• ioen@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    What makes a language easy is its similarity to a learner’s native language, or other languages they’ve already learned.

    Don’t believe this at all. English is far more different to Chinese than any to any European language, yet I was able to communicate in Chinese much better after a few weeks of learning than after months or years of French and Spanish, because the grammar is simpler.

    Familiarity with cognates, word order and grammar rules can’t beat simply never having to use an article, agree gender or conjugate a verb for the subject or tense. Tell me a Chinese verb and I can talk about anybody doing it at any point in time. Tell me a French verb and I’ll have to study declension tables all week.

    • uberrice@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Were you though, or did you just think you were?

      It’s also ‘easy’ to communicate in English. ‘I want eat’ ‘where go this place’ and so on. People understand, and probably will answer you. It’s easier for something like that in Chinese to be grammatically correct - but did you master pitch accents and never mixed them up after ‘a few weeks’? We’re you able to read hanzi?

      The thing is that with European languages, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to express ideas that are too complex for your language ability if you are native in an European language. I don’t remember French for shit anymore, but say I were to ask some French guy that doesn’t speak English for a good restaurant to eat in, I’d probably go something like ‘je veux mange, tu sais un bon Restaurant ici?’ I doubt that’s grammatically correct whatsoever, and sounds weird as fuck, but you’d probably get my point. It’s probable you sound similar when speaking Chinese only for a few weeks.