Chinese

Someone just sent me a link to a Chinese learning site where there's lots of helpful information for people who are struggling through Chinese.

It made me think about a couple of similarities between Japanese and Chinese. One similarity is that they both use counters. For instance, in English we would just use numbers that precede an item. But in Chinese and Japanese, they use counters, such as "ge" (Chinese) and "hon" (Japanese) and a whole lot of other counters that baffle non-native speakers.

Another similarity is the word that comes at the end of questions. Chinese uses "ma" and Japanese uses "ka." I'm sure Korean is similar as well, but I've never studied it. However, I know that Korean has a similar structure as Japanese.

My problem right now is that my reading ability in Japanese is pretty lame, and both my spoken and reading ability of Chinese is non-existent. And if I ever go to Taiwan, I may not be able to get around by speaking, just by winging the reading of the Chinese characters.