Jules, Here's the funny story of how the Japanese writing system helped teach me some Czech. I was in Prague with some Czech friends. They tried to teach me to say the Czech name of the town "Praha", but it was not going well. I am L1 American English with that weird back of throat r. I had studied German and French and Japanese but no Slavic languages. Ger and Fr have a back of throat r too (both different from English though). We were walking by a tourist shop selling guides in various languages and there was one in Japanese. For fun I sounded out the katakana: PORAHA. "That's it, that's it!" they yelled. I was confused, I had been amusing myself. "Say what you just said again!" "Poraha?" I asked. See, it turns out the r in Praha is a flap or tap very similar to the Japanese r (which I would liken to English d), but I had all along been trying to use an English r to sound it out and it had been coming off all wrong to them. So yeah, Roman letters got in my way, Japanese kana did the trick!
As someone studying linguistics with English as my native language and actively learning mandarin and Korean, this video is 10/10 and I cannot thank you enough. Mandarin was kicking my butt. Subscribed!
Thank you for explaining the topic and subject markers, i kept seeing things like (+topic) and (+subject) in learning recourses with 0 explanation as to what it meant, glad to find its not that complicated
Thank you very much for this video. As a person whose second language is English, and I'm learning Chinese and have started learning Korean at university, it was very useful. The explanations are very clear and it's a great summary. 感谢您。감사합니다.
This is terrific! It's GREAT ADVICE to avoid using English romanizations of Korean (한굴) when you're learning the language, not just to avoid developing a bad accent (which is inevitable if you rely on them), but also to avoid messing up your Korean spelling. Learning Korean words using a romanization creates a kind of linguistic "noise" in your brain: remembering the romanization, you then have to try to transliterate it back into 한굴 to write the word. But because the romanizations are never really accurate, your attempts to turn them back into correctly spelled Korean are extremely unlikely to work. And being unable to spell a Korean word correctly makes you far less likely to pronounce it correctly. This effectively negates one of the Korean language's greatest advantages for learners, which is its phonetic accuracy. Even transliterating Korean into the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), while much better than the common romanization systems out there, turns out to be problematic because the IPA can't always account for subtle but important differences between some letter combinations, syllables, and words. It's crucial to take the time at the beginning to master the Korean alphabet and learn how to pronounce syllables and words accurately. Minimal pair training is amazingly helpful for this, and there are UA-cam videos and Anki decks you can use for it. Also, if you're using flashcards to learn vocabulary, add native audio (from forvo or Papago) to the Korean side of the card, so you're sure to get the correct pronunciation, too.
this is my first video from you and i'm hooked! im also interested in learning both korean and chinese and i think, when you have a basic understanding of linguistics, language learning can become much easier, for all the reasons you mentioned. i'd also add in the phonetics section that the IPA is a great way of learning pronunciation without learning it through your native language! the physical descriptions and diagrams helped me tremendously when i was first learning chinese, and it's basically a new alphabet to learn either way i tool several linguistics courses as part of my english degree, and gaining that knowledge was so helpful not only to understand english as a foreign speaker, but also to compare it with my other languages, and then be able to verbalise the differences and finally understand why theyre so different as an example, my L1 doesnt have grammatical gender while my L2 and (my area's) native language does. for the longesttt time i thought i just couldnt speak my L2, that i would never be able to, and i couldnt understand why something so intrinsic to everyone around me made no sense to me (similar to english's adjective order lol). when i finally learned the concept of grammatical gender and connected it to my other languages, it made so much sense. now im able to exactly communicate why i struggle with this aspect of my L2 to other people who may or may not have linguistic knowledge, and help them understand it even when it comes naturally to them as their L1 p.s. urdu actually also has the SOV syntax structure!
Thank you very much for your comment! I actually wrote and filmed a Section 4 about pronunciation, where I'd talk about comparing phonetic charts of your native language and that of the target language, but the video was already 22 minutes in the edit before I got to Section 4, so I decided to cut it out due to length, and also since I felt like many people already know about IPA and mouth position diagrams. I hope you'll continue to watch my videos! I'll try to keep making them interesting :)
Thank you so much for this video! I’ve been studying italian, korean and japanese, and for a long time I’ve had this notion about getting to the “bare bones” of how the languages work, and thought it would be so helpful to incorporate that into my studying. However, I lacked the linguistic knowledge to actually do it myself, so I’m thrilled to have found you… you explained it perfectly, not making it so hard as to get confused with all the concepts, but also not so basic as to miss where it all comes from. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us 🥰
I understood you live in Korea from that little thing at the bottom of the door that keeps it open. Saw it in korea, friends noticed that i liked it and gave me one from home!
Japanese has a ton of conjugations that change the ending of verbs depending on situation, too! Furthermore, there are like three ways to change the ending for just one situation depending on the last syllable of the verb 😅
i learnt so much from this video, especially when you broke down chinese morphology. Also since I’m dabbling in Korean too, your grammar breakdowns were perfect!! thank you :))
Literary classical Latin also preferred the verb at the end and syntax specialists believe from that and from ancient Greek and Sanskrit evidence that Proto-Indo-European was also verb final. What do you think of that? This can also explain some weirdness and inconsistencies in the modern dialects between how they implement SVO. (And romance languages often still use SOV with pronouns, eg: Je t'aime.)
@@francisnopantses1108 Very interesting! I’ve never studied Latin, Greek or Sanskrit, but I’m a bit surprised at that, for basically one reason: when two nouns (both the subject and the object) are side-by-side, there usually needs to be something additional to explain which one is which (like in Korean there are both subject and object marking particles), which enhances the complexity of the languages. I would expect “original” languages to be as least syntactically and morphologically complicated as possible. I think in French, the SOV for pronouns makes sense because the amount of words (pronouns) that can be used are very limited, so there’s less room for confusion. I did study French for 6 years in secondary school, but never mastered the language, sadly!
@@julesytooshoes In Latin, indeed, words have a different suffix when used as different syntactical units, so you can easily tell which noun is the subject and which one is the object
@@julesytooshoes SOV is actually more common than SVO), including for example, most of the modern Indic languages (both Indo-European and Dravidian) and the Turkic languages, but lots of others as well. See, for ex., the Wiki article 'Subject-object-verb word order'. German has a very weird V2 (verb 2nd) order, as do all the Germanic languages except English. Verb is at the end in German only in certain circumstances such as subordinate clauses. I really enjoyed this and all your other videos (I think I've seen them all), was surprised at this goof.
