to this issue.
Next some of the most striking observed affinities.
(Jap= Japanese*; Chin= Chinese; Ar= Arabic; Swa= Swahili; Ger = German ; Gre= Ancient or modern Greek;
Lat = Latin; Fr= French ; It= Italian ; Sp= Spanish ; Port= Portuguese; Eng= English , Russ = Russian)
*not the Chinese derived Japanese, only the primitive (KUNI) Japanese
Rather willingly, I divided some words with a slash in order to put in evidence the roots
- Door = Tor (Ger) , TO, DO (Jap)
-Earth= Er/de (Ger) , di (Chin) , ard (Ar), lan/d , Bo/den in Ger
- To exist = A-RU in Jap --> are in Eng
- Flower : ua in Swa ; hua in Chin ; HANA in Jap
- Wind = feng(pron: fen) in Chin --> Foehn (pron: fen)= warm wind in Ger
- To go : I-KU in Jap; ire in Lat
- KU-RU to come in Jap --> come , course (Eng) courir (Fr) correre(It)
-to be= sein (Ger) --> zai (Chin to be there)
-GO-RAN (Jap courteous for : to look at,to see GO is only a court.prefix)--> ra = to see in Ar
The same root is found in : MI/RU to see , to look at in Jap --> miroir Fr = mirror; mirar = to look at in Sp
- The pronoun thou in Eng , tu (Lat, It) , du (Ger) ---> ANATA in Jap, anta in Ar
-The pronoun I in Eng = An in old Chin, Ana in Ar
-The pronoun we in Eng--> wo/men in Chin (wo = I in Chin)
The word : man can be found used in several personal pronouns, for example:
Wo-men = we , Ta-men = they in Chin, further: mimi = I in Swa --> me (me in It, mich in Ger)
look at the sound HU, HI and T:
He ---> hu/wa in Ar (hi/ya = she in Ar)--> iste, ille (this one, that one in Lat),--> HI/TO = person in Jap
m/tu = person in Swa ; ANA/TA = you in Jap, an/ta=you in Ar ; ta = he, she in Chin
They = hu/m in Ar ;--> na/hnu = we in Ar hnu-->hum hunna= they femin. in Ar.
Skin = pelle in It, peau (Fr) pi in Chin = KAWA (Jap)---> Haut (Ger)
Some (Eng) SAMA (court. for: person in Jap) soma = body in Gr ein/sam = lone/some in Ger
(-sam is a very used suffix of person related adjectives in German , just like -some in Engl)
-NANI = what? in Jap --->nani = who? in Swa
-The prepos. "yu" = in (Chin) ---> yu = to be there in Swa
-Idiot = blaka (Gr), bloed (Ger), BAKA (Jap), ben (Chin)
-Hao = good (Chin: ni hao!= hi, hello in Eng) , Heil (sane in Ger) , hal (situation in Ar ; kayf halu/ka?=how are you? )
s/al/ve (= hello in Lat, It)
Honey : Hoenig (Ger) --> feng= bee in Chin
KO/KORO = Heart in Jap --> cuore (It) coeur(Fr)
pigu = anus in Chin --> pigos = anus in Gr
BOTCHAN = baby in Jap ---> boccia (pron.: botcha) in piedmont dialect (Italy)
yu = rain in Chin---> lluvia (Sp), chuva (Port) ;m/vua (Swa) udor (pron. yu/dor) in Gr= water
NAMAE =name in Jap
MINATO = harbour in Jap = mina' in Ar
OTO = sound in Jap --->otos (Gr for : ear)
fei (Chin) = to fly (Eng) fliegen (Ger)
MI/TSU = honey in Jap = mi in Chin= mi/ele (It) med (pron: mied) in Russ
UMI = sea in Jap = mar (Lat) = more (Russ)-----> ma = water in Ar; maji= water in Swa
further: humere Lat for: to be moist, humid (Eng) = umido (It)
NIN/GEN =human kind --->genre (Fr) genus (Lat) ; ---> ren (pron: zhen) = man in Chin ; zhena= woman in Russ) ; ginaika = woman (Gr)
rad = glad in Russ , rad in Ar
Amen (Lat)-->atmen =to breathe in Ger--> atman =sorcerer in Russ-->atamanna = to wish in Ar
-->mente(It) = mind-->mantra (Sanscrit)
tou = head in Chin --> tete(Fr) --> o/tez = father in Russ , = O/TOO in Jap
to cut= kata in Swa --> KATANA jap.sword
Fanya = to do, to make in Swa = fare (It) = fa'al (Ar) = fa (Chin)
jenga= to build in Swa= jian in Chin
ma= horse in Chin , UMA in Jap --> ma/re in Engl, mae/re in Ger
legame (It) = bound , lien in Fr , lian in Chin
d/r + aspiration --> rih = wind in Ar-->dhihanie (Russ)= b/reath