3 ms·
> but you don't spend years memorizing thousands and thousands of characters to learn English except you are memorizing thousands and thousands of spellings to
by bgee 8y ago
> but you don't spend years memorizing thousands and thousands of characters to learn English
except you are memorizing thousands and thousands of spellings to learn English
- yakshaving_jgt 8y agoThis sounds like BS to me. There are rules and exceptions to those rules one must learn/memorise, but I highly doubt it's "thousands and thousands". There's a lot of English comprehension you get "for free" by knowing some of these rules, e.g., "magic e" or [the actually incorrect] "i before e, except after c".
- bgee 8y ago> There are rules and exceptions to those rules one must learn/memorise, but I highly doubt it's "thousands and thousands". Exactly my point: This is true in Chinese (Hanzi) as well. Edit: English-speaking individuals often overestimate the difficulty of learning Hanzi while underestimate the barrier of learning English spelling. For an example, see Ted Chiang's claim of "you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper" [0]. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-were-phonetic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-wer...