Right now I'm participating in a Korean language zoom which is mostly beginners &class leaders who were learners, and it's really helping me see how hard it is for people who've never learned another language. I took Spanish from 8th grade (1977) to junior year in college (1984) and i never learned how to dialogue because of my shyness and stage fright, but i learned a lot about reading it. I love Hangul because it makes sense to me, and i agree with you about focusing on it for a long time. It takes time for it to "click" unless one is some sort of talent or genius. But that moment makes everything else easier! The biggest block for me in any language is knowing the terminology for verb tenses and conjugations before learning how to apply them. They never clicked for me in English as a tool/method, I simply absorbed their uses from my environment. I wonder how often it's a stumbling block for other learners (if you'd commenjt on this I'm interested in your insight.) In this age of internet, it's easier to learn that aspect of korean by absorption of others speaking it. p.s. I love linguists, and some of my favorite reads growing up were alternative societies (SF & fantasy) with either linguist heroes (Lewis) or non-natives having to learn a language (Tepper) or even the invention of secret language (Haden Elgin.) Also probably a good influence on my being able to grasp the basics pf Korean.
This video was awesome! I am not a linguist or anything, but I've always thought that if I wasn't in my current career I would likely have gone to school for linguistics with a specialty in Asian languages. I know Japanese and I am learning Mandarin and Korean, and Japanese is very similar to Korean in how they also modify their verbs to express all of the different situations like you mentioned. Korean and Japanese are quite interesting as languages since they do not share a common ancestral language, yet they share a lot in common grammatically (likely due to how close they are and how much natural back and forth they've had throughout history). They also have a lot of vocabulary that is close due to the influence that Chinese had on both languages. A useful example to see one word that went from Chinese -> Korean and Japanese that are very similar: 运动 - yun4dong4 - exercise 운동 - un dong - exercise 運動 - un dou - exercise Pretty cool stuff! Also, the traditional form of 运动 is written with the exact same characters as the Japanese word: 運動. Can talk for a long time about the differences and similarities between simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese kanji though so won't digress about it here :D
@@PeebeesPet when did I make a claim about the ancestral family of them? I said they are not related but due to the proximity of the two they share some grammatical concepts.
the longer the verb endings are, the more regular they are as well. the Korean verb endings are crazy when you call them "endings" but in fact they're so regular that you can just call them independent words. same thing with Latin or ancient Greek, each verb has almost 100 forms but they're highly regular. I guess the human brain is just efficient, it'd be inefficient if you had to store a lot of rules, but if a language has already had too many irregular forms, then we would rather have one more rule instead.
But then for the topic comment it's seems we would say: There are a lot of books at the library, so the adverbial phrase modifier part of it shows that we put the quantifier (a lot of) before the swapped object noun (books).... because we'd do a simple 'Subject Verb quantifier Object' sentence 'there - are - a lot of - books' then add this prepositional phrases that acts as an adverbial phrases thus a modifier: 'at the library'
Interesting comparations, Korean🇰🇷 is very similar to Japanese 🇯🇵, both languages has the same structure SOV .ピッザはおいしいです。🙏🤓 Thanks for this video. このヴィデオは素晴らしいです有難うございます.👏👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏🙏🤓🤓🤓
Great video! Could you maybe do a video in the future about the r sound in Mandarin? I'm really confused, because sometimes I hear it closer to an [ɹ] and other times closer to a [ʐ]. Is it an allophone?
Cantonese also show different expression through the verb ending, for example: 好食呀！(Oh, it's tasty) /好食喎！(a bit surprise It's tasty) /好食嘅...(the taste is just up to standard) /好食㗎(you're already taste that and express to the others that is tasty) 好食㗎???(ask does it taste good???) /好食咩？(I doubt this food is tasty) etc.
Thanks for the video! Small suggestion: I find pinyin with accents easier to read: fàn vs. fan4. However, I don’t know how many people share my opinion.
That’s very valid! The only thing is that I’m not sure how to add them on Premiere Pro (what I use to edit my videos) - I can look into them. Also, because I make the pinyin smaller, I thought it would be hard to read the tiny accents. But I can try with accents for the next video!
@@julesytooshoes Cool! On macOS, you can add accents by pressing a key for a longer time. Alas, you don’t get all of the pinyin accents. Another option is to paste Hanzi into Google Translate (from Chinese to English) and Google will provide the accented pinyin - which you can then copy & paste. Alas, it occasionally gets the pinyin wrong, so it pays to be watchful.
@@julesytooshoes Do you use a Mac? If so, you can switch to the ABC Extended keyboard. Then you type OPT+A before the vowel you want to put a first tone marker on (ā), OPT+E for second tone (á), OPT+V for third tone (ǎ), and OPT+` (under the ESC key) for fourth tone (à). I find these easier to read too, but also agree with you that they can be hard to distinguish in a smaller font. (Sorry, if you use Windows, I'm not sure how to do it, though. haha)
@artugert On android mobile you can hold down a vowel key and after a few seconds it gives your accent options. You can do the same on Mac desktop keyboard. Windows is a pita.
@@julesytooshoes [UA-cam seems to have deleted the first version of this comment] I often use Google Translate to get pinyin with accents: I enter hanzi and Google Translate tells me the pinyin. The only caveat is that it occasionally makes mistakes.
What helped me tremendously with pronouncing Mandarin were videos that had diagrams of the mouth with tongue positions: Once you know that for some consonants, the tongue goes up (sh, ch, zh, etc.) and for some consonants, the tongue goes down (x, q, j, etc.), the pronunciation is relatively easy (vs., say, the Spanish R which took me ages to get - somewhat - right). But I would not have figured it out by only listening to native speakers.
Yeah, I think those can be really helpful. I was going to include a 4th aspect (about pronunciation), that would've talked about the mouth position diagrams, but those can be quite difficult to understand. There are very fine movements the tongue and teeth do for certain consonants in certain languages, that are quite difficult to show in a diagram or video. But I'm glad that it worked for you!
Actually English is as expressive as Korean, but where Korean uses verb final bound morphemes, English avails itself of simply more words in the verb phrase, e.g. can, may, wish, want, fear, hesitate, seem… placed before the main verb, often with the particle "to" in between.
The point is that Korean, like Japanese (and Latin, too) does this all through verb morphology, while English uses modal verbs and adverbs to achieve the same thing. It's true that grammar does not consist of inflectional endings alone, a bias of certain 19th century continental linguists (who, to the extent they knew about Chinese, thought it was bizarre). Thankfully almost everyone has moved on.
Well Chinese languages like Cantonese or Taiwanese indeed are SVO, but Mandarin which only retains 20% of Chinese vocabulary and is actually a mix of Manchu-Mongolian prefers to use SOV structure of the sentence. eg. Chinese Cantonese: 你攞嗰部手機俾我。 Manchu-Mongolian Mandarin: 你把那支手機拿給我。
@julesytooshoes It's my first time watching your content and I am amazed of the deep knowledge of languages you display. You are a great communicator. I'm subscribed now.
