how many writtes in a second language?

[John Smith]

Danish and Norwegian are definitely more alike in written, than in spoken form.

[Natkat]

Danish is a very cool language! I wish I could speak it :3

say "hej" (pronouced like in hi in english) that is: "hi"
say: "hej hej" that is "bye bye".

now you know fluent danish XD LOL hehe

I write songs in both Catalan and English, but I'm also writing a comic in Spanish. Will anyone ever read it? Not like I care xD

I probably will, love comic and making one myself, Only problem is I dont know spanish (at least not yet) but maybe I can get some friend to translate.

[Natkat]

Danish is a very cool language! I wish I could speak it :3 I especially love the fact that knowing Danish allows you to read books in Norwegian (and I heard to a lesser extent Swedish) too.

I speak as well as read and write in Chinese, but I'm definitely more comfortable in English as I was born in Canada.

tecnically I should know a bit chinese as I know some Japanese and some of the signs is the same used both in japan and chinese. But I dont know which one of the signs who has the same meaning in both languarge and which one has diffrent meaning. so thats brings me back to point zero.

I think the symbol for "friend" is the same: 友

[LilDevilOfPrada]

tecnically I should know a bit chinese as I know some Japanese and some of the signs is the same used both in japan and chinese. But I dont know which one of the signs who has the same meaning in both languarge and which one has diffrent meaning. so thats brings me back to point zero.

I think the symbol for "friend" is the same: 友

By Chinese do you mean Wu or Mandarin or Cantonese?? Sorry I just find it weird people say chinese when china has 3 offical languages and countless minor lanuages.

[Elspeth]

tecnically I should know a bit chinese as I know some Japanese and some of the signs is the same used both in japan and chinese. But I dont know which one of the signs who has the same meaning in both languarge and which one has diffrent meaning. so thats brings me back to point zero.

I think the symbol for "friend" is the same: 友

Japanese language structure and grammar is very, very different from any of the Chinese dialects. Japanese borrows Chinese characters and words, and many have similar meanings, but it usually only means that with a knowledge of one, you can sometimes recognize the general meaning of some characters, and not always reliably.

I learned Mandarin at one point, and got about as close to fluency as one can without being born in a Chinese speaking culture. At best I can only get the gist of Japanese signs (when they happen to use mainly Kanji). My son probably understands more Japanese than I do, due to his big interest in anime, manga and Japanese music. I do have some limited understanding of Cantonese and some of the other dialects that are close to Mandarin.

I had enough high school German (and retained enough of it later on) to muddle through on a trip to Berlin, once... and enough comprehension to manage to get one of the last seats on a plane heading back to Boston after our flight from Budapest to Frankfurt ran into some unexpected delays, and those who did not know German were scrambling to find replacement flights for those they had missed.

It also helped us get a free first class upgrade for that leg of the trip (mainly because I could tell the Lufthansa staff to expect a flood of people from our flight, which for some reason no one in the terminal was yet aware of).

Some of our luggage, though, was lost for at least a few weeks on the return, but my recollection was that the screw-up there happened between Boston and Philly.

[peky]

English.

Español.

*Insert signs here* (Don't know how to type signs  )

(01000010) (01101001) (01101110) (01100001) (01110011) (011011001) (00100000) (01000011) (01101111) (01100100) (01100101) (00101110)

B i n a r y *space* C o d e *period*

No hay espanol, nada que ver..tu dices castillan si? LOL Mi padre hera mitad catalan, y ahi tu vez nada le encojonaba mas que alguien le pregunte si abla "espanol" Haha pero si en ecuado decimos espanol, pero lo que ablan los guayaco, bueno nadie saben que lenagua es aquella...creo que se llama monada..

[Kevin Peña]

Si, en Ecuador, decimos, "Español." 

