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That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, no
by MichaelZuo 2y ago
That’s a pretty good point… if I saw ‘three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard’ forget how to write ‘sneeze’, I would assume they were lunatics pretending, not that they genuinely forgot how to write the word.
Does that imply learning the advanced literary culture, that is usually associated with prestige academia, has a vastly higher threshold in Chinese than in English?
It’s pretty disturbing for language itself to be a potentially retarding force on learning.
- shrimptho 2y agoAll three PhD's were perfectly capable of communicating the word for sneeze and also recognize it in writting. They just couldn't write it exactly. I don't think it has a slowing effect. Except maybe by adding annoying/useless classes for mid/primary students - which is just par for course everywhere else. I can name 3 objectively completely useless classes from my european youth (plus one in college) that were only there because 'culture'.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoHow does your assessment of the relative usefulness of ‘classes’ from youth relate to the possible existence of a retarding effect arising from language differences?
- djtango 2y agoA better example than sneeze might be diarrhoea. In Chinese this is very easy - 拉肚子 - but I'm sure there are English speakers who might forget the spelling for diarrhoea if they're having a bad day.
- ralfd 2y agoDoes English not have a native word? It would be „Durchfall“ in German, and the Greek word only be used if one wanted to be fancy.
- jan_Inkepa 2y agoIt just has, uh, diarroeha...yeah I can't spell it either
- School-Cotton 2y agoEnglish speakers perceive it as a native word, not a Greek one. There are lots of examples of this, where English has a foreign-sounding word for something whereas German has a Germanic one. For example oxygen vs. Sauerstoff.