It's funny how many non German speakers or even German learners classify German as a SOV language, while for us natives it doesn't appear that way at all. Because main clauses in present tense, so the most basic sentences are always SVO. Only when you start adding different tenses (future and past tense) or sentence structures ("if" clauses, "when" clauses, "that, who, which" clauses etc) the verb starts moving to last place or is in most cases actually divided, with one part stuck at second place and one at last place 😂 When a German learner first brought up the fact that in German, the verb comes at the end, I was like... wait a minute, why have I never noticed? That's why, when I wanted to learn Korean, I couldn't deal with the SOV sentence structure at all, so now I moved to Chinese and have a way easier time 😅 SOV sentence structure reminds me of Latin a lot, and I had a very hard time with that in school. Usually, alll the information is just put into the verb. Very similar to Korean and Japanese imo.
German in many cases is more like SVOV. There are two standard places where the verb goes. Usually when there is a model verb, the main verb goes at the end. Ich möchte einen Kaffee trinken Trinken is the main verb and möchte is the modal verb. Without the model verb, trinken would go after Ich. Ich trinke Kaffee. (not Ich Kaffee trinke)
From my perspective, someone who has learned English is a second language, English has a ton of words can your be used a noun, a verb, and sometimes as an adjective too in rare cases.
Very true! What I’m talking about in the Chinese case is that the word doesn’t change at all when changing POS, whereas in English and Korean (just two examples), it does. English “help” Noun: help Verb: I help, he helps, etc Adjective: helpful
I'm glad to learn that the last Chinese character is an important one, especially after studying the language for 4 months. Somehow, nobody mentioned that to me until now :) (though I did suspect it).
5:02 "[SOV] makes it very unique": SOV the most common word order cross-linguistically 5:07 "German": German is fundamentally V2; some clauses appear as SOV but I think it's not right to say German is SOV.
You raise some good points. I come from a background of Chinese and English linguistics, so I’ve always mainly encountered SVO languages. I’ve never studied an SOV language other than Korean, so from my perspective, it’s unique. That’s also why I said German is SOV, because a viewer once said it was easy for her to learn Korean sentence structure since she speaks German. (I’ve never looked deeply into German). After this video, however, (others have also pointed out that SOV is the most common syntax order across languages), I realize that that’s something I was not aware of. None of my professors ever pointed out to me that SOV was the most common syntax structure, and I’ve never read about it (as syntax was not my focus of research). Thanks for your comment.
I wouldn't call German V2 on a fundamental level. V2 is only present in main clauses and even there only one verb is moved to the second position, while the rest stays at the end. It beeing classified under SOV rather SVO isn't that uncommon actually. Mostly though it's called V2 with underlying SOV or something like that. I think German isn't also not a bad example for verb final syntax in general, I think. It's quite common for native English speakers, who learn German to complain, that they have to wait for the verb at the end of sentences. Even Mark Twain complained about: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
I'd say, German just doesn't match neither SOV nor SVO. The verb is not only at the end "in some clauses" but in many. In most cases however, it's situated both at the second and the last Position. So German is SVO, SOV and SVOV , all at once. It definitely is not like Korean or Japanese, or even Latin, but it's also not like English or Chinese.
Also, Chinese morphology in which there is no subject-verb agreement, no verb inflection, and no tense is actually very simple and easy to understan. Julesy, why do you find that aspect of Chinese difficult to understand?
Thank you for the video, very educational. I was just wondering the difference between ~은/는 and ~이/가. I thought it was the other way around. That you can make general statements with the ~이/가 marker and a more specific statement (for speaker and listener) with the ~은/는 marker. In my mind I always use the 'as for this ...' while translating to Korean to apply the ~은/는 marker. e.g. 사자가 육식 동물이지만, 이 사자는 초식 동물입니다.
There are many ways that 은/는 and 이/가 can be used, but the first clause of your example sentence is not very natural. When you use 이/가, it can’t refer to the general category of that thing. It’s referring to an individual instance of the thing. You’re right in that 은/는 is used to contrast something with something else, so your last clause “이 사자는 초식 동물입니다” is perfect. I would change the sentence to be like this: “대부분 사자들은 육식 동물이지만 이 사자는 초식 동물입니다.” It’s perfectly fine to use the same markers more than once in the same sentence.
I think you did an excellent overview. I am learning Korean ( and Spanish , I’m a native English speaker ) and I get overwhelmed by the amount of verb endings and how specific they can be and often confuse them. If you have time can you do a video on comprehensible input recommendations ? Particularly for Korean ?
Hello! Thanks for watching :) When you say a video on comprehensible input recommendations, do you mean general things like "watch cartoons" or do you want specific cartoon recommendations? I think it'll be good to do one for different levels, like beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yes the second one. Recommendations for shows or cartoons etc per level. I watch a lot of kdrama but with English subtitle. It’s too advanced for me at times to watch with just Korean subtitle and I struggle to find what’s not boring but also appropriate. Thank you!!
Hi Julesy, Can you explain what a "predicate" is? Many Chinese learning materials refer it them within the context of verbs. Your videos are always academic in approach but very accessible for the common language learners. Thank you.
It’s the part of the sentence that states information *about the subject* which makes the sentence complete, closes it. It’s what creates the whole point of saying a sentence, the idea you’re trying to share. And it isn’t always a verb or a verb phrase, in Ukrainian, for example, it can be any part of speech without any inflections or auxiliary verbs whatsoever. For example. 1) I speak English. “I” is the subject, and the predicate is “speak English,” which “closes” the sentence. 2) He is beautiful. “He” is the subject, and the predicate is “is beautiful.” 3) She walks slowly. “She” is the subject, and the predicate is “walks slowly.” Sometimes, the term “predicate” is also used for exactly the part that closes the sentence, not ALL the information. For example, the sentence “She walks slowly” is still complete without “slowly” but isn’t without “walks” therefore the predicate is “walks.” It’s important to note that it is still context dependent. In this same sentence “slowly” can very much be this other predicate if it’s a response to a question, “How fast does she walk?,” where it becomes THE part that closes the sentence and makes it complete. Imagine answering the question with, “She walks,” doesn’t it feel weird and incomplete? That’s because the predicate is absent.
It's kind of hilarious that you used "help" to translate bang1 zhu4. Because in each case help was used as a noun and verb but also didn't change form. "your help" and "help me".
“In the library, there are many books” is more of a sentence with a prepositional phrase at the beginning. But it can help when thinking about Chinese topic-comment structure!
@@julesytooshoes I don't think it being a prepositional phrase is relevant. You have to ask what is the function of "there are many books". The function is to comment on the newly introduced topic of the library. One can also say "In regards to libraries, there are many books there."
I concede to that point - I think the topic-comment structure can be found in most languages. However, the reason I brought it up in the Chinese syntax example is because Chinese doesn't need helping words to make it clear something is a topic, thus sometimes you get two subjects next to each other, which can be confusing for learners.
