More reviews at Amazon.com

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I honestly don't know how much time and space I will get here for all kinds of book reviews. Until I get a better understanding of that process, I will grab some books from the shelf and post reviews here, mostly about all my Japanese books taking vacation :-):

Kanji Hanzi's Profile on Amazon.com

Here is the first sample: "Read Real Japanese Essays", by Janet Ashby

Famous Chinese Scholar John DeFrancis Dies

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UPDATE: Now I know: "How the World Works" by Andrew Leonard was open for reading when I looked from another computer in the house. Thus ....

Genghis Khan gets a bad rap

... is recommended reading.

This is a rather funny coincidence. Whenever I get time, I will add a "Scriptorium" section to the Hub. Not in the strict definition "A Place where to Write", but a place to show what other people around the world has been writing through the centuries or millenia, and focusing on various writing systems. I had reserved the first post for the old Mongolian writing system, since I had not looked at it all before. Pretty unique "look and feel".

(I also admit being inspired by Paul Auster's amazing "Travels in the Scriptorium", when I picked the word, but I didn't know that there already were tons of Scriptorium pages on the net.)

Original post:

Since I am not sure about how much of Salon.com is open for non-subscribers or not, I simply paste the short article found at

Salon.com

below. Pretty interesting stuff! In particular I like the McCarthy stuff. Very relevant in these days when suppression of Thought and Speech is spreading like a vicious cancer across the Globe.

I will try to get a copy of DeFrancis' book Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy as soon as possible. Seems like required reading in some circles across the net.

Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009 13:12 PST
A name China scholars will remember

I just retrieved a tattered green paperback book from a dusty corner of my bedroom, where it had lain untouched for at least a decade: "Beginning Chinese -- Second Revised Edition" by John DeFrancis.

A generation of China scholars are nodding their heads. My generation. During the 1970s and '80s, "the DeFrancis series," complete with its intimidating profusion of accompanying audio-tapes, was by far the most popular instructional text for teaching Chinese to English-speakers. Just one glance at its familiar cover was enough to send me spiraling back through the decades into the dreaded language lab.

I learned today that John DeFrancis died on January 2, at the ripe old age of 98. And as usual in these matters, I also learned that the professor had led an astonishing life of which I had hitherto known nothing about. Among the highlights: floating 1200 miles down the Yellow River in 1935 on a raft made of inflated sheepskins, and testifying vehemently in support of one of his colleagues, Owen Lattimore, when the longtime "China hand" was accused of being a "top Russian spy" by Senator Joe McCarthy.

I am tickled to find out that the man whose name opened the door to the Chinese language for me got so angry at Joe McCarthy that he lost his job. Beginning Chinese is dry stuff, but being a China scholar in the 1950s was anything but. Good for you, John!
― Andrew Leonard

New Practical Chinese Reader, Second book

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Just testing some stuff here. The full post will come later. Or even later.

Click on the image below to get it in full size.

"Teach yourself Chinese" by Elisabeth Scurfield

This has been sitting here far too long! I will thus make it very brief: this is an excellent book, strongly recommended if you also buy the CD:s. As the reviews on Amazon.com suggests, it is a very fast-paced book at first. Don't mind the "I found the tapes to be useless." comment, though, since I can't possibly imagine what this means. The CD recordings are extremely well done, with a mix of various speaker to make the dialogues very useful! Check for yourself below.

Don't forget to Look Inside! There you will find the first lessons. - You will have to spend more time on the first lessons than you might be used to, but it sure pays off in case you are patient. The first 10 lessons are in pinyin only, but with the Hanzi versions published in the back of the book. I found it a bit troublesome to flip back and forth so I wrote the texts on my computer and printed them out.

Download files from the Google Group

Let me know if you have any problems with downloads, etc.

In short: This book is great even if you have a text book you are satisfied with, at least if you are a bit like me: Variation is FUN!



No proof, but a personal experience: I haven't repeated this very much, but I can nevertheless still remember most of what is said after a couple of weeks away from it.

Is Japanese THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE?

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UPDATE 1: What am I doing today? Actually reading the AJATT Chinese Corner (from the very beginning), pages I've merely browsed through when I've found a post in the past. He set up a Hanzi Mnemonics section a year ago, a fact I was blissfully ignorant of. Hopefully he will also add simplified characters so "my" readers :-) can enter characters there. Will focus on simplified characters, but add as many traditional ones that time and space allows.

UPDATE 2: Got a reply from the editor of this book



(see further down in the post for details!)

back to original post >>>

First posted at theJapanesePage.com:

Is Japanese THE MOST DIFFICULT LANGUAGE?

I assume you can comment there as well as here, whatever you prefer.

The Julia Nunes post has received a temporary Top of the World place at ...

The 2nd Kanji Hanzi Hub...

and no matter how great I think Julia Nunes is - and I do! - the real purpose of this is to test Blogger vs. Wordpress. If you want to be kind, please look at both pages/blogs. think about look and feel, ease of access, feature, functionality etc. and let me know what YOU prefer. Experienced bloggers familiar with both systems are of course particularly welcome to add feedback here or via email.

Now down to business, duplicating the post on theJapanesePage.com:

Hi there,

(Disclaimer: The **IS** a LONG post. No need to state what is obvious. Don't like, move on to shorter posts.)

