Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Resources
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- Опубліковано 24 бер 2023
- Take a virtual tour of my collection of materials for learning Chinese, Japanese, and especially Korean, including volumes I myself authored. As I go through the books, I pull down and talk about specific volumes, and I also answer questions from Xing Hao, who is filming.
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac... You can join me this week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages.
If you are in a position to support my educational efforts, please consider making a contribution at: ko-fi.com/alexanderarguelles
I see you have some John Defrancis in the Chinese collection. His Chinese Reader series is still one of the most brilliantly devised series of textbooks for any language, ever. Over 2000 pages of running text across 3 volumes, the majority of which is pure Chinese text. Combined with an internal spaced repetition system for each character, and just as importantly, each character compound, everything is systematically and painstakingly reintroduced and reinforced through subsequent lessons. Produced in the late 70s in Yale, it's still a masterpiece of pedagogy to this day.
Hello Chris! I used to have the complete DeFrancis series. I loaned it to someone who never gave it back. The ones that remain are either extras that I had then, or supplemental copies that somehow volunteered to join my collection subsequently.
@@ProfASAr I don't think I'd give them back either :) As a big fan of DeFrancis I would have loved to hear more about your experience with those.
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ You can join me this week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages.
I can definitely relate to the benefit of Chinese characters/vocabulary with regards to learning Japanese or Korean (and probably Vietnamese). Before life demanded that I learn Chinese, I studied Japanese for 2 years at university level. Whenever I see Japanese (or Korean with characters for reference printed on the page with the Hangul) my mind is absolutely blown that people somehow learn these languages to a high level with little or no Chinese etymological knowledge - and I say that as a compliment more than anything (and certainly not a criticism) because it means that hill is so much steeper than it is for those with Chinese going in. When I was learning Japanese before Chinese, obviously it has retained the characters for Sinitic words which makes the meaning a bit more transparent than Korean, but still it was mysterious as a western learner why these vocabulary had to be treated as special and felt almost copy and pasted into Japanese from a different source.
As I say here, I felt like I was plodding along until I added characters, and only then did my vocabulary start to grow geometrically.
You need to understand the pronunciation shift that happened during the last thousand years or more in order to get an answer.
Knowledge of Southern Chinese dialects is required for this topic because they retain many of the ancient Chinese phonetic system.
As you might know Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are the most heavily Chinese influenced languages both in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation.
This progress dates back almost 2000 years.
Many people do learn a language without etymological knowledge, particularly their native language. They don’t necessarily think about the challenges of doing so. It is just second nature because that is the environment they grew up in. Learning the etymology certainly helps, but you can also learn a lot through context as well.
Been waiting for this one!
Sorry it took so long to edit and get up.
THIS is the video I was eager to watch. Wish I could meet the professor.
Maybe we can meet some day in person, at a Polyglot conference or so. And you could meet me virtually by joining my academy. If the ongoing sessions do not suit you at present, I am thinking of offering occasional intensive 1-week virtual workshops. What do you think of that idea?
@@ProfASAr I live in California actually. I've been to one polyglot event.
awesome collection
Thanks for visiting!
Positively wonderful to see so much material that shows the inter-relatedness of these languages! I really wish I could dedicate more time to my Japanese and get at least basic reading skills in Mandarin but so far life has had other plans...
This is how I feel about Slavic languages - trying to find small pieces of time or opportunities to fit them into my life (systematically working through an old 'Teach Yourself' course for Polish and some others as treatment for chronic insomnia at the moment). If I may, I strongly recommend going through the James Heisig series for the writing/meaning of Chinese characters (the series has been made for Japanese, traditional, and simplified). When you finally do get to a point in life where you can dedicate time to the language itself, it will be all that much easier and more rewarding.
@@trayamolesh588 I do know Japanese but I do not spend as much time on it as I would’ve liked.
But yeah, more kanji is always helpful, thank you!
Hello Yan and Trayamolesh and thank you making the comment section to my videos well worth reading.
