Discussion Group

[caiweijie]

My guess is that 太太 is more modern than 妻子. In China, during the Cultural Revolution, I think people used comrade (I forget it -- tongzhi ?) instead of taitai.

i just entered unilang and i browsed thru the past messages on the board. i feel obligated to correct some mistakes in the messages here being a chinese speaker.

actually, both are still used today. when u refer to a married woman in a polite manner, u say taitai added with her husband's surname in front........ for example, if u refer to Liu married to Chen, u say Chen Tai-tai or Liu nv-shi. 'qi zi' is usually used in formal essays, as in Liu is Chen's 'qi-zi'.

[Aymeric]

furthermore, chinese grammar and japanese grammar are almost similar.

Really??? I've been learning Chinese for 3 years, and I studied Japanese for a while before that... and I found their grammars were way too different to even compare... The only thing that seemed similar to me was the use of classifiers.

[Psi-Lord]

furthermore, chinese grammar and japanese grammar are almost similar.

Really??? I've been learning Chinese for 3 years, and I studied Japanese for a while before that... and I found their grammars were way too different to even compare... The only thing that seemed similar to me was the use of classifiers.

I totally agree here—except, perhaps, for the way relative clauses are constructed, I don't see any striking similarities at all, either.

I wouldn't consider the classifiers myself because, after all, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai etc. also use them, so it's a rather common feature of languages in that region of Asia.

[caiweijie]

i said ALMOST similar..... probably i onli saw those similarities during my basic level class, that's y u guys might not agree wif my statement.... the clear example will be as below:

My name is Lee.

chinese: 我的名字叫李。(wo3 de5 ming2 zi4 jiao4 Li3)
japanese: 私の名前はリ一です。(watashi no namae wa Rii desu)

except for the 'desu' and the 'wa', the rest of the grammar is perfectly similar.
私(わたし)means 我
のmeans 的
名前(なまえ)means 名字。

[勺园之鬼]

i said ALMOST similar..... probably i onli saw those similarities during my basic level class, that's y u guys might not agree wif my statement.... the clear example will be as below:

My name is Lee.

chinese: 我的名字叫李。(wo3 de5 ming2 zi4 jiao4 Li3)
japanese: 私の名前はリ一です。(watashi no namae wa Rii desu)

except for the 'desu' and the 'wa', the rest of the grammar is perfectly similar.
私(わたし)means 我
のmeans 的
名前(なまえ)means 名字。

Err, well, there is something you got wrong...
You cannot say the grammar of these languages is common, when only the use of a determinative particle is...

The grammar of Chinese and Japanese are, as many people already stated, completely different. Without going into details, Chinese is like many languages a SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) grammatically based language. The grammar of Japanese, along with many other languages, is SOV. Thus the use of grammatical particles such as が、は、に、を,etc (this is not the Japanese forum, so I won't go deeper in this).
The determinative particle (or the hell how it is called in English ) is something common to many East Asian languages; and when you think about it you notice that even Indo-European languages work the same, if you consider "我的" as a determinative declension of "我", you get the same schema as "my" for "I", in more regular. In actual grammar, this is not the trend followed, but nothing would really prevent having this definition except the widespread use of existing grammar (tell me if I didn't make myself clear ).

Also, I have to say that "我的名字叫李" is not proper. 叫 is used either to introduce your given name (名字), or your whole name (that is: surname + given name). To say that your surname is 李, you would have to say "我姓李" instead, or "我的名字叫李连杰" (random example ) or even "我叫李连接". You probably know that, but the beginners who read this forum don't, so I thought it was better to make it clear.

Anyway, caiweijie, welcome to Unilang, and feel free to post in the English forum as well in the case you want to improve your English spelling; there are many native speakers there who can help you very kindly.

[caiweijie]

Well, Jun Ming, what you say might be right, but I learnt my basic Japanese according to Chinese grammar and it has proved successful for me. My Malay classmates had difficulties in catching up with Japanese classes, probably because their grammar is totally different from that of Japanese. But as I said, they are ALMOST similar, but not EXACTLY similar. Anyway, please do raise any suggestions if I have any mistakes in any of my statements.[/i][/b]