@@julesytooshoes Yes, I would agree. Hence why Chinese is referred to as a topic-prominent language whereas English is subject-prominent. A feature it shares with Japanese. In fact, I've long believed that Chinese and Japanese, despite being SVO vs SOV languages, share many common features. People often think that Chinese is more similar to English solely because of SVO (which is actually more like VO in Chinese). But that model of linguistic typology is sorely outdated.
的 is placed in between a modifier and a modified noun, e.g. 苗条的女孩 得 is placed in between a verb and the adverb modifying it, e.g. 活得痛快 地 is placed in between an adverb and the verb it’s modifying, e.g. 迅速地到达了目的地
Very helpful! I heard that in English the adverbs of manner can get placed after the verb e.g. 'sales have been dramatically' or you can place them before the verb for strong emphasis, but that present progressive can allow any type of adverb before the verb?
I’m a bit confused by your question, but it’s true that adverbs can go before or after the verb in English. “I slowly walked to the park.” (Slightly better) “I walked slowly to the park.” (Also okay)
@julesytooshoes wow! Thanks so much for getting back to me so quick, I'll definitely recommend you as I'm teaching English to my dear Chinese students! But I'm just starting to learn Chinese for me and them (but I also enjoy learning Korean and Japanese!)
Everyone: hangul is very consistent! Me, trying to understand some part in a phrase for 10 minutes, giving up, letting google translate to listen to it, only to discover that I actually know those words, but they were affected by EACH OTHER to the point of being utterly unrecognizable: 🤯
There are some pronunciation changes to the consonants when it’s the ending consonant or starting consonant of the next syllable. But they are 95% or so standardized, meaning if you give a newly made-up word to a Korean, they’ll most likely all say it’s pronounced the same way. I was thinking about making a video on this, but I’m not sure how high the demand is 😅
But I don't see how the Topic Comment structure is still Subject Verb Object. So when you use this transliteration, and it becomes 'library books a lot of' , is it that you take 'library' as the new subject then infer the the being verb 'are' (which then infers that it started with a prepositional phrase e.g. 'at the library') and so then the word 'books' becomes the object? If so, I like it more because the 'there' part of 'there are many books at the library' acts as a subject pronoun for the subject noun library doesn't it? If so, then it's really repetitive to then have to repeat the subject noun again with 'at the library'
I’m not an expert on syntax, so take this with a grain of salt. In the topic comment structure, “books” isn’t an object; it’s a subject. As far as I know, library is a topic (not subject or object). But I don’t think it’s necessary to analyze what word is what POS, because the nature of the POS’s changes depending on the structure of the specific sentence and doesn’t necessarily help us analyze it. But you’re correct in that the SVO structure isn’t maintained in all sentence structure in Chinese: it turns into SOV with 把 or 将, etc.
Hello! Platforms always take a large cut, so I don’t use them for language teaching. You can email me if you’re interested in lessons at my email in my bio.
So this year I have decided I want to learn basics of Chinese , Boy is it going to be a battle for me ; I have English , Spanish < Portuguese, Italian, French and Basic Turkish under my belt . I can read some basic words with Cyrillic Alphabet . I have never looked into Learning Korean Chinese or Japanese . Any advice you can give me about character, pinyin or grammar in Chinese ? I have been watching Chinese movies and I may hear one of 2 words I may recognize , Someone suggested I should learn pinyin first and then try memorizing the first 140 radicals ? which comprise about 50 percent of words formation ? thank you XIE XIE
@@ScarilyFunny the verb is “이다“ and changes depending on the context. It turns into “입니다” for formal sentences, “이에요/예요” for less formal but still polite sentence, “야/이야” for very casual sentences, and “다/이다” for written sentences (you’ll see this in books, etc). Example: 저는 선생님입니다. 저는 선생님이에요. 나는 선생님이야. 나는 선생님이다.
That was a blunder 🥹 I come from a Chinese and English linguistics background, and I hardly encountered SOV structure in my studies, so in my mind there were fewer SOV languages, but turns out that’s not true 😅
I enjoyed watching this video, but it has nearly nothing to do with the title of the video!!! Change the title of this video to reflect the contents. What I got from this video is be aware that different languages have different sentence structures and to avoid using your native language when interpreting the sounds of a new language. That is literally all I got from this video. Change the title of this video!
@@julesytooshoes Thank you, Jules(for: correction)! I don't know more about: Chinese greetings(just)! In textbooks: Ni Hao, in real life: Ha Lou(one video comparison)!
@@julesytooshoes For example: In Russia- three popular greetings, Jules! Exactly: Privet, Zdravstvuite, and: Zdraviya Zhelayu(only- in: Russian army)!
I laughed when you used the expression "really blew my mind" about Korean morphology and verb endings... To "blow a person's mind" comes from getting high on marijuana so I wondered if you have ever experienced a marijuana high?
Jules, Here's the funny story of how the Japanese writing system helped teach me some Czech. I was in Prague with some Czech friends. They tried to teach me to say the Czech name of the town "Praha", but it was not going well. I am L1 American English with that weird back of throat r. I had studied German and French and Japanese but no Slavic languages. Ger and Fr have a back of throat r too (both different from English though). We were walking by a tourist shop selling guides in various languages and there was one in Japanese. For fun I sounded out the katakana: PORAHA. "That's it, that's it!" they yelled. I was confused, I had been amusing myself. "Say what you just said again!" "Poraha?" I asked. See, it turns out the r in Praha is a flap or tap very similar to the Japanese r (which I would liken to English d), but I had all along been trying to use an English r to sound it out and it had been coming off all wrong to them. So yeah, Roman letters got in my way, Japanese kana did the trick!
@@francisnopantses1108 very cool story! It’s amazing when it just clicks!
Hi. I recently started learning Mandarin.
Do you have any ?
I already speak five but am finding Mandarin really tough.
As someone studying linguistics with English as my native language and actively learning mandarin and Korean, this video is 10/10 and I cannot thank you enough. Mandarin was kicking my butt. Subscribed!
Thank you and I’m glad it was helpful :)
As a language dilettante/nerd who's currently trying to teach herself Mandarin, I love this. Your videos are so useful!
Thank you for explaining the topic and subject markers, i kept seeing things like (+topic) and (+subject) in learning recourses with 0 explanation as to what it meant, glad to find its not that complicated
Thank you very much for this video. As a person whose second language is English, and I'm learning Chinese and have started learning Korean at university, it was very useful. The explanations are very clear and it's a great summary. 感谢您。감사합니다.