Great video as always! The collection of English-to-Korean and Spanish-to-Korean books was a real eye-opener for me, as someone who should improve my Korean before my son starts speaking it better than me. 😂
Here in LA’s Koreatown I can happily report that there are more surviving bookstores than I’ve found in other big cities, like Manhattan, Southern Brooklyn, or Valencia. They tend to be Korean-language focused, and I imagine this would be one of the places with a big demand for Spanish-Korean bilingual books, with many small businesses having employees who speak one of those languages better than English. Indeed, my Korean mother in law knows some Spanish because of the sheer amount of opportunities to interact with it, including in Koreatown.
I also second the thoughts about regretting having to abort Japanese (albeit, my level in the language is extremely basic). From the standpoint of literature, as well as TV and video games for those who are interested, it is by far the non-Western language with the best learning resources, and I can happily report that it not only shares grammatical similarities with Korean, but also with the Dravidian languages such as my heritage language Telugu. But alas, life is short, and it’s something I’ll have to put off until after my Telugu and Korean are much improved.
(To say nothing of how much I’ve had to delay my classical and Mandarin Chinese learning. Perhaps in a second or third life I could give them the respect they deserve).
P.S. Loved when Xing Hao got the chance to correct the Professor about the dates of Qin Shi Huang’s reign (no disrespect intended, but glad to see a fellow student carving out his own areas of expertise, in the spirit of the Academy). It is indeed a tragedy that so much early Chinese history was lost through this emperor’s actions (including possible attestations of non-Sinitic languages in East Asia).
Very interesting to hear about how the continued usage of Classical Chinese in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam interacts with attestation of those languages until the 20th century, when I already thought the Romance languages had serious attestation issues until the 11th or 12th centuries (to the point that some people mistakenly claim they are not descended from Latin, but I believe sound-changes and core vocabulary show that they are, but that they diverged centuries after the Golden Age of Latin and still influenced each other’s grammatical innovations, much like Korean and Japanese influenced each other’s grammar).
With that said, I am also really looking forward to the presentation on the Indic branch. Hindi was always a language that was just out-of-reach for me, with Dravidian-speaking-but-Hindiphile relatives, and I have been fascinated by how many stages are attested of Sanskrit’s descendants. We are fortunate as Germanic speakers to have a decently well-attested family, but I wonder if Indic is even better in this respect.
Hello Prateek - I love being corrected if I get something wrong. I don't know why I was ascribing the book burning emperor to 500 rather than 200 BC.
You reminded me of something. My native languages are English and Spanish. When I chose to study Italian, I got the Teach Yourself Italian course in English (the old, excellent book/cassettes one). While I did well, I found my brain going into Spanish thinking most of the time. Then I realized that I should try an Italian for Spanish speakers course. Bingo, smooth sailing. Take care you and kitty.
Thank you for the good wishes and for independently discovering the value of using related languages for learning their relatives.
Professor, I don't know how many opportunities you have to keep up with the current shift of the Korean language, but there are even more "Konglish" words that have virtually replaced their Korean counterparts in casual contexts. Things like 와이프 are much more commonly heard. There have also been even Korean-made Konglish words entering the lexicon, to the point that to learn Korean, to a small extent, also means re-learning some English. 언택트 is a prime example of that phenomenon.
Yes, I was aware of this trend when I lived there, and notice it more and more in current Korean videos that I watch with my wife. While this is the case for South Korean Korean, it is not at all the case for North Korean Korean. That is why, as I mention in this video, the South Korean linguists of my acquaintance feel that North Korean Korean is purer/better Korean.
This also happens in Turkish now. I am wondering how many languages are going to become an english creole in the future. In turkish many just use english verbs with -etmek instead of using a turkish word. I have family who say cook -etmek instead of pisirmek (to cook). English global dominance is really showing its power!
감사합니다.
천만에요.
