I want to learn either chinese or japanese. Whose literature has more to offer?

Depends on what you're interested in, to learn either you will probably need a lot more motivation than simply wanting to read a few classics. You'll definitely want to actively engage yourself in all types of media and find ways to use the language as much as possible.

your understanding is hobbled

until 17th century london the largest cities had been (hanghou)? china, and kyoto, japan

china had been far more urban throught he entire iron age. this is established

langs that start synthetic become more analytic the heavier urbanisation is present

It doesnt absolutely matter where the largest cities were. Ther percentage of population that lives in cities matters. And china is way behind even today. By your own logic, Japanese would be analytic as well, and it s literally more synthetic than latin. Modern japanese is almost like Skalička's wet dream. It has all his stereotypically agglutinating properties.

Is it true that written chinese is more bland than say english? So there is less room for creative expression, or you have to stick to metaphors?

And, to give an example from the opposite end of the spectrum, the most analytic slavic language is bulgarian, and they are definitely mostly rural to this day. Some of the extinct baltic languages are thought to have been much more analytic than the surviving ones, yet they were all rural. There is just no tangible connection. Maybe a slight trend, but that could disappear depending on how you measure (and setting up objective criteria to measure in this would be hellish, given that, outside of exremes like chinese or japanese, typology is usually murky ah)

Analytic literally just means primitive actually

UGH ME MAN ME LIKE MEAT UGABOOGA

language did not form during hte industrial revolution. are you retarded?

languages today formed during the early iron age and correspond to the length of this period. chinas had been far more urban as a % than britain. in fact, britain being very rural HELPED the industrial revolution due to their ability to establish high traffic nets via pack animals

japan had only been heavily urban starting in the 1200s. they didn't even live in japan until the year 700 or so. they'd literally been hunters before then. hence their language is heavily synthetic

none of the things I'm saying are even remotely controversial.

I'm not sure ho your disbelief enters into this

>none of the things I'm saying are even remotely controversial.

One part does which is what does urbanization have to do with the analytic character of a language

oogabooga is literally synthetic

I am not sure if lit just has very unfunny trolls or if lit is actually disabled

>oogabooga is literally synthetic

The fuck are you talking about, its just an imaginary meme noise

Of course they didnt. English, for example, crossed the analytic line around year 1200. Pretty early compared to your 17th century lodning. The Sapir-whorf shite you are spouting is pretty controvensial with me.

>implying they didn't just take the trash out

Japanese may be simpler to learn from scratch in terms of phonetics, ideograms and maybe grammar. Plus, if after learning japanese you'll want to learn chinese too you'll know already a great deal about ideograms.

> asian languages
> learn them for literature

no point, asians like women are shit writers

changes in analytic syntactical/grammatical shifts cannot spread/be communicated beteen communities at a distance/lacking script

synthetic changes can be very easily interpreted/communicated even in mobile communities. by necessity language is shifted in the direction of synthetic until the end of hunting/gathering

it is related to byantine fault tolerance

I am literally not saying anything controversial. you are not as smart as you think

well spoken my redpilled friend.

I would say learn Japanese because of it being significantly easier to pick up in comparison to Chinese (in terms of reading literature). There is a lot of support available online for reading things in Japanese, such as text-hooking browser plugins for reading webpages which can be used to look up and break down difficult kanji.

are all you people on lit literally retarded? I said nothing about sapir, his theory is about language directing thought

I am talking about information theory in language you fucking retard

What you were talking about was exremely ambiguous untill you posted my spergfriend. Give me approximately two weeks to think about this. It is probably rubbish in the larger context of this thread, but I think there might be some merit.