This is terrific! It's GREAT ADVICE to avoid using English romanizations of Korean (한굴) when you're learning the language, not just to avoid developing a bad accent (which is inevitable if you rely on them), but also to avoid messing up your Korean spelling. Learning Korean words using a romanization creates a kind of linguistic "noise" in your brain: remembering the romanization, you then have to try to transliterate it back into 한굴 to write the word. But because the romanizations are never really accurate, your attempts to turn them back into correctly spelled Korean are extremely unlikely to work. And being unable to spell a Korean word correctly makes you far less likely to pronounce it correctly. This effectively negates one of the Korean language's greatest advantages for learners, which is its phonetic accuracy. Even transliterating Korean into the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), while much better than the common romanization systems out there, turns out to be problematic because the IPA can't always account for subtle but important differences between some letter combinations, syllables, and words. It's crucial to take the time at the beginning to master the Korean alphabet and learn how to pronounce syllables and words accurately. Minimal pair training is amazingly helpful for this, and there are UA-cam videos and Anki decks you can use for it. Also, if you're using flashcards to learn vocabulary, add native audio (from forvo or Papago) to the Korean side of the card, so you're sure to get the correct pronunciation, too.
한국어는 과학적인 언어라고 생각해요. 다른 어떤 언어에 비해 매우 구체적이고 세부적인 규칙과 사용법을 가지고 있어요. 다른 인도유럽어보다 훨씬 늦게 개발되었기 때문에 완전한 패키지를 만들기 위해 그 이점을 충분히 활용한 것 같아요. 한국말이 진짜 멋있네요 !!
this is my first video from you and i'm hooked!
im also interested in learning both korean and chinese and i think, when you have a basic understanding of linguistics, language learning can become much easier, for all the reasons you mentioned. i'd also add in the phonetics section that the IPA is a great way of learning pronunciation without learning it through your native language! the physical descriptions and diagrams helped me tremendously when i was first learning chinese, and it's basically a new alphabet to learn either way
i tool several linguistics courses as part of my english degree, and gaining that knowledge was so helpful not only to understand english as a foreign speaker, but also to compare it with my other languages, and then be able to verbalise the differences and finally understand why theyre so different
as an example, my L1 doesnt have grammatical gender while my L2 and (my area's) native language does. for the longesttt time i thought i just couldnt speak my L2, that i would never be able to, and i couldnt understand why something so intrinsic to everyone around me made no sense to me (similar to english's adjective order lol). when i finally learned the concept of grammatical gender and connected it to my other languages, it made so much sense. now im able to exactly communicate why i struggle with this aspect of my L2 to other people who may or may not have linguistic knowledge, and help them understand it even when it comes naturally to them as their L1
p.s. urdu actually also has the SOV syntax structure!
Thank you very much for your comment! I actually wrote and filmed a Section 4 about pronunciation, where I'd talk about comparing phonetic charts of your native language and that of the target language, but the video was already 22 minutes in the edit before I got to Section 4, so I decided to cut it out due to length, and also since I felt like many people already know about IPA and mouth position diagrams. I hope you'll continue to watch my videos! I'll try to keep making them interesting :)
Thank you so much for this video! I’ve been studying italian, korean and japanese, and for a long time I’ve had this notion about getting to the “bare bones” of how the languages work, and thought it would be so helpful to incorporate that into my studying. However, I lacked the linguistic knowledge to actually do it myself, so I’m thrilled to have found you… you explained it perfectly, not making it so hard as to get confused with all the concepts, but also not so basic as to miss where it all comes from. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us 🥰
I understood you live in Korea from that little thing at the bottom of the door that keeps it open. Saw it in korea, friends noticed that i liked it and gave me one from home!
your channels going to blow up soon
I thought this when I found the channel a couple months ago , subs have multiplied times ten!
我学中文已经四个月了。这个视频很帮助。谢谢你！
Japanese has a ton of conjugations that change the ending of verbs depending on situation, too! Furthermore, there are like three ways to change the ending for just one situation depending on the last syllable of the verb 😅
i learnt so much from this video, especially when you broke down chinese morphology. Also since I’m dabbling in Korean too, your grammar breakdowns were perfect!! thank you :))
Literary classical Latin also preferred the verb at the end and syntax specialists believe from that and from ancient Greek and Sanskrit evidence that Proto-Indo-European was also verb final. What do you think of that? This can also explain some weirdness and inconsistencies in the modern dialects between how they implement SVO. (And romance languages often still use SOV with pronouns, eg: Je t'aime.)
@@francisnopantses1108 Very interesting! I’ve never studied Latin, Greek or Sanskrit, but I’m a bit surprised at that, for basically one reason: when two nouns (both the subject and the object) are side-by-side, there usually needs to be something additional to explain which one is which (like in Korean there are both subject and object marking particles), which enhances the complexity of the languages. I would expect “original” languages to be as least syntactically and morphologically complicated as possible.
I think in French, the SOV for pronouns makes sense because the amount of words (pronouns) that can be used are very limited, so there’s less room for confusion. I did study French for 6 years in secondary school, but never mastered the language, sadly!
@@julesytooshoes In Latin, indeed, words have a different suffix when used as different syntactical units, so you can easily tell which noun is the subject and which one is the object
@@julesytooshoes Yes, the case declension system solve this who-is-who issue in many languages.
@@julesytooshoes SOV is actually more common than SVO), including for example, most of the modern Indic languages (both Indo-European and Dravidian) and the Turkic languages, but lots of others as well. See, for ex., the Wiki article 'Subject-object-verb word order'. German has a very weird V2 (verb 2nd) order, as do all the Germanic languages except English. Verb is at the end in German only in certain circumstances such as subordinate clauses.
I really enjoyed this and all your other videos (I think I've seen them all), was surprised at this goof.
Right now I'm participating in a Korean language zoom which is mostly beginners &class leaders who were learners, and it's really helping me see how hard it is for people who've never learned another language. I took Spanish from 8th grade (1977) to junior year in college (1984) and i never learned how to dialogue because of my shyness and stage fright, but i learned a lot about reading it. I love Hangul because it makes sense to me, and i agree with you about focusing on it for a long time. It takes time for it to "click" unless one is some sort of talent or genius. But that moment makes everything else easier! The biggest block for me in any language is knowing the terminology for verb tenses and conjugations before learning how to apply them. They never clicked for me in English as a tool/method, I simply absorbed their uses from my environment. I wonder how often it's a stumbling block for other learners (if you'd commenjt on this I'm interested in your insight.) In this age of internet, it's easier to learn that aspect of korean by absorption of others speaking it. p.s. I love linguists, and some of my favorite reads growing up were alternative societies (SF & fantasy) with either linguist heroes (Lewis) or non-natives having to learn a language (Tepper) or even the invention of secret language (Haden Elgin.) Also probably a good influence on my being able to grasp the basics pf Korean.
Love your videos, you're sharing so many helpful things. thank you!
This was super helpful, amazing teaching, i will highly recommend!
Glad it was helpful! :)
Please make more Korean content i think it’s really helpful and I genuinely enjoy your Korean videos cause I’m trying to learn it!!🫶🏻
This video was awesome! I am not a linguist or anything, but I've always thought that if I wasn't in my current career I would likely have gone to school for linguistics with a specialty in Asian languages. I know Japanese and I am learning Mandarin and Korean, and Japanese is very similar to Korean in how they also modify their verbs to express all of the different situations like you mentioned.
