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This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got marr

This is interesting; I studied Korean in college / lived there for a bit. Randomly, met a Chinese woman there, who actually lived in the States, and we got married after we both moved back to the States. If I could do it over again, I would learn Chinese before Korean or Japanese. My Chinese friends who learned Korean learned it way faster than any western learner. Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. Both Japanese and Korean are distinct from Chinese and beautiful languages (I really do love Korean, such a pretty, logical language), but China has been an influence in the region for so long they can’t have help absorbing and using pieces of the Chinese languages. Fun random fact: a lot of Korean words are built on Chinese words; however, some of those words were taken from Chinese thousands of years ago. The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)!

philliphaydon 6y ago
> The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.
- stanrivers 6y ago
  Korean does not have vowel length change the meaning, however Japanese does. Korean used to be tonal, and you are right it now longer is. Korean is used in combination with other data points to determine pronunciations. This works for old English plays, for example too. You can use poems that should rhyme, plus commentary from linguists at the time, to guess what certain words would sound like “back then”. Just saying that Korean is another super rare but fun random fact that I have heard of being used at least once in combination with ancient Chinese poems, to guess at the old Chinese pronunciation.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology > In 2012, vowel length is reported almost completely neutralized in Korean, except for a very few older speakers of Seoul dialect,[14] for whom the distinctive vowel-length distinction is maintained only in the first syllable of a word.[13] So it does have vowel length change meaning but it’s almost kinda died out like tones?
    - yongjik 6y ago
      Native Korean speaker here, born in the 70s and grew up in Seoul. We all learned a dozen short-long pairs at school (like 눈 nun being either eye or snow), and of course the education got all of us tricked into thinking that we're making these distinctions (if only we try hard enough). But looking at it objectively, I don't think a single person around me used vowel length distinction. If you have to "think" whether a word is long or short, that means the distinction is dead. No English speaker has to "think" whether fan or pan is the correct word. An actual sound distinction comes automatically for native speakers. Similarly, ㅐ/ㅔ ("ae"/"e") distinction was dead before I was born, but schools insisted that they're well and alive. Not sure what they're teaching these days.
      - philliphaydon 6y ago
        I can't speak Korean, only a little bit of Mandarin :D so I'm really happy to have your reply, thank you! Makes sense!
z2 6y ago
I totally agree with this analogy, though maybe to add some nuance (or pedantry), I'd claim that to start learning Chinese, you need to pick a modern dialect (probably Mandarin), which is like choosing Spanish over Portuguese or Catalan. Then, learning Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese) is like learning a nearby but non-Romance language that was heavily influenced by Latin or Romance languages, like English. Knowing Spanish will let you appreciate the similarities with English, but you'd still need to delve into historical Spanish (or French) to really see the connections. Chinese is a pretty old and continuous language, so at the advanced level, learners could delve into Classical Chinese, which is truly analogous to Latin, and was also a dominant lingua franca in written form across East Asia. Pieces of Classical Chinese are 'alive' in everyday use, kind of like how Latin is 'alive' in the Romance languages through general and obvious similarities, or specific vocabulary, (e.g. "quid pro quo", "ad hominem"). But Classical Chinese is radically different from any dialect of today's vernacular Chinese. In any case, the similarities and overlap definitely make learning between CJK(V) easier!
- stanrivers 6y ago
  100% agree with this post, which I tried to get at saying that Korean and Japanese are distinct. Apologies for not making that clear. Your post is great to clarify this all more specifically. The cultural side of things definitely requires a lot of time. And that’s fun. What also takes time is learned how ideas are shared. Not just grammar, but which version of the multiple correct grammar options that is more common. How are paragraphs constructed? What is usually shared first in an idea or argument versus the end? You can have someone with completely correct grammar and pronunciation that sounds odd to a native speak because the cultural / idea organization is not “native”.
- Cro_on 6y ago
  Go back to middle Chinese, of which, for example, the Shanghai based Wu dialect, or the Southern Teochew dialect, retain much of the features of, and you will really feel like you're studying the mother language.
tabtab 6y ago
My spouse is Chinese and I tried to learn Chinese for obvious reasons. However, they speak multiple dialects in practice such that it's hard to focus, and there are limited training materials for some of the dialects. Generally there is Cantonese, Mandarin, and their local dialect, which is what they use most often.
- andi999 6y ago
  Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if you found a solution.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    The English and Chinese Wikipedia articles about the dialect will usually have at least some useful information e.g. about the phonology and maybe links to other resources. You can also try Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese#About_specific_lects https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese#Abou... https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ has IPA pronunciations for single characters across many different dialects. https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ may have some recorded vocabulary. https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime has input methods for many dialects that can also be abused as a dictionary (associating romanization with Chinese characters you can look up). https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-kb0gr11d1 https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-k... may have flashcards if you're lucky. You'll probably also want to make your own flashcards. https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump is helpful for getting voice messages out of WeChat. If you want to practice by passive listening, you can try http://phonemica.net/ http://phonemica.net/ , searching on https://youku.com/ https://youku.com/ or check whether there's a local TV station that has programs in dialect. Reading material will be almost impossible to find, but maybe there's a bible translation from the 19th century or something. Also check whether there's a local language preservation group. Finally, https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ is supposed make a lot of material available to the public soonish (right now I get a certificate error in Firefox, but you can see the landing page in a less strict browser).
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like That is rather an exaggeration. Korean and Japanese can be used as guides for Middle Chinese pronunciation, but they aren’t all that useful compared to using China’s own rhyme tables and running the comparative method on the Chinese dialects. For stages of Chinese before Middle Chinese, neither Korean nor Japanese are useful at all.
lifthrasiir 6y ago
> Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and Korean.
- stanrivers 6y ago
  Yes - you should learned the language that has meaning to your life. If you don’t have a reason to use the language you will forget it all. And agreed - once you get into more “college level or technical” Korean for lack of a better word, knowing the hanja/ Chinese characters makes vocab acquisition easier.
throwaway66554 6y ago
>Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. >The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English. An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max. Words like "library" use the same Chinese letters, and have very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent. I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did). Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
- 49531 6y ago
  That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.
  - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
    There's also "Gift" (Poison), "Pickel" (Pimple), "Wo" (where), "Wer" (who), "Fahrt" (travel), and so on...
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  > I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did). Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when visiting Japan in recent years. What's your rationale for this ordering?
  - throwaway66554 6y ago
    Because when you learn Japanese, you have to learn kanji, the more traditional strokes (non-simplified), both Japanese and Chinese sounds, and the grammar is closer to Korean (and closer pronunciation for a lot of words). So, it's better to learn Japanese, quickly pick up Korean, then learn Chinese. Chinese last since you have to learn simplified characters, the grammar is different, tonality is quite different, etc.
kazinator 6y ago
Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust". Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending particle like よ. E.g. "ばかだよ私は". Sometimes that can be because the speaker realizes mid-sentence that it requires a topic to be clear, and you can tell when this is the case when the topic is preceded by a pause. But it has a nuance of its own, so it is used deliberately, even in writing.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  "Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.
  - pmyteh 6y ago
    It's not absolutely unknown: "With this ring, I thee wed" from the Book of Common Prayer marriage service seems to me to be SOV (with an adverbial bit in advance), though it's definitely archaic. I imagine it features a bit in poetry too.
    - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
      The word order in that sentence is less important, because it uses old pronoun "thee" as opposed to "thou" (analogous to German "dich" vs "du"), thus indicating the subject and object. "With this ring, thee I wed" "I wed thee, with this ring" ... "Thee, with this ring, I wed" (???) When you use "you", suddenly there is only one obvious order.
      - kazinator 6y ago
        You, with your attitude, I cannot accept!
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
>Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and refined consistently over many years. All of these become harder the further the target language is from the ones you already know. Would French really be significantly harder to learn if they said 'Je le ballon frappe'?. I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms). Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you need to listen and read for. Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.
- laurieg 6y ago
  A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.
    - 6y ago
totetsu 6y ago
My university Japanese class was full of Korean and Chinese international students. It was hard to keep up.
ngokevin 6y ago
If you're learning Chinese from her, you might be interested in my project for couples learning each other's languages! https://learncoupling.com https://learncoupling.com

