Sad, but probably not a coincidence

I've chosen Korean because the level of play and teaching materials are better than Japan's. Also, the language takes much less time to learn to read than Chinese or Japanese because it uses Hangul, a featural alphabet. The only real disadvantage is it is harder to find adequate English language teaching materials than with the other two.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Level of play is better, really? I'm sure the difference between the top korean pros and the top japanese one is less than two stones, so unless you're an aspiring pro I can't see this making a difference.

Definitely true about the alphabet though, kanji is a serious pain.

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee

I suspect that what nagano is meaning, by better teaching materials, is that someone spending the same effort with their materials improves faster.

This is the kind of thing that you could probably get a real statistic on, if only there was an unbiased observer...

I agree with the people who say pick the one the most people around you speak (ie where I live, there are many more chinese people).

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

two stones!!!!do you mean 20 moku? exagerated =,=!!!

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长考出臭棋.

What I mean is there is an organised curriculum for all levels of players. Maybe Japan has something like that by now, but I haven't heard of it. In an interview with the head of a Japanese Go school I read recently, which I cannot currently find, the question "What training method do you use?" was asked. The shocking reply was (paraphrased) "We basically let the students do whatever they want. We have no plan." What? If this is true, no wonder Japan is behind.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

For improving with go, I think, you can use any of the study materials from any of the CKJ countries.

What will differentiate you comes from within yourself. There may be differences in the types of curriculum, etc., and people have their own opinions about this.

To the OP, I think you should form your own opinion, get some books, and then study. You don't have to worry about the details of countries.

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be immersed

Again, I think it goes back to two main things:
1) Which one are you more interested in?
2) Which one will be easier to find real people to help you practice?

The first one will keep you going, the second one will actually help you learn and keep up in all that you've learned.

And like Kirby said, most of the differentiation will come from yourself. I have all kinds of go books, but they only do as much good as the time I put into them (very little currently ). So right now, I'm not too worried about the "level" of the material when I can't even get myself to work on them anyway.

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KGS: schultz [?].

Learning a language is something personal and individual, especially if you get to choose the language. Which of the three cultural backgrounds appeals the most to you? In my case, it would be China's background, both cultural and philosophical, as well as the history, so if I had the time and motivation to learn a fourth language, Chinese would be my choice. (I really should, seeing how my partner is half-Chinese, though only her relatives speak Chinese, she doesn't.)

From a job perspective, Chinese might be a good choice as well. Huge, widely still "closed" market and very many people who speak the language (without being likely to speak English). If China opens up more, and it just might over the next few decades, there will be numerous opportunities for people who are fluent in English and Chinese.

But as I said, I think it's a personal choice. Like art.

The point about difficulty would extend to European languages with grammars, historical origins and suchlike similar to English. For the same reasons that an English speaker has a substantial edge learning German, and a mild edge learning French, speakers of those languages would face the same difficulties in learning Chinese.

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Occupy Babel!

Speaking as a linguist here, Chinese is deceptive. For reading and writing, it is fine, but if you ever hope to speak the language with native speakers, You'll find that learning any form of standard chinese will leave you so dicombobulated as to regret it. The many hundreds (it's almost a thousand, actually. Almost.) of dialects are really different from each other and divergent as to be considered practically different languages in themselves. For example, even in shanghai, you could learn the standard language of the newscasters, but you would be utterly incomprehensible to the average man in the street. (Well, maybe not utterly incomprehensible. But it would be pretty bad.)

Linguistically speaking, the range of speech in chinese is too different to just learn one language and be able to communicate everywhere. Luckily, china is so huge that you can pretty much pick your community language and stick with it. Also, the writing system is pretty much standardized. Which is what unifies china, linguistically speaking.

Japanese will be the easiest to learn, because even though there are various dialects, they are the most similiar, and you can simply learn the standard edokko dialect and get around anywhere.

But in terms of writing, if you want to learn to read Go books and materials quickly, then Korean is your best bet. The Korean Writing system is by far much easier to learn than chinese and the beastly monstrosity that is Japanese(which will take you many years to gain even basic proficiency in.)

Hope I helped.

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"Yeah, just imagine: A place where mosquitos carry off mid-size komodo dragons."

That`s something I`ve always wondered about, El Teboso, so the regional differences in Chinese are, for example, greater than the regional differences in German ? Even adjusted for greater geographical separation ?

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

As someone who has studied--and continues to study--Chinese as a foreign language, here is my input.

For native English speakers, Chinese is quite easy to learn to speak and extremely difficult to learn to read. Speaking Chinese is easy because there is no gender, no conjugation of verbs (just add particles to change tense), and you get great mileage from learning the basic rules of grammar. This is significantly easier than Korean and Japanese. The phonemes are not too difficult for a native English speaker (harder than Japanese, easier than Korean). Using correct tones will always be a problem unless you work hard at them and use spoken Chinese with native speakers. Understanding tones is much easier.

If you go to China, your standard Chinese will be understood by most people you would actually meet, regardless of location. I lived in China for ~2.5 years and traveled extensively from Inner Mongolia to Sanya, Qingdao to Kunming, and had little trouble speaking with local residents. There are certainly many local and regional dialects that you will never learn, but most people speak at least some of the standard dialect. You can thank the Communist Party for this! If you DO learn a bit of a local dialect--even just some slang--you will earn serious cred when you meet anyone from that area.

