It’s so weird they don’t even have it here, we just have Italian, German and Spanish.
yeah so it makes sense in that regard, still having the 2nd most spoken language in the world would be a good idea
Lol my school had Spanish only and it was taught by a white woman who I never heard speak a full sentence in Spanish
Real Peggy hill hours
We have 2 Spanish teachers, one is a racist white lady and the other is a extremely strict and indecisive Spanish person
My first spanish teacher was from Peru, my second spanish teacher was from Spain, and my third spanish teacher was some white American suburbanite who spent weekends in Mexico
Things just got progressively weirder and "wrong" er as the years went by
Considering that I have a non-zero chance of having to flee into China to escape the equator turning into Venus, I really need to start learning Chinese.
The first few months are the hardest by far. The vocab itself ain't too bad.
Yeah I was just recently using Google Translate to try to write something in Chinese for a meme and it was really fucking weird, I couldn't quite grasp the inputs and outputs
To be fair sometimes Google Translate absolutely lies when you have ungrammatical words in there. It was just surprising hard to swap words without changing structure
Pro-tip: https://www.deepl.com/translator is way better than google translate
Oh thank the Lord
Side note, I really want someone to build a translation service that doesn't try to instantly translate 1:1 text.
Everyone says translation is hard because things can have different meanings - they're ambiguous.
Well
Fucking ask
Let me put in what I specifically mean when translating to a different language. Ask what each word means. Ask if it's an idiom.
When I'm translating to my language, give a huuuuge list of possible translations.
Hmm it acts really weird though. Maybe it's better for normal paragraphs? Look how it changes the meaning of "How are you?"
How are you? How are you doing? How are you today? How are you doing today? How is it going? How's it going? How ya doin? How are ya? How are you doing? How's it hanging? How are you?
Come stai? E tu come stai? Come stai oggi? Come va oggi? Come va? Come va? Come va? Come va? Come va? Come va? Come va?
It's honestly not as hard as people make out after the first few months. Yeah, mastering the sounds is hard; but:
- the grammar is easy -- as a beginner you can basically use any fucking word order and it makes enough sense to be understood by native speakers
- numbers are a piece of piss -- if you know 1-10, 100, 1000, etc. you know the entire system -- there's non of that "thirteen, twenty-one" bollocks like English, let alone German or French nonsense (wtf is a quatre-vingt-dix-sept???)
- actual words tend to be pretty simple and reusable to mean similar things as descriptors when you're starting out
- the characters aren't anywhere near as hard as Japanese/Thai
Give it a shot on duolingo for a couple of weeks and if you don't click then it might not be for you, but I found it easier than Korean, Thai, Japanese etc that I've dabbled in a bit for holidays
Also the range of sounds you use in speech I swear improved my singing voice by miles but YMMV
Might be worth starting a (new) Duolingo account so you can get a 14 day free trial. Unlimited retries to just repeat it until you get it. It didn't click for me for about 10 days of 15 mins a day, but after that I basically didn't need to pay for retries etc.
it is hard but the fact there are only 214 radicals helps you figure out roughly what a word means
The hard thing for me is the script. I actually found Vietnamese easier because it has a phonetic alphabet
I had mandatory english classes in all school that were shit cuz every single year we went back to verb to be. Then suddenly learned it to a pretty good level by just immersion in the internet. Chinese surely is hard, but pedagogy matters A LOT.
If 14 yo weebs can learn japanese out of sheer weebness, why couldn't we learn chinese.
there’s not really a common starting point between languages
this is why i found it easier to learn chinese than english, it's largely a context thing.
If 14 yo weebs can learn japanese out of sheer weebness, why couldn’t we learn chinese.
watching tv in chinese would probably be a good shout as a learning aide
It is generally accepted wisdom that the reason why Scandinavians tend to be better English speakers than Germans is that they use subtitles for foreign-language film and TV whereas Germans dub everything.
So Scandinavians got a lot of language immersion because their languages had too few speakers to make dubbing economically viable.
very little because the chinese will meet you where you are. they aren't an anglo merchant empire that forces hanfu and mandarin on their vassals, they just want your shit
Authoritarian communists are forcing the children to learn a foreign language so they can be indoctrinated with even more anti-American propaganda 😔
If teenage weebs can learn japanese out of sheer weebnes, you can learn anything.
It's all just time in. I got pretty ok at Italian for a little while and I only learned it for a year.
Well they don't really learn it
But yeah Spanish is a lot lot easier than Japanese, both in absolute terms and for an English speaker