>you are not as smart as you think

Except the conclusion that is derived you fuckwit is that synthetic languages are actually more sophisticated and urbanization marked a point of decay defeating your whole fucking point
Something tells me this poster is a nasty little dick yellow man

no. I made it pretty clear. even if you didn't understand modern linguistic theory the connection of urban living/analytic language is obviously tied to urbanisation in the period of language formation, NOT MODERN living. I shouldn't have had to specify that at all to anyone remotely educated bout this, even after I DID through several posts about urbanisation during the specified periods it still didn't click for you

the findings on this issue are highly highly parsimonious

>the findings on this issue are highly highly parsimonious

Yeah yeah big talk, how is urbanization even defined here, I highly doubt any society was urban in periods of language formation

are you honestly suggesting that mandarin is not derived from court language used solely in urban environments?

also I already defined the relevant criteria for you: density of information nets providing robustness against information loss

if you aren't dumb you can think of 3 or 4 metrics that could get you a decent enough figure to get published

I'll repeat it again: you aren't as smart as you think

>heh, I bet he cant think of a reasonable variable bound to define information density, heh

Dafug is this "language formation" these two fkwits are talking about. They talk like it was made in a specific moment and stable circurmstances. The period the formation of modern languages is way too long and way too tempestuous for this sort of thinking to make any sense. (and we know much less than we should like about it)

you deny categorical variables and so the planet becomes confusing to you.

I guarantee you, if you stop being retarded you can make sense of a lot of it

>also I already defined the relevant criteria for you: density of information nets providing robustness against information loss

That's not a definition thats just vague incongruent description. How the hell do you measure "information". Linguistics is so full of shit whenever it tries to step outside its autistic grotto

>making sense of it = ad libbing vague unfalsifiable narratives

Poppler is rolling in his grave

>implying information principles that come from computer programming are "vague and incongruent"
you aren't as smart as you think you are. fags like you read proust and cant do calculus and you call programmers dumb

truly a fucking miracle

>fags like you read proust
>>>/nothere/

...

>implying information principles that come from computer programming are "vague and incongruent"

They are actually, I'm a Comp Sci student and its hilarious you think that information is a measurable metric when our capacity to relay and store the numerous specific forms of information is constantly under analysis and reframing

>philosophy
Chinese, at least classically.
>prose/poetry
Japanese will probably be better, but Chinese has a lot to offer there as well.

if it is calculable it is neither vague nor incongruent

The mechanism we use to handle the information is calculable. The information itself is not whatsoever. This is a significant difference

the more reliable the output is to the variable e aim to capture/model, the more reliably it can be determined that said iput is neither vague nor incongruent

the inputs for a lot of linguistic information models are highly reliable. granted there is a lot of leftist bullshit, but most of them cant even construct recursive models or do algebra.

even given corruption in all science (60% replication crisis in physics) I assure you there is reliability in some corners of linguistics

you cant just bury your head in the sand and declare the entire universe is incomprehensible

learn chinese. They have really good online novels

youtube.com/watch?time_continue=207&v=KnCMQ4OY24w

imagine being able to harness coherent information states from incoherent forms of matter, but still thinking there is not coherent information in human patterns of development

absolute.jpg

Epistemologically naive, more sophisticated mechanisms of transport does not suddenly make information itself quantifiable. Infact it simply proves the rule of its utter contingency

information forms resulting from human patterns of interaction are more actionable and have less entropy. by definition that binds it to qauantification. iterated patterns occurring over time could not have occurred by chance, something then, on a decentralised basis, percieved and acted upon the pattern, inherently proving it is quantifiable and perceptible.

you deify humans to some sort of holy state above quantifiability. it is utterly superstitious

entropy is mathematically defined (auantification) negative entropy is mathematically defined (one e.g. is p values)

it isnt magic

>by definition that binds it to qauantification.

Only in practice not theoretically. This has nothing to do with humans/machines, its about the nature of information itself which as far as I see has no inherent calculability only relative referentiality.
For any given storage/transportation of a given state it is concievable that it could be made twice as more efficient. What is to be said of any inherent value given such a contingency.

every jap worth his salt died in the war, after that it was just herbivore men and anime

Someone asks a very simple question, and the entire board starts sperging like /pol/tards.
Can't you stick to the actual subject and give informative answers?
What the fuck has been happening to this entire website over the years?

