The language that has kicked my ass
For a long time I pretty much assumed that while all languages have their own difficult points and easy points, they all more or less balance each other out and the amount of time and effort required to learn didn’t vary all that much. I have a very efficient set of methods for learning but those methods are not universally applicable to every language. While I still believe any language can be learned very quickly with the right methods and effort, there are some language that require a different approach.
Japanese
Japanese has pretty complicated grammar that is counter intuitive for just about everyone except Koreans (Korean grammar is pretty much the same). There is a polite and casual way to say everything and tons of little nuances you can put into your sentences which change the overall tone. There are tons of characters to memorize and not one but TWO “alphabets” to learn. The characters also have many pronunciations which is a headache. To make up for this, pronunciation is as simple as it gets. You can reach understandable pronunciation in a matter of 2-3 days with a YouTube video. All the sounds always sound the same no matter how the different “letters” connect. Self study is ok cause your chances of mispronouncing and developing an awful accent require some pretty heavy negligence.
Took me 3 years to become fluent.
Mandarin
While the sounds are much more difficult to Japanese, they are still manageable. They require a little more practice and there are more of them, but at least pinyin, the romanization of the sounds is fairly straightforward. All you need to learn as an English speaker is how a few letters are pronounced differently from English (xi is like “she”...not “ji”, I don’t know why no one tells any English speaking news reporter this). The tones are a bit rough but you can manage if you have a textbook with a cd or do a lot of listening practice as you practice the grammar. The tones are also romanized well, flat line, up line, down line and curvy line. There is no alphabet and characters almost always have the same pronunciation which is simpler than Japanese. And the grammar is way simpler than any other language I’ve studied, at least when we are talking about daily conversation. No conjugation (like Japanese) and very straightforward structures (at Least as simple as western languages, maybe moreso). Also mandarin speakers will speak mandarin to you without reservations which means you can practice easily.
Took me 5 months to become fluent.
Spanish Portuguese and Italian
I’ve never been motivated enough to make any if these fluent because I’ve never had many speakers around as an adult but I know it wouldn’t be be hard for me to study these. The sounds are almost as simple as Japanese and the grammar is basically intuitive for an English speaker. The masculine and feminine nouns are a bit of a pain and everything’s is conjugated but whatever. Lots in common with English and straightforward enough. I will learn someday.
French and German
The difficulty of these two, for an English speaker, seems pretty similar to the last few plus slightly harder pronunciation (nothing too crazy) and slightly more nuanced grammar. I haven’t studied enough to know but I’m quite sure I could handle either.
The language that has kicked my ass : Cantonese
Everything that’s difficult about Mandarin, make it’s more difficult. The pronunciation is wild. I’ve been working on it for two years on and off (not full time of course, if it was it wouldn’t take THIS long) and I still can’t remember how to pronounce things. The romanization is a mess and this makes it incredibly hard. It means I always need a Cantonese speaker around because any notes I take, I not know how to speak out after I practice them. It also means reading and speaking don’t really enhance each other. The grammar isn’t slightly more nuanced and the characters are traditional, luckily I know Japanese. Add to these difficulties, most Cantonese speakers won’t speak Cantonese with you unless you push them. In Hong Kong they’ll speak English with a foreigner, in Guangdong they’ll speak Mandarin with a foreigner. Resources are limited and hard to find. Even the electronics dictionaries are lacking
I usually need to rely on my notes to practice grammar but since the romanization isn’t helpful and I’ve had such a hard time getting the sounds down (forget the 6-9 tones), my notes are all but uselessly. I usually make lots of sentences to practice and learn new words but the dictionaries that come with a sound feature are very limited with only few hundred words. It doesn’t help that I haven’t consistently been in an environment to study and that I only study for a few weeks at a time before getting busy with other things. Also, I only hear this in groups which is not easy to speak in like one on one conversation.
Still, I WILL conquer this language
Because I have so many friends who are native speakers and I love to visit them, I’m set on learning this one. I’ve set aside 20-30 minutes a day to SPEAK Cantonese and I have a wide selection of friends who I can ask to speak with and who will answer my questions if I have any. Even when I’m not in Hong Kong i can easily find them on Facebook or maybe even discord in the future. I’m already very familiar with the efficient ways of learning a language and know my weaknesses so I will ask all the right questions and encourage my friends to repeat a lot of the same words and structures. I won’t have notes to rely on but I’m not in a huge hurry anyway, I just hope I can become conversational by the end of the year.
Here’s to all that! Then hopefully I can finally get around to some western languages.
