Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
Apparently the neutral tone is less common in the Taiwanese dialect of Mandarin (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar...n#Neutral_tone for more info). The mainland speakers I know do, in fact, use it for the question symbol at the end of sentences. Note that many Chinese dictionaries (including the one at http://mandarintools.com/ ) explicitly list the question symbol as neutral tone.
Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, not alphabets, which often take alphabet users some getting used to. But while one could write a message using only the syllabaries, it would be rare (outside of texts for very young children) to read such a message written by a native speaker. One needs reading fluency of about 3000 characters to handle a newspaper.
Different meanings (especially when being defined in another language) are common for words in all languages. Different pronunciations for the same written word are more unusual. Yes, Chinese has some, but Japanese has more-- nearly every character has multiple pronunciations for the same meaning depending on whether the "On" or "Kun" reading is being used.
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Of course Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries, since the smallest building blocks of East Asian languages, including Korean, Japanese, all Chinese dialects, and Vietnamese (though they now use an adapted Latin alphabet) are syllables. There is only a very small number of syllables available and other sounds cannot exist within the language. The two syllabaries are thus like alphabets for Japanese. My point is that they are phonetic and thus easy to learn. Using a syllabary is easier than using an alphabet, since misspellings are impossible.
Because Westerners that have no special interest in linguistics probably have never even heard the term "syllabary" I used the term alphabet. This also answers the question of an other member -- if a sound doesn't naturally occur in a syllabary you can't reproduce it. All foreign words used in Chinese or Japanese can only be approximated with the syllables that already exist in the script. So if a Westerner goes to HK and pays 100 HKD to have your name written in Chinese he/she must be aware that this is no accurate version. Only something that sounds similar. If you go to 10 different people to write your Western name in Chinese characters then you will most likely get 10 different versions.
And my point was: you can write a letter in Japanese using only Hiragana and possible Katakana (if you have any non-native words in it). Every Kanji can be expressed in Hiragana. That gives you a maximum of 100 "signs" with which you can fully communicate with any Japanese. Yes, you need to learn Kanji to read books and newspapers. But a lot less than in Chinese and in Chinese you have no other way to communicate in a written form (PinYing would be hopelessly inadequate for that). 3000 characters in Chinese is only enough for the most basic needs. An educated person knows at least 5-8000 characters, many know 10,000. On a keyboard you can produce more than 13000 characters.
Which brings me to our ma 嗎 argument. Download a Chinese traditional character input method. (Simplified input methods PinYing and WuBi do not let you input tones). I am using the Eten phonetic keyboard. Enter MA 3 -- 3, of course, representing the third tone --- and the word in question will appear as number 6. Yes, it also appears in the list under MA 1 (flat tone), which would indicate that we are both right. But if you approach it from a logical perspective for the spoken language, how could a question end in a flat note? Besides, do not forget that people in China through the ravages of the cultural revolution and the butchering of the beautiful traditional characters in the 50s (which at that time made sense to reduce rampant illiteracy but is outdated now since you are equally fast with both systems on a computer) have not been as closely in touch with classical Chinese as Chinese speakers in Taiwan, for example. And after the communists took over in 1949 there was also a great exodus of scholars to Hong Kong and Taiwan, since intellectuals were not held in very high regard during Mao's times. So mainland Chinese were kind of "rediscovering" their roots only starting in the early 90s and are not necessarily the real authorities on these subjects.
I was not talking about the Taiwanese dialect (called Hoklo), which is very similar to Southern Fujianese. That dialect has 8 tones and is completely unintelligible for Mandarin speakers unless they have studied it. I was talking about standard Mandarin.
And finally, you are missing my main point. Japanese is not difficult if you just want to learn to communicate, it is difficult to achieve perfection. I never said everything about Japanese is easy.