Couldn't find a place to discuss linguistics specifically so this might be just as good as any other section.....

I would really like to get some WELL-FOUNDED thoughts on this matter, i.e. not mere speculations or opinions. I am not sure if there are any professional linguists around here, but people ACTUALLY having studied more languages than Japanese for more than two weeks are welcome

Considering the general recommendation from US Foreign Department Language Studies - at least something like that - Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic get the rating Very Hard To Learn, right? I have PLAYED around with Japanese for soon ten years and have studied Mandarin since last (this) summer.

I have never attempted to study Arabic, but I have a Teach Yourself book and can "read" Arabic, since I know the writing and can translate that into acceptable sounds. Of course I don't understand anything of what I say, but nevertheless.... It's a rather tricky grammar, compared with, say, Farsi ("Persian") which is a VERY EASY LANGUAGE, something I know since I have learned a bit a long time ago. Arabic is kind of difficult to pronounce, but not at all as difficult as Mandarin.

Mandarin is A VERY DIFFICULT language the first months or so, when you have to learn 1) pinyin (a monster compared with romaji/kana) and 2) the rather subtle and varied sounds and 3) the tones. This takes some SERIOUS work. But from there it's a fast ride towards literacy, **IF** you happen to know Kanji really well, as I do. If not, then you of course have to add the problem of learning Hanzi, which is roughly the same as learning Kanji, apart from the fact that MORE characters (3000+) are needed than in Japanese if you to be considered reasonably literate. (I am also very old fashioned since I also count HAND WRITING as a requirement to gain the status of FULLY LITERATE )

When I stopped merely having Japanese as a hobby and recreational activity, and actually tried to STUDY Japanese in a serious and structured way, I had a rather humbling experience: I failed! And I failed miserably!What I did was to basically go for a modified AJATT method, i.e. adding sentences to a SRS program and repeating them until I new them well AND could go from English to Japanese without any effort. No problemo to learn the sentences in Japanese and be able to read them and understand them. BUT... And a MIGHTY BIG BUT: the other way around just didn't work! Soon I found that I had to spend 60-70% - probably more like 80-90 - of my time to repeat and repeat. Not much room to add new sentences.

OK, I thought, I am getting too old and dumb for this kind of Real Language Studies. [Nasty Word] Japanese!!! Then I needed something new to put my teeth into and picked Mandarin as the best candidate as another failure. And voila: I was neither dumb not too old to learn A VERY DIFFICULT LANGUAGE. I am rather shocked by the ease of Mandarin and the speed I manage to keep up. There might be some black hole waiting ahead, but I can't possible imagine what that could be. Mandarin grammar is so easy that many claim that "Mandarin has no grammar at all". It sure does, as proven by the one and only Mandarin grammar book I own (Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar), but as things look right now this single title will be enough for a couple of years.

Japanese seems to a particularly easy target for MERE OPINIONS; even among EXPERTS. Compare these two quotes from

1) Read Real Japanese Fiction, Amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/977p3t

and

2) Read Real Japanese Essays, Amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/94sbcg

both beautiful books I strongly recommend (like almost every title from Kodansha)!

1) Michael Emmerich:

The phrase "best-kept secret" gets on on my nerves [...] You have heard rumors, no doubt, that Japanese is an extremely difficult language for English speakers to master. Impossible, even! Well, rest assured, fellow students - these rumors are false. One of the best-kept secrets around, really and truly, is that Japanese is not actually that hard. [...] That's the rub, really - It's not that the language is hard, per se, you just have to take your time getting into it, and that's true of any language.

(My emphasis on the last sentence!!]

2) Janet Ashby:

[...] Yet Japanese remains a deeply frustrating language to study. So much so that I remember finding it positively encouraging when my Japanese professor remarked one day that it took seven years to learn the language - I had despaired pf ever being able to pick up up a Japanese magazine or newspaper and read it more or less easily.

The problem is not only the kanji barrier, high though that can be for Western learners of Japanese, but also the differences in the spoken and written language and the unfamiliar vocabulary, set expressions, sentence patterns, and even the way of thinking. And despite all the changes in the learning environment over the years, there still aren't many intermediate reading materials available, especially ones that can be used for independent study.

I quoted at length from Ashby since she summarized what would have taken me much more words very eloquently. I would like to add one point, though: There aren't very many text books for the beginner either. Genki, Japanese for Everyone (which I own) and the likes are excellent for maybe one year, but then they leave you in the dust. Mandarin have already passed Japanese by a wide margin with text book SERIES like A New Practical Chinese Reader offering material for a full three years of UNIVERSITY STUDIES. OK, it will, when the final volume 6 is published. There are quite a few alternatives, even if I don't think anything i FULLY as comprehensive as this one.

Back to Emmerich/Ashby ... Why the contrasting statements? Don't know. I think Emmerich is possibly playing with words. "Difficult" and "taking ages" are obviously not synonyms. Every bit and piece of Japanese is of course NOT DIFFICULT. The problem is that the NUMBER of pieces to keep track of, vastly exceeds any possible and impossible language I can think of. Just for fun, I will send a copy of this post to his Princeton email address, including a link to see if he will respond

Enough for now. I'm all ears