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The ROI of learning speaking and listening is very high. I’ve been learning Chinese for 10 years and have gotten much more out of it than my 6 years learning Ge

The ROI of learning speaking and listening is very high. I’ve been learning Chinese for 10 years and have gotten much more out of it than my 6 years learning German. Why is that? Living in England, there weren’t many German-speaking people around so I didn’t get much out of it. Even when I went to Germany, they all spoke English better than I spoke German so we mostly ended up conversing in English. Chinese on the other hand... there are lots of Chinese speakers in most places, and they’re mostly very happy, relieved and even excited to speak Chinese with you. If you ever go to China, speaking Chinese opens you up to a whole host of new experiences. Few people confidently speak English there so you can get a lot of practice very quickly. I do agree that ROI on reading/writing is low, and it’s mostly due to the insane difficulty of memorizing characters. My suggestion: learn how to read and type simplified Chinese. Don’t bother with writing (which interestingly is much harder than typing on a pinyin keyboard), or traditional Chinese (there are tools which convert back and forth between the two of you need

nicolas_t 8y ago
>Don’t bother with writing (which interestingly is much harder than typing on a pinyin keyboard), traditional Chinese (there are tools which convert back and forth between the two of you need I personally find traditional Chinese characters easier to learn to read than simplified characters. Simplified characters are definitely much easier to write but that's not very useful in modern times. Plus learning traditional Chinese characters helps with Japanese. The reason that traditional Chinese characters are easier for me to learn is that it keeps components that hints toward the meaning that are left out of the simplified version. For example, hear is 聽 (traditional) and 听 (simplified). The traditional character has 耳 which means ear, the new simplified character has 口 (mouth) and 斤 (axe). That's not necessarily the best example since some of the other components of the traditional character are a bit weird in a character related to hearing but I do feel that it's easier to derive the meaning from the traditional character. Likewise, I prefer 愛 (love) to have the heart component 心.

nicolas_t 8y ago

>Don’t bother with writing (which interestingly is much harder than typing on a pinyin keyboard), traditional Chinese (there are tools which convert back and forth between the two of you need I personally find traditional Chinese characters easier to learn to read than simplified characters. Simplified characters are definitely much easier to write but that's not very useful in modern times. Plus learning traditional Chinese characters helps with Japanese. The reason that traditional Chinese characters are easier for me to learn is that it keeps components that hints toward the meaning that are left out of the simplified version. For example, hear is 聽 (traditional) and 听 (simplified). The traditional character has 耳 which means ear, the new simplified character has 口 (mouth) and 斤 (axe). That's not necessarily the best example since some of the other components of the traditional character are a bit weird in a character related to hearing but I do feel that it's easier to derive the meaning from the traditional character. Likewise, I prefer 愛 (love) to have the heart component 心.