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This is so true. The only recipe for learning language is the amount of time required. The rest is almost irrelevant. And knowing at least two languages, findin
by xvilka 7y ago
This is so true. The only recipe for learning language is the amount of time required. The rest is almost irrelevant. And knowing at least two languages, finding a time to learn new one close to impossible.
There is one thing in the article I disagree with: they suggest that there are no hard and easy languages. It is certainly false, for example, the huge difference between languages with an alphabet and without. In the first case, you just learn the alphabet and rules on how to read, and you can read the literature quite early. Latter wouldn't allow you to do that unless you learn almost all of the commonly used words. So learning Mandarin, Japanese, other similar languages is way harder than learning Korean or Vietnamese, while they are very similar by nature (there are even similar words in them).
- indigo945 7y ago>So learning Mandarin, Japanese, other similar languages is way harder than learning Korean or Vietnamese, while they are very similar by nature (there are even similar words in them). This is a comically wrong statement. Those four languages are not similar at all -- they are four languages from four different families, they could hardly be more different! Even the loanwords that they have are often hardly recognizable, much less than with languages that are actually very close (say, English and Romanian).
- xvilka 7y agoIf you listen the real speech you can recognize the similar words between them quite often. I admit my mistake of claiming they are similar, but they do share a common traits, words. Nevertheless from all those both Chinese and Japanese are like 10x harder than the rest, telling from my own experience.