"The Firebombing of Dresden"
ID: V96-VPH-5YG
February 13th, 1945, 10:00PM Dresden Germany.
Letsa go! Woohoo!
Penelope's forum posts
@Dudacles: I am the person you want to talk to about this.
I've attended high school and college in Japan, had an additional year of college in Taiwan, and am now living in Beijing. I speak Japanese fluently and can boast some moderate skill in Mandarin Chinese although my studies are ever ongoing.
Your post and questions could have been ripped directly out of my head 5 years ago. Let me share some of my experiences.
As far as languages go, Japanese is a MUCH easier language to learn than Chinese. There are several reasons for this.
First Chinese is a tonal language. There are 4 tones in Chinese (excluding the 5th toneless variation) so saying the same thing in a falling tone when you should have used a rising tone can be the difference between wanting to ask a question and accidentally asking for a kiss. This is counter-intuitive for most native English speakers as we use tones to imply emotions and this takes a lot of practice and muscle memorization to overcome.
Cantonese has 9 tones. Fuck learning Cantonese unless you really want to live in Hong Kong.
Japanese on the other hand has incredibly few sounds. It's very easy to pronounce. Outside of the "n" sound they don't even have regular old consonants. You never just see the "k" sound in Japanese. It's either 'ka' 'ki' 'ke' 'ko' or 'ku'. Think of all the Japanese words you know. Sushi, karaoke, and... what other words do non-speakers know?
I forget. Either way, it's easy shit.
The only real difficulty with Japanese is that the grammar differs in one large way. English uses the subject-verb-noun sequence (I eat chicken) while Japanese uses a subject-noun-verb order (I chicken eat). Japanese also has several levels of politeness (keigo, slang, casual) that are used in different circumstances, but that's pretty high level stuff you won't need to be concerned with and don't need to understand to be understood yourself.
Chinese people will tell you Chinese grammar is easy because they have so few rules. They are dirty liars. The lack of organized structure to their grammar and overwhelming abundance of 'special' rules for certain phrases has been a huge hindrance to my studies, not a boon.
Which language is more useful? Well they only speak Japanese in Japan, and China has a population of over 1 billion with other countries speaking formal mandarin as well, so Mandarin would be the way to go right?
Not really. Saying that Mandarin is the spoken language of China is like saying Mexicans only eat Tacos. I started studying Mandarin in Taiwan. At least I thought I had. Turns out Taiwan has a drastically different set of vocabulary, on top of it's own language/dialect (Taiwanese?). This is true for almost every goddamn province in China. Sometimes it's so severe people have no chance of understanding what the other person is saying (I'm looking at you Sichuan and Hunan province!) On top of having its own dialect Taiwan also uses traditional Chinese characters whereas the mainland uses the new simplified ones. That meant that essentially half of the characters I spent a year learning in Taiwan had to be re-learned in simplified with new mainland pronunciations and even tones.
Also, Beijing people laugh at my Taiwanese accent. It's pretty awesome.
Chinese only uses Chinese characters, Japanese has three sets of alphabets: Chinese characters, and two sets of phonetic alphabets (hiragana, katakana). Hiragana is used for native words, and katakana for foreign words. The existing of a phonetic alphabet (often used as furigana to give the correct readings of Chinese characters) also makes it an easier language to read, and fewer Chinese characters will get you a lot further.
As for the gaming culture? Japan embraces it whole heartedly. Game and game culture is everywhere. I loved going to TGS and browsing old game shops and Akihabara for Superfamicom carts and other nerdy paraphernalia. It's not cheap, but game culture is everywhere there. Also, the arcades are awesome.
China does have PS3, XBOX, and Wii. It's all just bootlegged. They sell modded systems here at electronic shops, and games can be bought in boot leg stores or on the street from poor people who make their living copying games onto discs and selling them. Want to buy a DS? They sell you an R4 right along with it.
The good? PS3 games and XBOX games can be gotten for around $1 U.S. This is obviously amazing.
The bad? Forget about using your system to go online. China laughs at the idea. Also, these aren't high quality officially released discs. That means a lot of the time I'd get halfway through a game only to have it lock up in the same place again and again, or never even run in the first place. A lot of times you buy a game, and it won't go past the title or first loading screen. You only lose a dollar though so it's not the end of the world. At least Skyrim worked for me.
As a side note I brought my Wii from the U.S. here and it looks like China has blocked access to the Nintendo network since it can't connect even though it hasn't been hacked.
Access to the rest of the internet can be easily accessed with a VPN. I use freegate (it's free and it works fine except no porn!) so save yourself some trouble and download it before you join us behind the great fire wall of China.
Hope that helped. If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask.
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