Shut up little bitch faggot

>mandarin

information is a property of energy. information takes on fault tolerance forms in et environments. that makes them noisy/lossy environments, but does not put into uestion the nature of information itself

information changes forms in order to be calculable by its referent over time in iterated systems. the fact that it emerges is PROOF it is calculable.

it could be made more efficient in your mind if it became linear, but the linearity of it causes its destruction. YOU are the one imposing relativism onto the planet. you'd chop up a "chaotic and incalculable" tree and arrange the branches into straight lines "efficiently", then complain that because the tree stopped living and died, that there never had ever been any calculation or information inherent in the tree

it is sophomoric. it emerges and reemerges, it is calculable. many human phenomena are the same but you'd prefer to kill a system and call the dead thing lo entropy because it is linear

Chinese tea>Japanese tea
I expect the same applies to literature.

what about korean

>information is a property of energy

Stopped reading here

you're an idiot. visual information is lossy, carried completely by the photon (energy) and inherent to coding a proper a.i.

it is DIFFICULT, but you are claiming because it is difficult, there cannot be an information basis to visual input...

uh... okay, faggot. I guess lifeforms being able to see and having developed brains around it is an accident.

In terms of languages with a future, Russian might be better

Indian tea > Chinese

the Chinese were significantly more intelligent, in-depth philosophers, their poetry is superior and their culture is more interesting and less derivative. The Japanese seem to have mastered superficial cultural output, and thus if you like the look of language, the sound of foreign tongues, the structure of jap poetry, you should go with that (pleb aesthetics faggot).

basically, chinese lit is superior but the japanese have more modern literature and poetry tho its swill for idiots and doesn’t touch western lit at all and you’d be better served just reading chinese literature and ignoring how vulgar their language is

Tfw bad at memorizing mandarin because I’m dense

This is page 3 and I still can’t recognize 你好 on sight HELP ME

depends. kiev of moskau are probably going to be the centers of europe but the likelihood of that benefitting you are slim

astounding. rotk is one of the single finest pieces of lit on the planet.

you might consider giving up. though more complicated, the logograms are basically shapes. if you cant discern a triangle and circle you have a problem. if you cant discern a triangle and some sticks from a circle and sone sticks, you'll have a problem. take the metaphor nd run ith it and you should see the problem inherent for you

if you cant see the shape, you cant see it

Chinese is a bugman language, Japanese is much better

But really you should be learning Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

>turkish, moroccan, rape victim, unemployment, mud people
you're just full of good advice arent you

>chinese is a bug language
sort of
>Jap is much better
aesthetically yeah, its linguistically inferior to Mandarin and Cantonese and also derived from it (stolen/borrowed), their philosophy and poetry is inferior in every way to Chinese thought user

>taking the time to EVER learn a non-phonetic language
Compare the English “0” to this hot mess in Mandarin

chinese is semi phoenetic actually, and faster to read by about 30%

>semi
Key word there bub

semi means not NON, bub

Let me rephrase for the dumb-dumb ITT
>semi phonetic languages
>worth knowing or taking the time to learn
Forgot how Veeky Forums never fights the spirit of an argument, just how it’s worded lmao

your post is straight up incorrect though. the spirit is incorrect

the phoenetic component of each character is slightly less accurate than english phoenetics

fuck off you dumb nigger

>semi semi semi
And this not intuitive and thus not worth learning. Evolution is a thing in a language. If the language is intentionally getting in the way of communication it is self defeating and worthless

*Ends your argument*

you sound like you enjoy newspeak

fuck off you nigger. you are doubleplusfuckingnigger

>once again not even ATTEMPTING to counter my argument
Sounds more like a critique of yourself tbqhwy

Who is best bandit and why is it Li Kui?

dumbing language to the level you'd like it to be is a self refuting argument. language has masny purposes being easy is not one of them.

there is direct evidence language becomes harder over time as a direct result of people liking to make it complicated on purpose, to demonstrate mastery. recieved pronunciation is one case. english itself is another

kill yourself

you faggot

>one of the first expressions you learned is 马马虎虎
>find out much later that nobody uses it IRL

it is like saying "golly gee" or something, if you need a cultural anchor

Does anyone have Japanese or Chinese book suggestions?

