Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets" video.

@saifm2409 In Turkey, you half-wit.
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@Baka_Oppai That's mixed in my experience. When my wife and I moved to Japan we found it pretty easy. Kana takes a few days: you just write them down on a card and carry it with you, then look them up every time you see them for a few days. The Kanji can be harder, and being lazy I never really got beyond the grade school seven hundred or so. (On the other hand, I could amaze people by being able to point to a lease, reading it upside-down, and saying something like "Yeah, but I'd like to cut down on the guarantee money. My record's pretty good after all..." What they didn't realize was that I'd read hundreds of leases, and of course upside-down is no harder than sideways with Kanji, while it might have been the first or second time even a landlord had negotiated one -- let alone with a foreigner!) With Chinese, though, reading even a lot of Japanese has been no help: for months it just supplied me with a headful of incorrect pronunciations!
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Neonazis Should Speak Deutsch Partially true. South Korea uses Hangul, Roman & Arabic (letters and numerals) and Chinese characters in their own unique mix. It's a long time since I've been in Korea and I have no doubt it all continues to evolve -- at their customary lighting speed. Can anybody comment on how much their use of Chinese characters reflects Japanese taste from the colonial period and how much it's come to reflect the competing Mainland, Taiwanese and Hong Kong influences?
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There is a statue of King Sejong in the middle of Seoul, and people used to put flowers around it. In formal terms he is called the inventor of Hangul -- but I imagine he did about as much for it as King James did for the KJ Bible ("the only good work ever done by a committee"), i.e. called a bunch of wise men together to do a necessary job. I was impressed by the logic of it. The way their "alphabetical order" follows positions of the lips and tongue is impressive, but there's more: I was taking Koran lessons at the Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo, and at one point the teacher wanted to show off how you could write foreigners' names in Korean. He used me, the only non-Japanese in the room, and asked me my name, then wrote it on the board, then read it, part by part. "Here's the L ...loid jones, is that right?" I said "Not quite. It's Welsh and in the Welsh alphabet, LL and DD are single letters, hl and th, with slightly different sounds. `Lloyd' is more like `hloyd' maybe." So he smudged his example on the blackboard, and pronounced it in perfect Welsh. I think that one reason the Koreans are so good at other languages, while the Japanese, equally intelligent, are so universally poor, is that their writing system is so good at getting English, Chinese, Russian, every damn thing, correct. The Japanese may not be able to get L and R right because they can't write them properly in kana.
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Poly, All your "peoples" videos are really fine, not just the Chinese ones. Keep on keeping on: you're a treasure to the Internet!
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@yoavmal If you want a hilarious thought, try putting yourself in Chiang Kai Shek's shoes in say 1936: he was a natural Hitlerite and totally in bed with the Japanese and the Green Gang and such like mobsters in the coastal cities -- but his only real allies, i.e. the only people who were giving him money and weapons, were the Russian Soviets who were very up-and-down with Mao. Vinegar Joe Stillwell is a joy to read on that whole period.
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bestsmall country You look at a bunch of facts and announce a conclusion 180 degrees the opposite of what is in front of your eyes. Why? You know better. What the video just told you is that the rulers of Kazakhstan are taking effective steps to protect their language, Kazakh from domination by Russian and you claim that you see local languages vanishing. Now Russian is no longer one of the five dominant languages of the UN, it's true. Arabic has been added to the original five and is now spoken widely in America and Europe. Welsh was vanishing when I was a child, but today you can get a university degree and a job on television speaking it. Are you quite sure you've had any view at all on this channel? But you've covered the Georgia Guidestones. Clearly part of you knows the truth -- that the world is protecting the world's small community languages, and Kazakhstan is just one example of this salutary development.
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@leesiheon8013 The last time I was there was 1984 -- when average per capita income was still US$700 a year -- so I imagine quite a bit has changed since then. In those days quite a high percentage of the neon signs in commercial districts were in Chinese characters -- which is partly why I wondered whether they were still Japanese Chinese characters left over from the colonial period! They were still a police state back then, but the level of energy was huge and it was easy to be able to be enthusiastic for their success. A very attractive bunch!
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@SiaarZH I've read the mumble "There are 6000 languages in the world and half of them are going to vanish in a generation" -- but the last time I read that was probably a generation ago, so I have no idea what it's like these days. My father's first job, in secondary school, was on the preservation of Welsh. His job was inventing new Welsh words for things like "helicopter" and "antibiotic" using bogus philology and notions of what ancient literature would have done. He quit in disgust -- but Welsh has recovered with a bit of help from radio and television. Latin, Aramaic and Coptic are doing fine, thanks to the Internet.
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@11u510n15t Yes, but most of them were learning to read for the first time. An oddity for you, China, like Indonesia and the Philippines, has a notional "national language" which doesn't really exist. Putonghua, Bahasa Indonesi and Pilipino are all three artificial languages still in formation. The first people to speak them as their mother tongues have not been born yet.
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@faithlesshound5621 Good thinking, Dawg.
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@MegaSandyvagina Japan's colonization of Korea, 1905~1945, was it? I didn't know there were any other colonial periods. What do you have in mind? The Chinese characters of Japan in that period would have been prior to the MacArthur reforms of 1945, hence pretty much the ones imported from China into Nara in the 10th century. Plus or minus...
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