Korean and Japanese are quite interesting as languages since they do not share a common ancestral language, yet they share a lot in common grammatically (likely due to how close they are and how much natural back and forth they've had throughout history). They also have a lot of vocabulary that is close due to the influence that Chinese had on both languages.
A useful example to see one word that went from Chinese -> Korean and Japanese that are very similar:
运动 - yun4dong4 - exercise
운동 - un dong - exercise
運動 - un dou - exercise
Pretty cool stuff! Also, the traditional form of 运动 is written with the exact same characters as the Japanese word: 運動. Can talk for a long time about the differences and similarities between simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese kanji though so won't digress about it here :D
interesting study, Where do you live to study Mandarin and Korean... in their respective countries?
@@joehelmick1057 I live in America and study the languages from here. I did live in Japan for 1.5 years while I was studying Japanese though.
I wouldn't be willing to make any claim about the ancestral language families of Japanese and Korean. It is a highly contested subject among experts.
@@PeebeesPet when did I make a claim about the ancestral family of them? I said they are not related but due to the proximity of the two they share some grammatical concepts.
@@im_jacobf Saying that they’re not related is also making a claim about their ancestry, is it not? 🙄
the longer the verb endings are, the more regular they are as well. the Korean verb endings are crazy when you call them "endings" but in fact they're so regular that you can just call them independent words. same thing with Latin or ancient Greek, each verb has almost 100 forms but they're highly regular. I guess the human brain is just efficient, it'd be inefficient if you had to store a lot of rules, but if a language has already had too many irregular forms, then we would rather have one more rule instead.
But then for the topic comment it's seems we would say: There are a lot of books at the library, so the adverbial phrase modifier part of it shows that we put the quantifier (a lot of) before the swapped object noun (books).... because we'd do a simple 'Subject Verb quantifier Object' sentence 'there - are - a lot of - books' then add this prepositional phrases that acts as an adverbial phrases thus a modifier: 'at the library'
Interesting comparations, Korean🇰🇷 is very similar to Japanese 🇯🇵, both languages has the same structure SOV .ピッザはおいしいです。🙏🤓
Thanks for this video. このヴィデオは素晴らしいです有難うございます.👏👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏🙏🤓🤓🤓
Cool new video, Jules! Well done!
GREAT video!!! 👏👏👏
amazing video!! thank you so much :)
Great video! Could you maybe do a video in the future about the r sound in Mandarin? I'm really confused, because sometimes I hear it closer to an [ɹ] and other times closer to a [ʐ]. Is it an allophone?
Cantonese also show different expression through the verb ending, for example:
好食呀！(Oh, it's tasty) /好食喎！(a bit surprise It's tasty) /好食嘅...(the taste is just up to standard) /好食㗎(you're already taste that and express to the others that is tasty) 好食㗎???(ask does it taste good???) /好食咩？(I doubt this food is tasty) etc.
I'm always inspired to learn a new language ik 4 languages fluently TYSM for sharing
Thanks for the video! Small suggestion: I find pinyin with accents easier to read: fàn vs. fan4. However, I don’t know how many people share my opinion.
That’s very valid! The only thing is that I’m not sure how to add them on Premiere Pro (what I use to edit my videos) - I can look into them. Also, because I make the pinyin smaller, I thought it would be hard to read the tiny accents. But I can try with accents for the next video!
@@julesytooshoes Cool! On macOS, you can add accents by pressing a key for a longer time. Alas, you don’t get all of the pinyin accents. Another option is to paste Hanzi into Google Translate (from Chinese to English) and Google will provide the accented pinyin - which you can then copy & paste. Alas, it occasionally gets the pinyin wrong, so it pays to be watchful.
@@julesytooshoes Do you use a Mac? If so, you can switch to the ABC Extended keyboard. Then you type OPT+A before the vowel you want to put a first tone marker on (ā), OPT+E for second tone (á), OPT+V for third tone (ǎ), and OPT+` (under the ESC key) for fourth tone (à). I find these easier to read too, but also agree with you that they can be hard to distinguish in a smaller font. (Sorry, if you use Windows, I'm not sure how to do it, though. haha)
@artugert On android mobile you can hold down a vowel key and after a few seconds it gives your accent options. You can do the same on Mac desktop keyboard. Windows is a pita.
@@julesytooshoes [UA-cam seems to have deleted the first version of this comment] I often use Google Translate to get pinyin with accents: I enter hanzi and Google Translate tells me the pinyin. The only caveat is that it occasionally makes mistakes.
What helped me tremendously with pronouncing Mandarin were videos that had diagrams of the mouth with tongue positions: Once you know that for some consonants, the tongue goes up (sh, ch, zh, etc.) and for some consonants, the tongue goes down (x, q, j, etc.), the pronunciation is relatively easy (vs., say, the Spanish R which took me ages to get - somewhat - right). But I would not have figured it out by only listening to native speakers.
Yeah, I think those can be really helpful. I was going to include a 4th aspect (about pronunciation), that would've talked about the mouth position diagrams, but those can be quite difficult to understand. There are very fine movements the tongue and teeth do for certain consonants in certain languages, that are quite difficult to show in a diagram or video. But I'm glad that it worked for you!
@@julesytooshoes Right! You need explanations too.
Actually English is as expressive as Korean, but where Korean uses verb final bound morphemes, English avails itself of simply more words in the verb phrase, e.g. can, may, wish, want, fear, hesitate, seem… placed before the main verb, often with the particle "to" in between.
The point is that Korean, like Japanese (and Latin, too) does this all through verb morphology, while English uses modal verbs and adverbs to achieve the same thing. It's true that grammar does not consist of inflectional endings alone, a bias of certain 19th century continental linguists (who, to the extent they knew about Chinese, thought it was bizarre). Thankfully almost everyone has moved on.
@@francisnopantses1108 That's exactly what I have written.
Well Chinese languages like Cantonese or Taiwanese indeed are SVO, but Mandarin which only retains 20% of Chinese vocabulary and is actually a mix of Manchu-Mongolian prefers to use SOV structure of the sentence.
eg. Chinese Cantonese: 你攞嗰部手機俾我。
Manchu-Mongolian Mandarin: 你把那支手機拿給我。
It's interesting to see how happy and excited you get describing grammar. 😊
My goodness, this video is so great!
Thank you!!
@julesytooshoes It's my first time watching your content and I am amazed of the deep knowledge of languages you display. You are a great communicator. I'm subscribed now.
