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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
It's honestly not as hard as people make out after the first few months. Yeah, mastering the sounds is hard; but:
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
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Bien 👌
:volcel-judge:
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.
deleted by creator
this is why i found it easier to learn chinese than english, it's largely a context thing.
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.
no language is as easy or as hard as it seems