Curious what other languages are represented here. Are you learning a new language? Is anyone here learning any endangered languages?
Curious what other languages are represented here. Are you learning a new language? Is anyone here learning any endangered languages?
I’m bilingual in German and French since I have family on both sides of the border and I’m mostly okay at English. I’d love to learn Mandarin one day but I feel like I’m too much of an idiot to get anywhere with that, really
Honestly I’ve just started on Mandarin a couple months ago and the basics really aren’t that bad. The tones are kinda difficult to grasp for me but I dunno reading-wise I’m finding it easier than German was to learn as a second language from English, which should have been a cakewalk. I’ll probably never be completely fluent or have a huge vocabulary but it turns out the majority of communication only uses a relatively small subset of characters anyway. I’d highly recommend giving it a shot, you may be surprised.
Well, “relatively small” being about 2k for causal speech and texting, and 3~5k for texts, depending on the type of literature. Luckily most Chinese characters are phono-semantic, meaning one side gives a pronunciation hint whilst the other gives a meaning hint.
Yeah it’s not nothing, but it’s way more manageable than a lot of people might think coming into it, myself included
That’s really interesting! Thank you for the encouragement!