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Confessions of the Damaged - a collection of short stories
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by @skyleap
While there are tone of dialects, most people can understand Mandarin well enough.
Join the "Be Awesome" discord community
The Be Awesome discord chat, was created with the intention of making deeper connections with fellow steemians. Come talk about "deep shit" and make friends.
I’m also a language learning coach. Come find me if you need help learning a language.
Confessions of the Damaged - a collection of short stories
—-
I welcome crypto gifts :-D
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by @skyleap
Dude, HOW on earth did you master all of these truly difficult languages? I speak and understand about 5 languages, but most of them share European similarities.
Do you also actively use all of these languages still? Or was it just to learn them for the fact of learning them?
Ive tried to learn for the sake of learning with western languages but between the other languages and music and writing, I always lose motivation. The others were practical to speak with people.
The most difficult thing about them is that we think they are difficult and still stuck in classroom learning methods. Even Cantonese would have been ok for me if I had a chance to use it with people who didn’t always change to English or mandarin
Which languages do you speak?
Classroom methods, yeah the death of motivation dude. And agree what we think is difficult will make it more difficult!
Im native Dutch/English speaking, had French and German in school and by just bing there a lot and am still working on Spanish because it is just convenient here. But these languages have so many similarities also based on Latin origin (also in school, but faaar far away), that they are easy to exchange
I find it so hard to focus on a language that is too similar to English. I get bored with words that are just SLIGHTLY different. Loanwords in Japanese as well. Mandarin loanwords don't sound like loanwords which is nice.
Which means you are somebody who really like languages as an activity right??
I am always excited actually when I find words that are similar to other to be honest. It always proves to me that in the end we are all the same.
More than often when I have patients at work who I can not understand, Im thinking: why dont we all just speak the same language haha
Speaking different languages is a wonderful thing. ♥
I am fluent in 3 (English, Italian and Croatian). I travel often and feel safe everywhere I go. ;)
Hahah I haven't tried to learn most of the other languages you mentioned here, but I was born and raised in HK, and learnt Cantonese, and a part of me is glad that you acknowledged that it is NOT an easy language to learn whatsoever. I struggled lots with the language growing up there, especially because we spoke English at home. And now, with my kids, I'm not going to make them learn Cantonese, even though it's what most of our family and friends that way speak. I'd rather them learn Mandarin instead, because it's just the more natural one to learn if you're an English speaker!
Well they teach language very poorly in school and it’s more the classroom setting than the curriculum sometimes. You speak it fluently now?
I hope one day they decide to learn on their own, the culture is so awesome, it’s really a culture of its own, unique in a lot of ways. I would hate to see the language disappear, which i think is a real possibility, Shenzhen is all Mandarin, Central is all English....the rest of Guangdong is likely to make a slow transition to mandarin, I know some people in their twenties who can’t really speak great Cantonese despite it being their first language. If it’s about which isn’t more useful, then mandarin of course, but under the right conditions, it’s still not that hard to learna few languages. It’s all about setting up the environment for natural learning.
wow dude - very impressive - keep going with it - look forward to following your story.
Anyone who can speak several languages is definitely brilliant.
Steem On!
Anyone can! It’s just about motivation and study methods...most people don’t have enough and use the wrong ones!
Makes me feel glad that my sifu speaks Cantonese and willing enough to teach, though he teaches the same way I learn which is to say extremely casually (if I'm the only non-Chinese speaking person in the class he will talk to everyone else in Cantonese and then translate for me, and occasionally send me texts in Cantonese which I can mostly read, I just can't speak or understand what I'm hearing most of the time XD)
I think on pronunciation a lot has to do with what you grew up hearing, as I don't have too much difficulties being able to hear the pronunciations of Asian languages (though sometimes it takes a bit of practice to get the Chinese ones just so, have zero issues with Malay/Indonesian aside from pronouncing everything with a Malay accent, just more used to that lilt XP) but a lot of the Euro ones stump me and I can't even with Slavic languages or Arabic or anything else that requires that phlegmy -ch- sound XD
And having said all that I haven't actually looked too intently at Japanese even though it did intrigue me for a little purely to try to understand anime and a lot of the non-translated Japanese RPGs I loved a bit better.
Good luck with it :D
I never had much of a problem with pronunciation in other languages because I’ve always listened to a lot of music and remember it all very well, including all the nuances.
I have a lot of questions for you but I’ll leave most of them for chat....just one I need to know urgently....
Which untranslated RPGs!
Mostly the Final Fantasies that didn't make it to Australia XD I had this thing for Square Enix games back in the day.
Very Beautiful💜