5 ms·

Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker. I don’t think

by pja 11y ago

Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker. I don’t think anyone claims that spoken Chinese is particularly hard compared to other languages, but that the written form is measurably harder than languages that use an alphabetic orthography. (I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?)

Grue3 11y ago
>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?) In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and it's more phonetic than English (but not completely phonetic). I'm sure anyone can learn to write/read Cyrillic in a few days if they already know Latin. The actual language is harder than English because of large number of noun/adjective declensions (depending on plurality, case, gender) which would be a pain to memorize for a non-native. But being an Indo-European language it's still pretty similar to English as far as languages go. Chinese, having a completely different writing system, completely different sentence structure, completely different fixed expressions, completely different sounds (and tones!) is orders of magnitude harder.
- EvenThisAcronym 11y ago
  Chinese sentence structure is in many cases identical or very similar to English, and follows the same general word order, Subject-Verb-Object.
Arnt 11y ago
Yeah, the better example for English would've been the spelling. Ghoti and so on, dyslexia is a significant problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Language My wife knows Russian and 5-6 other languages on a tourist level or better. She says Russian has both a difficult and a simple aspect: Newspapers use a large vocabulary so reading with moderate education is tricky, but people's accents are easier to deal with.

by pja 11y ago

Grue3 11y ago

>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?) In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and it's more phonetic than English (but not completely phonetic). I'm sure anyone can learn to write/read Cyrillic in a few days if they already know Latin. The actual language is harder than English because of large number of noun/adjective declensions (depending on plurality, case, gender) which would be a pain to memorize for a non-native. But being an Indo-European language it's still pretty similar to English as far as languages go. Chinese, having a completely different writing system, completely different sentence structure, completely different fixed expressions, completely different sounds (and tones!) is orders of magnitude harder.

EvenThisAcronym 11y ago
Chinese sentence structure is in many cases identical or very similar to English, and follows the same general word order, Subject-Verb-Object.

Arnt 11y ago

Yeah, the better example for English would've been the spelling. Ghoti and so on, dyslexia is a significant problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia#Language My wife knows Russian and 5-6 other languages on a tourist level or better. She says Russian has both a difficult and a simple aspect: Newspapers use a large vocabulary so reading with moderate education is tricky, but people's accents are easier to deal with.