There are two books I deeply wish I had when I started learning Japanese.
1. "An Introduction To Japanese Grammar And Communication Strategies" by Senko K. Maynard
2. "日本語の省略がわかる本 : 誰が誰に何を How can we know who did what to whom in Japanese? : the grammar of omission : less is more" by Shigeko Nariyama (it's bilingual)

Note how you'll find no blogs or anything mentioning these. That's because everyone's busy drooling over Genki and other textbook series that are written by Japanese language teachers who might be great at their job, but know zip about exactly what makes Japanese so difficult to interpret for foreign learners. If you go Genki route, you'll end up like Maynard writes in her book: a student who has studied for years but can't read or talk. Much like a Japanese student of English, who knows the words and the grammatical patterns but can't read or produce shit. You can get by with Genki or whatever for some time, but eventually you will need something to teach you what's in these books.

Maynard's book is dry, but will teach you the in-depth details about the usage of various verb forms etc. Nariyama's book should be mandatory reading for all students of Japanese because it's the most concise introduction to subject/object omission there is.

I dare say to anyone who ends up seriously learning Japanese, if you ignore this post, it will be the biggest learning fuckup you'll ever make.

If you do Japanese, get some Kanji practice books.
It's essential to know how to write the characters, even in this digital age.

Languages worth learning:
-Portuguese
-Spanish
-French
-Italian

Why? Latin alphabet and no bullshettery. Portuguese is the hardest. I would recommend the following order: french > spanish > italian > portuguese.

It's stuffed full of largely fixed idioms. Not sure how that makes it 'bland', but I guess it does mean there's less emphasis on originality. On the plus side, because the idioms generally come from classic texts going back around 3000 years, it means it's a highly literate culture. For an English equivalent, imagine that random newspaper articles or everyday conversation include short quotes from the Iliad, Tacitus, Chaucer and Shakespeare every few sentences.

>and maybe grammar
This is a crazy stab in the dark, but I'm going to guess that you're not at all familiar with at least one of Chinese or Japanese, and maybe both.

>How can we know who did what to whom in Japanese? : the grammar of omission : less is more" by Shigeko Nariyama

Can't find it anywhere

I found both on amazon.jp

Thanks user, purchased right away.

>Is it true that written chinese is more bland than say english? So there is less room for creative expression, or you have to stick to metaphors?
Not true.

Is there anything like contemporary chinese literature? Apart from that one sci-fi author I have never heard of good chinese authors from the last 50 years.

Mo Yan
Yu Hua
Wang Shuo
Gao Xingjian

...the list could quite literally go on. You should at least have heard of the guy who won the Nobel prize a couple of years ago.

go home pajeet this is a board for literates

jin yong

What's the preferable japanese level you would recommend to go through this? Or should one just take it as a beginner (translated)?

You and many of the other "took mandarin 1 as a uni lang requirement" posterd should understand the difference between conversational, ghettoized post-communist mandarin and formal chinese. You will absolutely not be able to read chinese literature if you come out of a conversational class going "wo shi huan ni di jong wen". The grammar and vocabularly used in traditional literature and poetry is very complex, and most modern speakers don't bother to learn it to proficiency. It's even worse than the gap between shakespeare's english and your english.

I would say that Japanese has the better recent literature and Chinese has the better ancient stuff. You should learn both. The Kanji will help make reading one easier after you've learned the other. Also, do not learn simplified characters, learn traditional.

Again, if you learned svo bullshit and how to ask for cola in chinese, you're not in the right place for historical texts. It makes it much harder to say "im learning chinese for the reading". It's going to be an uphill battle learning classical chinese, and I mean it. Ancient chinese writing is more like a formalized art than a language.

All that means is that Japanese is easier to self study. Chinese is a much easier language to learn in the long run

What did this poster mean by this?

Chinese is much easier.