philliphaydon 6y ago

> The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

naniwaduni 6y ago
Modern Korean alone definitely isn't sufficient to reconstruct from, but including it in an analysis can add some information that isn't preserved in other branches.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Chinese itself wasn’t much of a tonal language until a little more than one thousand years ago. Modern Chinese tones emerged in the Middle Chinese era as a way to avoid homophony/preserve distinctions of meaning as a lot of old final consonants were lost.
stanrivers 6y ago
Korean does not have vowel length change the meaning, however Japanese does. Korean used to be tonal, and you are right it now longer is. Korean is used in combination with other data points to determine pronunciations. This works for old English plays, for example too. You can use poems that should rhyme, plus commentary from linguists at the time, to guess what certain words would sound like “back then”. Just saying that Korean is another super rare but fun random fact that I have heard of being used at least once in combination with ancient Chinese poems, to guess at the old Chinese pronunciation.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology > In 2012, vowel length is reported almost completely neutralized in Korean, except for a very few older speakers of Seoul dialect,[14] for whom the distinctive vowel-length distinction is maintained only in the first syllable of a word.[13] So it does have vowel length change meaning but it’s almost kinda died out like tones?
  - yongjik 6y ago
    Native Korean speaker here, born in the 70s and grew up in Seoul. We all learned a dozen short-long pairs at school (like 눈 nun being either eye or snow), and of course the education got all of us tricked into thinking that we're making these distinctions (if only we try hard enough). But looking at it objectively, I don't think a single person around me used vowel length distinction. If you have to "think" whether a word is long or short, that means the distinction is dead. No English speaker has to "think" whether fan or pan is the correct word. An actual sound distinction comes automatically for native speakers. Similarly, ㅐ/ㅔ ("ae"/"e") distinction was dead before I was born, but schools insisted that they're well and alive. Not sure what they're teaching these days.
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      I can't speak Korean, only a little bit of Mandarin :D so I'm really happy to have your reply, thank you! Makes sense!

z2 6y ago

I totally agree with this analogy, though maybe to add some nuance (or pedantry), I'd claim that to start learning Chinese, you need to pick a modern dialect (probably Mandarin), which is like choosing Spanish over Portuguese or Catalan. Then, learning Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese) is like learning a nearby but non-Romance language that was heavily influenced by Latin or Romance languages, like English. Knowing Spanish will let you appreciate the similarities with English, but you'd still need to delve into historical Spanish (or French) to really see the connections. Chinese is a pretty old and continuous language, so at the advanced level, learners could delve into Classical Chinese, which is truly analogous to Latin, and was also a dominant lingua franca in written form across East Asia. Pieces of Classical Chinese are 'alive' in everyday use, kind of like how Latin is 'alive' in the Romance languages through general and obvious similarities, or specific vocabulary, (e.g. "quid pro quo", "ad hominem"). But Classical Chinese is radically different from any dialect of today's vernacular Chinese. In any case, the similarities and overlap definitely make learning between CJK(V) easier!

stanrivers 6y ago
100% agree with this post, which I tried to get at saying that Korean and Japanese are distinct. Apologies for not making that clear. Your post is great to clarify this all more specifically. The cultural side of things definitely requires a lot of time. And that’s fun. What also takes time is learned how ideas are shared. Not just grammar, but which version of the multiple correct grammar options that is more common. How are paragraphs constructed? What is usually shared first in an idea or argument versus the end? You can have someone with completely correct grammar and pronunciation that sounds odd to a native speak because the cultural / idea organization is not “native”.
Cro_on 6y ago
Go back to middle Chinese, of which, for example, the Shanghai based Wu dialect, or the Southern Teochew dialect, retain much of the features of, and you will really feel like you're studying the mother language.

tabtab 6y ago

My spouse is Chinese and I tried to learn Chinese for obvious reasons. However, they speak multiple dialects in practice such that it's hard to focus, and there are limited training materials for some of the dialects. Generally there is Cantonese, Mandarin, and their local dialect, which is what they use most often.

andi999 6y ago
Same problem here (different dialect though). Let me know if you found a solution.
- yorwba 6y ago
  The English and Chinese Wikipedia articles about the dialect will usually have at least some useful information e.g. about the phonology and maybe links to other resources. You can also try Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese#About_specific_lects https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese#Abou... https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ https://xiaoxue.iis.sinica.edu.tw/ccr/ has IPA pronunciations for single characters across many different dialects. https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ https://forvo.com/languages-codes/ may have some recorded vocabulary. https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime https://github.com/laubonghaudoi/Chinese_Rime has input methods for many dialects that can also be abused as a dictionary (associating romanization with Chinese characters you can look up). https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-kb0gr11d1 https://xefjord.wixsite.com/xefscompletelangs/courses#comp-k... may have flashcards if you're lucky. You'll probably also want to make your own flashcards. https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump is helpful for getting voice messages out of WeChat. If you want to practice by passive listening, you can try http://phonemica.net/ http://phonemica.net/ , searching on https://youku.com/ https://youku.com/ or check whether there's a local TV station that has programs in dialect. Reading material will be almost impossible to find, but maybe there's a bible translation from the 19th century or something. Also check whether there's a local language preservation group. Finally, https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ https://zhongguoyuyan.cn/ is supposed make a lot of material available to the public soonish (right now I get a certificate error in Firefox, but you can see the landing page in a less strict browser).