The truly daunting thing to me about Korean is that you don't get the kind of regular, reliable exposure to the hanja as one obviously does with Japanese or Chinese. This seems to make mastering them and developing true reading proficiency an almost insurmountably difficult task. It's staggering me that there are those who have done it, and beyond graded readers I wonder how they have managed it.
Reading historical classics give you great exposure to them.
It’s context. Hanja can be helpful, but there are some words that have more than fifteen definitions, sometimes with different hanja roots, so I don’t know how helpful it would be to know the hanja for a particular morpheme unless you know all the hanja roots. You still have to plug it into the sentence. Just keep reading and move on if the material doesn’t suit you. You have to create your own “graded materials” by finding material that is comfortable for you and reading narrowly, from a single author or on a single subject.
Wow! I would like to live in your library, Alexander! I have got a copy of an old 新しい日本語 textbook, but no cover, so I don't know the editor of the course, which I really like. Maybe you have the printed course book? What if I shoot a video about my copy , so you could see what it is. The course book is for English speakers.
I will watch it if you do and tell you if I know.
@@ProfASAr ok, I will let you know as soon as it is ready. Thank you for your response.
@@ProfASAr ua-cam.com/video/RozrTJvk28g/v-deo.html here is the video
@@42alexey69 Thanks for making and posting the video. I am sorry, but I cannot identify that textbook for you. Maybe if you post about it at forum.language-learners.org/ someone there will be able to do so after watching the video. Good luck with this!
Interesting that you found hanja so useful for learning Korean--even before watching this, I was wondering if studying hanja would help me. What I'm finding is that Korean syllables have no meaning for me, because the language is opaque. As much as people bash on kanji for Japanese, I find them essential for forming word-boundaries. How much overlap is there for hanja and kanji?
Another question that came to mind: how do you approach opaque languages that don't have Chinese characters or some easy-to-identify morphology?
Thanks for writing. There is a great degree of overlap between Hanja and Kanji. As for opaque languages that don't have easy-to-identify morphology, you just have to do without it, which is largely what makes them opaque in the first place.
Professor, listening and reading an hour of an audiobook at the same time is equivalent to two hours of comprehensible input, one of reading and one of listening?
As the audio pushes your reading along and the reading helps you understand the audio, I think that it would only be honest to give yourself 30 minutes of credit for each, a total 1 hour, not double the hour to two. Sorry!
Lately I have come to the conclusion that Koine Greek is the finest of all languages I have encountered.
Which others have you encountered? :)
@@iktunutki Aside from Koine, there is English (native language) Italian(B1/B2), German (C1+) You could say I have a smattering (to varying degrees) in Modern Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean. But many of these I hardly know at all - rather I've just read up a little bit about the grammar. With others (like French or Spanish) I could perhaps read simple newspaper articles, and maybe make a stab at basic communication? But it is only Italian and German (the latter especially) that I would really claim to "know" in any meaningful way. I have studied these two formally in my youth, and I spent significant time living in the countries (again, especially in Germany.) Though I'm keen on languages, I'm not a hardcore professional learner like the polyglots whom we all admire, such as Professor Arguelles, Richard Simcott, Luca Lampariello, et al. I don't have the burning passion and iron determination to learn more and yet more languages to the highest level. Being now in my 40s, I find there has to be a crystal clear reason to motivate me to learn. For me this is only true of Koine Greek, really...
@@j.burgess4459 What a GREAT post, probably because I am the type of person who is more interested in having a "smattering" knowledge of a lot of different languages rather than a deep knowledge of one or two. Like you, German and Italian are the languages I am the most advanced in. My philosophy of language learning is based on my general philosophy of life: I try to learn something new in life every day. That could be a new recipe, learning something new about the solar system, etc.. Just because someone does not learn a foreign language to a native or near-native level, who's to say that is wasted time? ANYTIME you can learn something new in life, be it in regard to languages or anything else, is a plus in my opinion.