Reading and writing Chinese is extremely difficult because you must memorize over a thousand(!) characters to read anything interesting. You must memorize them one by one. Sometimes there are clues within characters as to sound or meaning, but if you do not know the character you are stuck with an unlikely guess. This is the hardest part about Chinese. Sure, you can look up characters in a dictionary, but that is a painful process where you must (1) determine the radical used to classify the character, (2) look up the radical number, (3) look up the character. Reading online makes this process MUCH faster, but that is not an easy option if you are trying to read a pdf or a Go book. Also, once you get past learning the basics of grammar, there are many constructions and idioms to learn. Learning Chinese has required much more effort than learning French.

Of course, the best way to learn a language is to find a girlfriend/boyfriend who speaks that language.

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I am Tartuffe from GoDiscussions.com

hm, what is 'form' of standard chinese'? There's only standard chinese. And it's standard because it is supposed to be used to communicate with other chinese who speaks different dialect as you do. And I even have no problem to communicate in standard chinese with chinese-speaking people outside China, e.g. Singapore.



I don't feel it's true. You may have difficulty to speak with very old people, But generally speaking you will have no problem in communicating with people in the street. It doesn't take me longer to understand shanghai dialect than to understand Indian accent English.

I don't know where you gether those information, but it seems you have some misunderstanding of standard chinese. I would agree most Peter Hansmeier said.

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长考出臭棋.

I'm late to the party, but here's some feedback.

A long time ago, I studied Chinese for a while. I found it a wonderful experience, because it's an ideogram-based language, and, while it's difficult to learn to read Chinese characters, I have a friend who's a sinologist who gave me plenty of tips. (Learn the couple hundred roots characters by heart, and you'll be able to figure out some of the more complex characters in context.) I found that the pronunciation was no problem, but I'm already bilingual (and actually had good knowledge of a third language at the time), and in such cases, one learns to use new sounds more easily. This said, I'd disagree with the poster who said that what you learn will be intelligible. While I've never been to China, this friend goes regularly leading groups of tourists, and he's told me that he's always understood. People in China seem to speak at least one standard form of the language and a dialect.

If I had the time and inclination to learn a new language today, however, I'd probably choose Japanese, if only because I find the Japanese go scene a bit more interesting, especially the historical aspects of it. Alas, I don't have time for such studies now...

Nevertheless, having taught English as a foreign language for many years (and having a graduate degree in applied linguistics), I'd suggest that the choice should focus on what resources are available. It's extremely difficult to learn a language without face-to-face interaction, so if you can't get classes or find native speakers willing to really make an effort to help you, you won't get very far. You might be able to learn enough to read go books, but that won't help much if you travel to a country that speaks the language you're learning.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Thank you guys for your feedback. Sorry I've been so inactive in this topic, I've been sick for a while now, feeling better though.
Some of you have offered me great insight into all languages and linguistics in general. I can't believe how many linguists this forum has, I had expected a lot more math-orientated professions for some reason. Sadly I'm still torn between these wonderful languages. I've been looking around for classes, however, pretty much all of them are located in Amsterdam which is over an hour away, so that seems a little impractical. Because of this unfortunate truth I have also been looking into self-study courses, but the schools I've been able to find don't offer Korean, and a rather limited amount of Japanese and Chinese (Both mainly centered around speaking, one of them assures a 340 character vocabulary, which is supposed to be around 800 words, which seems really really low).

Considering I'm unable to find courses in Dutch perhaps it's time to look for courses in English, but that would make it harder to find native speakers and converse with them on a regular basis. All I can find at this point are books from the "for dummies" series (in all three languages) though, and however accurate that name might be, I'm not sure they'll be able to teach me the things I want (which is mainly reading, at this point in time).

Any help finding resources would be very much appreciated.

I can't say anything about the three languages concerned, but I learned a non-indoeuropean language as well, and am learning another one currently. I would not consider "usefulness" of a language in terms of speakers. You are unlikely to speak with more than 100.000 persons in your life. So it does not make a difference whether the language you learn has 10 million or 500 million speakers. You usually do not meet totally random persons either, but meet persons according to your social networks - which will change with the process of language learning. Do not overemphasize the public library - if you learn a language you should spend the amount of money necessary to buy some material - you can labour on it for month to come anyway - saving a lot of money elsewhere. If Go is the most important thing in your life, do not learn a new language, you will have less time to study and the time you study a language if you are serious about it will likely exceed the time you spend for Go.

I would think about, which of the three/four countries I can imagine to spend time in, residing for a longer time or even settle down. Then choose three objects representing each language. Put them before yourself, think hard. If you can't decide take a coin in your hand and prepare yourself to decide the issue by coin tossing. If you're uncomfortable with that idea, then you do have a preference, make your mind up, which one it is, choose it and don't look back. If not, toss the coin, as the decision is the only thing lacking and all choices are equally good to you, it won't do any harm.

When you start a course (you can try to sneak in university courses intended for students of the languages, if it works it is a good idea) or a self-studying course (you really need self-discipline here) try to find real people for face to face meetings, put up an ad in some suited shop/restaurant, ask your friends and language teachers. This should be possible nearly everywhere in Europe (you're from Netherlands I reckon), and never be overwhelmed by fear but go out and look for opportunities to practice from the first day on. Never stop learning and be prepared to learn seriously - one evening a week will still take a lot of time but won't teach you the language.

Chinese, of course.
Chinese invent Go 3000 years ago, and now, they have lots of world best Go players.
I'm a Chinese, I may give you some help, if you want.

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Recommended a new Go server——http://www.wuzheng.org

happy birthday to chinese go invention. but what does invention of go 3000 years ago have to do with what language is the best to learn go?
NOTHING!

easyest language to learn would be korean. their writing is easy to learn and all you need is few hours to memorize 24 different sounds to read a book. you wont know what you are reading..but at least you can pronounce them and lookup.

i am korean and know some chinese character to start with and studied for a while but i was still unsuccessful.

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"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson