What’s your fav language?

Chinese is not as flexible as Japanese. There are fewer readings and the grammar is analytic, like English (i.e. word order is rigid). Only Japanese fully exploits Chinese characters to their full artistic potential.

I think French is beautiful pronunciation!

Yeah, it's very beautiful once you have a correct pronunciation (which is a pain in the ass to get there)
Have you tried Spanish, user-kun? It's pronounced exacly the same as Japanese, with a few additions.

you're doing well. keep it up user

lm kinda happy.lol
Japanese and German grammar are really similar.

Once I am not busy, i’ll check it out.

I'm job hunting now.

>There are fewer readings
How on earth is the fact that most written words have only one pronunciation a bad thing?

This is Yea Forums, we love puns, wordplay and linguistic confusion

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Having multiple pronunciations for the same word depending on context actively inhibits puns, though

I don't see your point.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wordplay#Goroawase

I love Korean and Latin. Some British dialects of English sound really cool too but American English is meh.

It's an obvious point. To use as an example, I can't make a pun about 行 as 'to go' or 'to do' in spoken Japanese, because those words have different pronunciations even though they share a character.

I could make a graphic pun, of course. But I could do that in Chinese too, with the added benefit that the 行 character stands alone in Chinese as a unit of meaning, without the clarifying hiragana that Japanese has to use. And in Chinese both meanings are pronounced the same, so my graphic pun can also be a verbal one.

Latin greatest language of all time cannot be denied. Weebs GTFO

>I can't make a pun about 行 as 'to go' or 'to do'
The fact that these two are interchangeable makes it a graphic pun.
Furthermore you can use Ateji for different puns. Depending on how much cringe you can stand, you can go really far with this.
>行く (to go)
>逝く (to die)
>生く (to live)
>幾 (how many)
>19
4219 (go die)

Geographically close to Korea,so i’ve interest Korean.

Re-learning Irish, which I was taught in school.

I'm having a lot of fun with it. Previously I've learned Russian up to a decent standard (can read basically anything but srs literature бидлo speak and understand most spoken stuff)

Dropped Latin due to my job taking up a lot of time and so not having the time it deserves, plus a much stronger desire to pick Irish back up.

I'll probably go back to Latin, or maybe French or Italian once my Irish is where I want it to be,

I specifically said
>in spoken Japanese

I know you can make puns in Japanese, of course. My point is just that having multiple pronunciations of a single character isn't a gain in punning terms, it's a loss.

I learned German at school but I can barely hold a conversation in it. I really want to pick it back up, but I always have difficulty with grammar in foreign languages and get frustrated. So much is available in English that it's easy to get lazy as a native speaker.

Yes I got your point. You lose some puns in the spoken language but on the other hand you get to Ateji different characters with different meaning to the same pronunciation, which can be played with even when spoken.

tl;dr yes puns in japanese are less obvious and work better when written but there are far more opportunities

>there are far more opportunities
I'd need to see proper evidence of that. Chinese has an extremely small range of sounds attached to an extremely large range of characters- the number of homophones is truly ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the most technically pun-ready language in the world.

Languages (mostly just Romance, really) I can read: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English, some Latin, some Provençal, some Catalan.

Languages I have a slight idea of, in the sense that I can understand a lot of the original if, say, I look at a translation first: Rumanian, German.

My favorite ones, in order: Latin, Italian, Provençal, Middle English, English, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, French, German.

Japanese, English, Italian, or German. I can't pick.

See eg

quora.com/What-languages-have-the-most-and-the-least-number-of-homonyms

>Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English, some Latin, some Provençal, some Catalan
These are all the same language.

>Japanese people are weeaboos now

retard

>Chinese has an extremely small range of sounds attached to an extremely large range of characters
Yes, therefore Chinese is the second best language for puns, because guess what, Japanese loans most Chinese characters, removes the tones and simplify the pronunciation further, all on top of its native vocabulary. Yes, Japanese is the king of puns.

>that pun you have in Chinese, chances are it works even better in Japanese

I can meme read in lots of languages but I'm not truly fluent in any of them

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Greek is pretty fucking great. Learning it I feel sometimes like I'm studying a Gothic cathedral or an ancient temple: there is awesome beauty in its arcane, incomprehensible structures.

Says the person who doesn’t know/speak any of them.

Ancient Greek?

lots of people can read and speak in all of those languages, except maybe Latin. you're not special. branch out into other language families if you want to be the chad polyglot.

You're probably just memeing at this point, but
>simplify the pronunciation
is just a silly claim. Every Chinese character is pronounced with a single syllable.