Just a short example: I decided one day to learn the Arabic writing system, although I was not sure how far I was going to go into the grammar of the language. Whereas the appearance of the Arabic script was a total mystery to me before, studying and learning the Arabic writing took me from being overwhelmed when a saw an article written in Arabic to at least being able to recognize all the letters in their various forms and how to sound them out. Just because I don't know Arabic from a grammar or speaking perspective does not mean my learning the Arabic script was a wasted effort on my part. After all, I learned something new in my life, and should I at some point in the future wish to delve deeper into Arabic, I have conquered one of the hurdles to learning that language.
@@j.burgess4459 I enjoy Koine Greek quite a lot as well, and I say that as someone who even went through an anti-religion phase as a teen and early-20-something. What about it would you say elevates it above other languages for you? While I don’t like choosing favorites, I personally love how Koine Greek combines the morphological richness of Latin with a clear, mostly unambiguous syntax (which I’d say German does as well, through other means), plus with the verbs not being as complex as Attic. And yes, it doesn’t hurt that it’s the language of some of my favorite religious texts as well.
@@prateekvasireddy5166 It's undeniable that texts such as the Septuagint, New Testament, and Church Fathers provide a special motivation for those of us who happen to have a personal interest in this field. However, you could also say that a knowledge of Koine gives one the keys to the Library of Alexandria! I agree with you about the qualities of the language - in some respects there is a kind proto-Germanic flavour. Yet in other ways it feels much more fluid and flexible - for example in its use of participles.
I just saw this video and I wonder if you have the names of some of your books for learning japanese? I really like your videos but I don't know where to find your book recommendations for specific languages
Please pause the video as it scans the shelves, then ask me more about any particular volume that piques your curiosity.
@@ProfASAr Thank you very much for responding Professor! I would like to know about the beige book you say is a 1942 vintage at 1:38. Do you think that book would be helpful for me to learn kanji alongside intensive reading of easy books and childrens books? Hope you have a nice day!
@@snail248 Yes I do think it would be a good help.
Wow, this is so dope!! You're really making an impression of a real polyglot, not like the fake ones we can see on various other UA-cam channels.
見ていたらご紹介の本の中で北朝鮮の言葉を勉強するためのドイツ語で書かれた本んもあるし、北朝鮮から亡命したひとに関する本んもありますね。
Davon abgesehen, bedeutet das auch, daß Sie die koreanischen Sprache sehr gut beherrschen.
从你的视频中可以看出你是从事专业级教授行业的，跟我 父亲一样当大学教授那种。我父亲曾经在大学教俄文，目前已经早就退休了。
Je suppose que vous avez dû vous spécialiser en linguistique ou quelque chose comme ça, tout comme moi.
저는 대학교 졸업 후 중국 북경에 유학 와서 석사과정을 다녔으나 돈 벌고 싶어서 학업을 그만두고 심천으로 이사와서 최근까지 사업을 하고 있습니다.
Your channel just popped up due to the recommendation algorithm today, but I'm really impressed and also deeply appreciate your accomplishment.
I'm an avid language learner, if not comparable to you, just for hobby or business purposes, but not for academical goals anymore.
Besides, during my long-term stay here in China, I also learned Cantonese which is the mother tongue of my wife. I speak also some Hokkien and Teochew.
It was not until 2016 that I started learning Vietnamese and Thai mainly because of business matters.
They are relatively very easy to pick up if you understand tonal languages like Mandarin and Cantonese.
In additon to that, recently I'm also teaching myself the basics of Hindi, Tamil, some Spanish and Russian.
I think Spanish to be the most easy one, especially with a background of German and French.
When studying Thai, I came to understand that the letters originate from Hindic characters, which all have an Abugida writing system in common.
This is also true for Burmese, Khmer, Tibetan and Korean letters.
끝으로 이렇게 우연한 기회를 통해 선생님을 알게 된 것을 영광으로 생각하는 바이며 그외 하시는 일마다 일익 순조롭기를 기원합니다.
Thank you for sharing your own detailed language learning history - it really helps to make these comment sections worth reading!