LogFAQs > #923896778

coolcono posted...

Do you know any other languages?
Chinese isn't really that hard. I had a Vietnamese background going into it. Pretty similar.
Vietnamese is the hardest one to speak.

Aside from my native language of English and having studied Korean a long time, I have some formal training in Japanese, but with a high emphasis on reading comprehension for research purposes. My spoken Japanese is extremely limited. I took German in high school but I've barely used it since and so I can't really speak it now and can basically just recognize some words and very short phrases here and there, when I'm lucky.

I want to study literary Chinese (aka classical Chinese) a bit because it's useful for understanding older documents in Korean and Japanese.

Vietnamese is another one of the languages from within what is sometimes called the "Sinosphere," the region around and including China that has historically used Chinese characters for writing at some point and have had their own languages and literature influenced heavily by Chinese, even if not being "genetically" part of the same language family. If you know any one of those languages, you will often notice some similar words (and sometimes even patterns among the similarities), which helps with the learning process.
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"History is the road map and without it there is no way to navigate the future." - George Wunderlich