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like That is rather an exaggeration. Korean and Japanese can be used as guides for Middle Chinese pronunciation, but they aren’t all that useful compared to using China’s own rhyme tables and running the comparative method on the Chinese dialects. For stages of Chinese before Middle Chinese, neither Korean nor Japanese are useful at all.

lifthrasiir 6y ago

> Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. As a native Korean speaker this is an apt analogy, even more so because it won't help much initially but will help a lot once you've got to the later stage of learning. This is of course a valid strategy if you want to eventually learn both Chinese and Korean.

stanrivers 6y ago
Yes - you should learned the language that has meaning to your life. If you don’t have a reason to use the language you will forget it all. And agreed - once you get into more “college level or technical” Korean for lack of a better word, knowing the hanja/ Chinese characters makes vocab acquisition easier.

throwaway66554 6y ago

>Learning Chinese is like learning Latin before learning a Romance language. >The added benefit is that Chinese isn’t a dead language. I wouldn't go that far. It's more like learning Greek and hearing many of the same root words, sounds, etymology, etc. in English. An Italian speaker can listen to Latin and grok maybe 25%. A Japanese speaker can listen to Chinese and get maybe 2%, max. Words like "library" use the same Chinese letters, and have very similar pronunciations, but that's about the extent. I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did). Source: I speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

49531 6y ago
That sounds similar to English and German. There are a few words that are still somewhat connected, like water / wasser, but knowing one gives little insight into the other.
- krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
  There's also "Gift" (Poison), "Pickel" (Pimple), "Wo" (where), "Wer" (who), "Fahrt" (travel), and so on...
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
> I'd say the best way to learn would be Japanese, Korean, then Chinese (what I did). Why? I speak Chinese and used to be fluent in Japanese. I find my Chinese (and English + katakana) a huge help when visiting Japan in recent years. What's your rationale for this ordering?
- throwaway66554 6y ago
  Because when you learn Japanese, you have to learn kanji, the more traditional strokes (non-simplified), both Japanese and Chinese sounds, and the grammar is closer to Korean (and closer pronunciation for a lot of words). So, it's better to learn Japanese, quickly pick up Korean, then learn Chinese. Chinese last since you have to learn simplified characters, the grammar is different, tonality is quite different, etc.

kazinator 6y ago

Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust". Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending particle like よ. E.g. "ばかだよ私は". Sometimes that can be because the speaker realizes mid-sentence that it requires a topic to be clear, and you can tell when this is the case when the topic is preceded by a pause. But it has a nuance of its own, so it is used deliberately, even in writing.

jcranmer 6y ago
"Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.
- pmyteh 6y ago
  It's not absolutely unknown: "With this ring, I thee wed" from the Book of Common Prayer marriage service seems to me to be SOV (with an adverbial bit in advance), though it's definitely archaic. I imagine it features a bit in poetry too.
  - krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
    The word order in that sentence is less important, because it uses old pronoun "thee" as opposed to "thou" (analogous to German "dich" vs "du"), thus indicating the subject and object. "With this ring, thee I wed" "I wed thee, with this ring" ... "Thee, with this ring, I wed" (???) When you use "you", suddenly there is only one obvious order.
    - kazinator 6y ago
      You, with your attitude, I cannot accept!

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

>Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be learned and refined consistently over many years. All of these become harder the further the target language is from the ones you already know. Would French really be significantly harder to learn if they said 'Je le ballon frappe'?. I also think this applies to some other 'hard' qualities of languages, like pronouns and alphabets (i.e. not logograms). Conversely, freedom in how you approach grammar in a sentence makes it harder, not easier, because while you're able to structure a sentence how you like it makes it harder to know what sounds idiomatic and it increases the number of forms you need to listen and read for. Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the highest entropy. If there was another word that carried the same meaning but was more common, the author would be more likely to use it. So it's not enought to learn 90% of the words, you need the niche words too.

laurieg 6y ago
A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.
- adrianN 6y ago
  The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.
  - 6y ago

totetsu 6y ago

My university Japanese class was full of Korean and Chinese international students. It was hard to keep up.

ngokevin 6y ago

If you're learning Chinese from her, you might be interested in my project for couples learning each other's languages! https://learncoupling.com https://learncoupling.com