To go back to the OP example, 行 in Chinese is xing (rising tone). The OP gives us two pronunciations, iku and okonau, so we're adding one or two syllables depending on meaning, and I'm pretty sure other changes will be involved depending on tense, case etc (Chinese doesn't bother with these things- it's always just 'xing'). This is clearly not 'simplifying the pronunciation'.

for satan de

I'm not memeing, I speak both languages and I'm trying to convince you.

The onyomi for 行 is 'kou' (the most common one, there are more). Here's a quick search on jisho.

jisho.org/search/こう

It yields 685 kanji. Even if we only consider onyomi (sinoxenic readings), Japanese has more homophones because the nasal syllable coda 'ng' becomes a long vowel in Japanese. Most characters also have at least two onyomi, goon and kanon, because each character was borrowed first from the southern dynasty which reflects the wu dialect, then later from the tang dynasty.

The homophones increase exponentially when you take native words into account, so Japanese really provides for a titanic number of puns.

>Same alphabet means same language
>By this logic English, Dutch and German are also the same.

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Speaking German and claiming you can read Dutch isn't special at all, because they are so closely related. Now if you say you can read Russian you'll start impressing people.

Ah, interesting, thank you. I hereby drop my charge of memeing.

What function does an onyomi like 'kou' for 行 serve? Is it just the name of the character, or can it be used in speech to mean go, do, OK or whatever else 行 or the other 684 characters might mean? If the latter, it seems like you'd pass right through Punville and get into I Have No Fucking Idea What Anyone Is Saying Anymoretown.

>native romance language speaker brags about knowing other romance languages
nothing more cringe. weebs can at least say for themselves that they're trying to learn a language that requires genuine cognitive effort.

The relationship between Japanese and Chinese can be compared to that between English and French. Many nouns are sinoxenic. Verbs are predominantly native in both cases.
In Japanese you can construct pseudoverbs from sinoxenic compounds. So with the character 行 you can have the following:
Native:
行く (i-ku): to go
行う (okona-u): to perform
Sinoxenic:
行動する (koudou-suru): to act
行進する (koushin-suru): to march
行使する (koushi-suru): to use
and many more. So most chinese verbs can become japanese verbs using this grammar.
As for place names, most place names are fortunately native, but quite a few are also sinoxenic, and yes they can be horribly confusing. This becomes obvious when japs try to pronounce names from the sinosphere.
広州 (koushuu): Guangzhou
杭州 (koushuu): Hangzhou
膠州 (koushuu): Jiaozhou
黄州 (koushuu): Huangzhou
高州 (koushuu): Gaozhou
光州 (koushuu): Gwangju
甲州 (koushuu): Kai, ancient Japanese province
pretty based desu

i never noticed this until i started learning other ones, but english really is the best language

because it's the only language you know

>Yes, but modern Greek is very interesting to look at too in terms of the multiple layers of overlapping influences received over the centuries and the centuries long political and cultural struggles that have shaped it into what it is now: a zombie and a Frankenstein's monster, yet very much alive and evolving.

Sorry, didn't mean it as a greentext.

i just said i never noticed until i learned other ones

Latin, though I'm still in the beginning stages of learning it. I'm enjoying the learning process and it really trains you to rethink concepts and how you process grammar.

Who cares about impressing people?

The goal here is to explore literature. If you can read both English and Spanish, you can explore a wider range of great literature than if you spoke Russian, Zulu, Icelandic, Tupi, Finnish, Norwegian and Egyptian with 100% fluency.

>lots of people can read and speak in all of those languages

Read? Maybe. Speak? What? No. It is possible, but there certainly isn't a *lot* of people who can do it, not without sounding like complete idiots, that is. You'd have to dedicate many years to the study of Romance languages in order to be able to speak all of them. Pound did dedicate many such years, and yet his Portuñol letter to Jorge de Lima is full of many Italianisms and mistakes, and we're talking about one of the greatest writers of the past century who did major in Romance literature and even wrote a whole book about it... I myself have read Spanish for many years, and still I can't really speak it, I'd have to study the grammar very carefully in order to do so - and I'm a native Portuguese speaker.

I like Ancient Greek and Italian

Any celtic language learners here?

I'm the guy above who mentioned learning Irish, but I wouldn't mind taking a look at some welsh or breton if anyone has any beginner advice

I like Finnish, mostly because it's my first language but it's also very flexible due to the loose word ordering and other stuff that's absent in the more popular European languages..

Spoken everyday German sounds really nice but I was too lazy at school to learn it properly.

no, LARPers aren’t allowed here

I’ never heard that before.

I like languages that sound like shit, it's harder to say something melodic in them. German, Russian or my native Czech.
Although I have to say these guys have good picks as well:

words hurt user

I'm learning Welsh at the minute mate yeah