mynamy1,
I think that you're
greatly oversimplifying things here. Applying your same logic, then a native speaker of English should be proficient in Greek, Latin, and French...not to mention German for grammatical rules.
English word: Ambidextrous - being equally proficient at using both hands for all tasks.
Root words: Ambi - Latin
ambi-, Greek
amphO - meaning:
both
Dexter - Latin
right hand
Interestingly enough...the Latin word for
left hand, "Sinister" has a very bad meaning in English. The French word for the same, "Gauche" is used in English to describe someone that's awkward or lacking in social graces. (no offense to you lefties out there!)
This just goes to show you that the similarities in languages don't automatically carry over into the ability to use them as you would your native tongue. Japanese has two systems of pronunciation, one adapted from Chinese (with pronuciations being taken from both North and South China, to further confuse things) and one for native Japanese pronunciations of words that existed before Chinese characters were imported and adopted in Japan. To compound problems, Chinese characters or "Kanji" (Hanzi to you Chinese folks, Hanja to Koreans) most often have
multiple pronunciations for the same character depending on usage. Sometime you use the pronunciation adopted from Chinese, and sometimes the native Japanese. Sometimes the pronuciation changes when the word is compounded with another, or there may be multiple (and very different) ways to pronounce the same Kanji in Japanese. In extreme cases, one character can have up to 20 different pronuciations, and the only way to learn that is to study, study, study. Knowing Chinese or having it as a "base" language won't help you in the slightest here, just as being a native speaker of English doesn't qualify me to pore over the original Latin transcriptions of the Roman Senate, nor does it enable me to try and read Plato's "Republic" in the original Greek. Chinese is actually grammatically
more similar to English than Japanese, believe it or not.
Languages are different, and have idiosyncrasies that make them rather "unportable" without undertaking a certain amount of study. While some languages are easier to learn if your base language is the same (i.e. Romance languages: Latin->Italian->Spanish->French->Protuguese) the rules are by and large incompatible, and if they weren't then machine translation would already be a perfected science .
Not trying to cause a flap here. Just wanted to make sure that SF is getting the credit due for undertaking a difficult course of study. Knowing Chinese isn't much help in learning to speak or read Japanese.