It's funny how many non German speakers or even German learners classify German as a SOV language, while for us natives it doesn't appear that way at all. Because main clauses in present tense, so the most basic sentences are always SVO. Only when you start adding different tenses (future and past tense) or sentence structures ("if" clauses, "when" clauses, "that, who, which" clauses etc) the verb starts moving to last place or is in most cases actually divided, with one part stuck at second place and one at last place 😂
When a German learner first brought up the fact that in German, the verb comes at the end, I was like... wait a minute, why have I never noticed?
That's why, when I wanted to learn Korean, I couldn't deal with the SOV sentence structure at all, so now I moved to Chinese and have a way easier time 😅
SOV sentence structure reminds me of Latin a lot, and I had a very hard time with that in school. Usually, alll the information is just put into the verb. Very similar to Korean and Japanese imo.
German in many cases is more like SVOV. There are two standard places where the verb goes. Usually when there is a model verb, the main verb goes at the end.
Ich möchte einen Kaffee trinken
Trinken is the main verb and möchte is the modal verb. Without the model verb, trinken would go after Ich.
Ich trinke Kaffee. (not Ich Kaffee trinke)
From my perspective, someone who has learned English is a second language, English has a ton of words can your be used a noun, a verb, and sometimes as an adjective too in rare cases.
Very true! What I’m talking about in the Chinese case is that the word doesn’t change at all when changing POS, whereas in English and Korean (just two examples), it does.
English “help”
Noun: help
Verb: I help, he helps, etc
Adjective: helpful
I'm glad to learn that the last Chinese character is an important one, especially after studying the language for 4 months. Somehow, nobody mentioned that to me until now :) (though I did suspect it).
We can learn grammar easily naturally by listening more
非常好 👍
5:02 "[SOV] makes it very unique": SOV the most common word order cross-linguistically
5:07 "German": German is fundamentally V2; some clauses appear as SOV but I think it's not right to say German is SOV.
You raise some good points. I come from a background of Chinese and English linguistics, so I’ve always mainly encountered SVO languages. I’ve never studied an SOV language other than Korean, so from my perspective, it’s unique. That’s also why I said German is SOV, because a viewer once said it was easy for her to learn Korean sentence structure since she speaks German. (I’ve never looked deeply into German).
After this video, however, (others have also pointed out that SOV is the most common syntax order across languages), I realize that that’s something I was not aware of. None of my professors ever pointed out to me that SOV was the most common syntax structure, and I’ve never read about it (as syntax was not my focus of research).
Thanks for your comment.
I wouldn't call German V2 on a fundamental level. V2 is only present in main clauses and even there only one verb is moved to the second position, while the rest stays at the end.
It beeing classified under SOV rather SVO isn't that uncommon actually. Mostly though it's called V2 with underlying SOV or something like that.
I think German isn't also not a bad example for verb final syntax in general, I think. It's quite common for native English speakers, who learn German to complain, that they have to wait for the verb at the end of sentences.
Even Mark Twain complained about: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
I'd say, German just doesn't match neither SOV nor SVO. The verb is not only at the end "in some clauses" but in many. In most cases however, it's situated both at the second and the last Position. So German is SVO, SOV and SVOV , all at once. It definitely is not like Korean or Japanese, or even Latin, but it's also not like English or Chinese.
Also, Chinese morphology in which there is no subject-verb agreement, no verb inflection, and no tense is actually very simple and easy to understan. Julesy, why do you find that aspect of Chinese difficult to understand?
Thank you for the video, very educational. I was just wondering the difference between ~은/는 and ~이/가. I thought it was the other way around.
That you can make general statements with the ~이/가 marker and a more specific statement (for speaker and listener) with the ~은/는 marker. In my mind I always use the 'as for this ...' while translating to Korean to apply the ~은/는 marker.
e.g. 사자가 육식 동물이지만, 이 사자는 초식 동물입니다.
There are many ways that 은/는 and 이/가 can be used, but the first clause of your example sentence is not very natural. When you use 이/가, it can’t refer to the general category of that thing. It’s referring to an individual instance of the thing.
You’re right in that 은/는 is used to contrast something with something else, so your last clause “이 사자는 초식 동물입니다” is perfect. I would change the sentence to be like this:
“대부분 사자들은 육식 동물이지만 이 사자는 초식 동물입니다.”
It’s perfectly fine to use the same markers more than once in the same sentence.
I think you did an excellent overview. I am learning Korean ( and Spanish , I’m a native English speaker ) and I get overwhelmed by the amount of verb endings and how specific they can be and often confuse them. If you have time can you do a video on comprehensible input recommendations ? Particularly for Korean ?
Hello! Thanks for watching :) When you say a video on comprehensible input recommendations, do you mean general things like "watch cartoons" or do you want specific cartoon recommendations? I think it'll be good to do one for different levels, like beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yes the second one. Recommendations for shows or cartoons etc per level. I watch a lot of kdrama but with English subtitle. It’s too advanced for me at times to watch with just Korean subtitle and I struggle to find what’s not boring but also appropriate. Thank you!!
Hi Julesy, Can you explain what a "predicate" is? Many Chinese learning materials refer it them within the context of verbs. Your videos are always academic in approach but very accessible for the common language learners. Thank you.
It usually means the verb, verb phrase, or something acting as a verb. (I am not a linguist.)
It’s the part of the sentence that states information *about the subject* which makes the sentence complete, closes it. It’s what creates the whole point of saying a sentence, the idea you’re trying to share. And it isn’t always a verb or a verb phrase, in Ukrainian, for example, it can be any part of speech without any inflections or auxiliary verbs whatsoever.
For example.
1) I speak English.
“I” is the subject, and the predicate is “speak English,” which “closes” the sentence.
2) He is beautiful.
“He” is the subject, and the predicate is “is beautiful.”
3) She walks slowly.
“She” is the subject, and the predicate is “walks slowly.”
Sometimes, the term “predicate” is also used for exactly the part that closes the sentence, not ALL the information.
For example, the sentence “She walks slowly” is still complete without “slowly” but isn’t without “walks” therefore the predicate is “walks.”
It’s important to note that it is still context dependent. In this same sentence “slowly” can very much be this other predicate if it’s a response to a question, “How fast does she walk?,” where it becomes THE part that closes the sentence and makes it complete. Imagine answering the question with, “She walks,” doesn’t it feel weird and incomplete? That’s because the predicate is absent.
English does have topic/comment structures. They're just not common.
Eg. In the library there are many books.
It's kind of hilarious that you used "help" to translate bang1 zhu4.
Because in each case help was used as a noun and verb but also didn't change form.
"your help" and "help me".
“In the library, there are many books” is more of a sentence with a prepositional phrase at the beginning. But it can help when thinking about Chinese topic-comment structure!
@@julesytooshoes I don't think it being a prepositional phrase is relevant. You have to ask what is the function of "there are many books". The function is to comment on the newly introduced topic of the library. One can also say "In regards to libraries, there are many books there."
