City Guide
Answers
Login
Home
/
Community
/
Forums
/ Post a Reply
Post a Reply
Thread: Comparing languages
Title:
(100 characters at most)
Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )
You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.
[quote=TOMSPENCER,258660]I'm not sure whether I can attribute scores to language in terms of how easy I've found learning them, but I certainly have an opinion. My native language is English and at school I studied Latin, French and German. I probably ought to have started by saying that I have never been good at languages. Don't know why. I love languages - just never mastered them. Never-the-less, I found French relatively simple as, growing up in the south of England, I visited France often and got in some practice in those formative years. Also, of course, French uses an alphabet very familiar to speakers of English, and indeed there are a great many similarities between the two languages. The same could be said for German. In fact, in many ways German was even easier to learn than French because (to me) it seems to resemble English more closely. Although a lot of English is derived from Latin, I found this language just a bit too full of unfamiliar grammar for me to really make much headway. When I came to China I could neither speak nor read Chinese and everyone insisted that it was one of the most difficult languages to learn. That is, by the way, why I came here - because I thought that only by living in the country could I hope to learn the language properly. I must say, though, that my experience of Chinese, so far, has been very rewarding. Getting away from pinyin was a crucial step, as learning characters really helped me to understand the relationships between the words far more easily. The fact that Chinese bears little resemblance to English hasn't stopped me from getting along well in my studies and I am now very confident in my listening, speaking, reading and typing (not writing) abilities. I won't say that Chinese is easy to learn, but for me no language has ever been easy. Still, I don't believe that westerners should fear it as so many seem to.[/quote]
characters left
Name:
Get a new code