[Natkat]

By Chinese do you mean Wu or Mandarin or Cantonese?? Sorry I just find it weird people say chinese when china has 3 offical languages and countless minor lanuages.

uhm.. I dont know?.. its only the kanji who somethimes got the same meaning? but I dont know how they use them in china?

like Elspeth said

[LilDevilOfPrada]

uhm.. I dont know?.. its only the kanji who somethimes got the same meaning? but I dont know how they use them in china?

like Elspeth said

Kanji is actually the one that has different ways you can read any symbol.

For an example 恵 has two meaning, both are names however.
It can be read as Kei(mainly for female use with this specific kanji symbol) and also Megumi(also female).

The thing is sadly Kanji is the mainly used of their 3(or 4 i never remember) alphabets so japanese is just really hard to learn.

Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji are all influenced by china however Kanji is almost exact(not really but its similar) copy in a way, I heard katakana was built of short hand early communicaton with china, and Hiragana is the main forgein communication alphabet.

Do correct me if I am wrong.

[Elspeth]

uhm.. I dont know?.. its only the kanji who somethimes got the same meaning? but I dont know how they use them in china?

Chinese uses only what in Japanese are called kanji. I believe the total number of characters is larger (and the system of radicals, the bits that make up each character) has been used to generate new words over time.  In part this is possible because there are almost no inflections in Chinese, no verb tenses, no modifiers of nouns to indicate various properties. Japanese is highly inflected (even has separate modifiers conditioned by the gender speaking, and the social status of speaker and listener in many cases). Older forms of Chinese do have some social status conventions, but they are largely expressed in terms of honorific adjectives used to express politeness and respect (most are no longer used in modern Chinese either on the mainland or elsewhere).

There are radicals that sometimes suggest the phonemic content (the sound of) a word, but these are not regular or entirely predictable. Most of Japanese writing, aside from the kanji, is essentially a phonetic representation, similar to our alphabet or others like Cyrillic, Greek or Hebrew alphabets, though often the Japanese symbols represent combinations of consonant and vowel sounds.

With Chinese writing one more or less has to memorize the sounds associated with each character, and learn how meaning changes depending on the combinations of characters used. However, the grammar is much, much simpler and systematic than Japanese or English (or any other language I know of, for that matter), so some aspects are easier to learn.

There are some phonetic symbols that are used for indexing dictionaries and so on, but they are hardly ever used outside of early language education, or as tools in dictionaries and some language textbooks or lesson materials.

[Elspeth]

Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji are all influenced by china

Influenced is the right word. There's some overlap between those various alphabets and the symbols used in some Chinese language learning. The Japanese symbols are used regularly in written text and other writing. I suspect you know more about how they are used than I do... I have some Japanese dictionaries and have tried to learn a little over the years, but have not spent that much time studying Japanese, except to agree that I find the writing system fairly complicated and know that I'm far from a good understanding of how and why each of those symbol sets is used in the ways that they are.

Sound about right to me. I'll leave it to someone fluent in Japanese to point out any of the finer points.

[Ms. OBrien CVT]

 jIH laH write Daq tlhIngan, chugh vetlh counts.

ang vulcan,

ang romulan.

[Elspeth]

(I'm of the opinion that characters belong just as much to the Japanese as the Chinese, as they've been using them for hundreds of years now).

I wouldn't dispute that, though phrased this way it could be a bit misleading to someone not familiar with both languages. As I've said, I haven't studied Japanese as closely as my son has. Did Japanese have a writing system prior to adapting Chinese characters and radicals to the task? I'm not aware of one, so in that sense at least, yes, Japanese has as much claim to them, even though they weren't invented by the Japanese. (Chinese characters go back to (I think) at least 2000 BCE, unless I'm misremembering).

I suspect that Chinese linguists may have borrowed back some of the conventions Japanese adopted to use radicals and modified characters to serve as phonetic symbols, but that's not something I've ever researched in detail. Korean also borrowed Chinese characters, though their phonetic alphabet is considerably simpler that what developed in Japanese. That may relate, though, to how Japanese (or so it seems to me) is so much more inflected than Korean seems to be. (Had a roommate in the Korean course, but again, I only learned a smattering of it, so my impressions could be very mistaken).