I concede to that point - I think the topic-comment structure can be found in most languages. However, the reason I brought it up in the Chinese syntax example is because Chinese doesn't need helping words to make it clear something is a topic, thus sometimes you get two subjects next to each other, which can be confusing for learners.
@@julesytooshoes Yes, I would agree. Hence why Chinese is referred to as a topic-prominent language whereas English is subject-prominent. A feature it shares with Japanese. In fact, I've long believed that Chinese and Japanese, despite being SVO vs SOV languages, share many common features. People often think that Chinese is more similar to English solely because of SVO (which is actually more like VO in Chinese). But that model of linguistic typology is sorely outdated.
"I like to verb nouns", the apple-eating girl slowly said.
In linguistic terms, ‘measure word’ is also called ‘classifier’ , isn’t it?❤😊👌
Yup, they’re the same thing :)
I frequently confuse 的，得，and 地
的 is placed in between a modifier and a modified noun, e.g. 苗条的女孩
得 is placed in between a verb and the adverb modifying it, e.g. 活得痛快
地 is placed in between an adverb and the verb it’s modifying, e.g. 迅速地到达了目的地
Hy there, thank you for making an interasting and helpful video, but could you please share your PHD thesis?
Very helpful! I heard that in English the adverbs of manner can get placed after the verb e.g. 'sales have been dramatically' or you can place them before the verb for strong emphasis, but that present progressive can allow any type of adverb before the verb?
I’m a bit confused by your question, but it’s true that adverbs can go before or after the verb in English.
“I slowly walked to the park.” (Slightly better)
“I walked slowly to the park.” (Also okay)
@julesytooshoes wow! Thanks so much for getting back to me so quick, I'll definitely recommend you as I'm teaching English to my dear Chinese students! But I'm just starting to learn Chinese for me and them (but I also enjoy learning Korean and Japanese!)
Everyone: hangul is very consistent!
Me, trying to understand some part in a phrase for 10 minutes, giving up, letting google translate to listen to it, only to discover that I actually know those words, but they were affected by EACH OTHER to the point of being utterly unrecognizable: 🤯
There are some pronunciation changes to the consonants when it’s the ending consonant or starting consonant of the next syllable. But they are 95% or so standardized, meaning if you give a newly made-up word to a Korean, they’ll most likely all say it’s pronounced the same way. I was thinking about making a video on this, but I’m not sure how high the demand is 😅
@@julesytooshoes yes, please make the video! That sounds interesting and useful
But I don't see how the Topic Comment structure is still Subject Verb Object. So when you use this transliteration, and it becomes 'library books a lot of' , is it that you take 'library' as the new subject then infer the the being verb 'are' (which then infers that it started with a prepositional phrase e.g. 'at the library') and so then the word 'books' becomes the object? If so, I like it more because the 'there' part of 'there are many books at the library' acts as a subject pronoun for the subject noun library doesn't it? If so, then it's really repetitive to then have to repeat the subject noun again with 'at the library'
I’m not an expert on syntax, so take this with a grain of salt. In the topic comment structure, “books” isn’t an object; it’s a subject. As far as I know, library is a topic (not subject or object). But I don’t think it’s necessary to analyze what word is what POS, because the nature of the POS’s changes depending on the structure of the specific sentence and doesn’t necessarily help us analyze it.
But you’re correct in that the SVO structure isn’t maintained in all sentence structure in Chinese: it turns into SOV with 把 or 将, etc.
Hi, do you give classes on korean? Like on italki or anywhere else?
Hello! Platforms always take a large cut, so I don’t use them for language teaching. You can email me if you’re interested in lessons at my email in my bio.
@@julesytooshoes thanks for replying^^ I can't seem to find the email ID though😅
Can't seem to find the email ID😅
@@Ulynxhi julesytwoshoes@google.com
emailed you^^
So this year I have decided I want to learn basics of Chinese , Boy is it going to be a battle for me ; I have English , Spanish < Portuguese, Italian, French and Basic Turkish under my belt . I can read some basic words with Cyrillic Alphabet . I have never looked into Learning Korean Chinese or Japanese . Any advice you can give me about character, pinyin or grammar in Chinese ? I have been watching Chinese movies and I may hear one of 2 words I may recognize , Someone suggested I should learn pinyin first and then try memorizing the first 140 radicals ? which comprise about 50 percent of words formation ? thank you XIE XIE
so I can learn Korean and only speak to myself?
@@theblueiMe I’m not sure I understand the question 😅
Do being verbs like 'am' have an 'imneeda' ending (sorry, i cant get the Korean keyboard up to type it)
@@ScarilyFunny the verb is “이다“ and changes depending on the context. It turns into “입니다” for formal sentences, “이에요/예요” for less formal but still polite sentence, “야/이야” for very casual sentences, and “다/이다” for written sentences (you’ll see this in books, etc).
Example:
저는 선생님입니다.
저는 선생님이에요.
나는 선생님이야.
나는 선생님이다.
Great video. That's really helpful. Thank you!
5:05 eh? I thought SOV is most common ordering
That was a blunder 🥹 I come from a Chinese and English linguistics background, and I hardly encountered SOV structure in my studies, so in my mind there were fewer SOV languages, but turns out that’s not true 😅
@ I get it 😅 a lot of the most spoken languages are SVO
I enjoyed watching this video, but it has nearly nothing to do with the title of the video!!! Change the title of this video to reflect the contents.
What I got from this video is be aware that different languages have different sentence structures and to avoid using your native language when interpreting the sounds of a new language. That is literally all I got from this video. Change the title of this video!
"The 3 things to mastering any language:
1. Structuring the Syntax
2. Mastering the Morphology
3. Winning the Writing System & Phonetics"
Which greeting- right, Jules(your opinion): Ni Hao, or: Ha Lou?
People nowadays usually say 哈喽 for casual greetings. 你好 is better for formal situations, like at work or at official places.
@@julesytooshoes Thank you, Jules(for: correction)! I don't know more about: Chinese greetings(just)! In textbooks: Ni Hao, in real life: Ha Lou(one video comparison)!
@@julesytooshoes For example: In Russia- three popular greetings, Jules! Exactly: Privet, Zdravstvuite, and: Zdraviya Zhelayu(only- in: Russian army)!
Why do you put numbers next the pínyin?
Because I can’t insert accents on letters in Premiere Pro 😆
PLEASE MORE TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR!
I'm 5 minutes in, and you're still giving Chinese lessons. You haven't said anything about how to learn a language. Byeeee
他走得慢死了，嘻嘻， 在前的就不在前了。
I laughed when you used the expression "really blew my mind" about Korean morphology and verb endings... To "blow a person's mind" comes from getting high on marijuana so I wondered if you have ever experienced a marijuana high?
除了英文之外其他語言沒有用。
你的笨超於凡人，是獨一無二的笨。
So you were brought up in an bilingual environment?