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What an amazing illustration of how humor can be lost across language boundaries. You have to have experience in both English and Chinese to know how hilarious
by supportlocal4h 8y ago
What an amazing illustration of how humor can be lost across language boundaries. You have to have experience in both English and Chinese to know how hilarious that statement is. It's genius to write it in English and deliver it so deadpan to readers who won't know to laugh out loud when they see it.
- gdy 8y agoI definitely didn't intend it to be humorous. I'm not a native English speaker and have made an attempt to learn Chinese. To me memorizing how hieroglyphs look was harder than any part of English. One need to have a good visual memory to find that easy.
- supportlocal4h 8y agoTo take a few examples from your comment: "Definitely" has 19 "strokes" "Speaker" has 14 strokes "Visual" has 10 strokes "Made" has 9 strokes 9 strokes is a lot in Chinese, but relatively few in English. And despite what anyone says, you can't learn English using phonics or any other method except bulk memorization. In English, every word and every one of its derivatives has to be memorized. Past tense, possessive, plural, everything has to be memorized. Nobody bats an eye at this. Learning 8 strokes for "tree" is easy, but the 4 strokes for the Chinese equivalent is hard. 12 strokes for "water" is easy. 5 strokes in Chinese is hard. Oh, and throw on 4 more strokes in English if you turn it into a verb and use the past tense, "watered". Unless you write "did water" instead and split them up with a noun in between: "did you water". What a disaster. I am a native English speaker. I like to think I am decent at it. Better than most of the people with whom I speak in person. But did I just use "whom" correctly? And did I just start a sentence with "but"? And "and"? And leave out the subject? Is this even proper English?