WHY ENGLISH IS HARD TO LEARN

[Fat Homer]

It can't be all that bad... Learning a new language is like learning basic algebra. You get you equations (sentence structure) and your answer (translation) and all you have to do is fill in the variables (vocabulary). I want to learn Latin.


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Its difficult because unlike a lot of languages that have an alphabet of some sort or similar, Chinese there is no alphabet, but instead probably hundreds of thousands of characters that can be made from as little as one stroke to up to 10 or more per character which is why its really difficult to learn it properly...

Then the pronunciation is another challenge as depending on tones, length of the sound etc, you can probably create 4 maybe 5 words out of certain words if you know what mean?

Take for example the No.2 in Cantonese, if you change the tone a little it could mean "Easy" instead, or it could mean 2 or 3 different other things as well... so yeah... thats the only reason why i say its pretty much one of the most difficult languages to learn fluently...

 

[Warborg]

Really? As in shes pretty much fluent in Reading and Speaking cantonese (not going to get into written Traditional Chinese since thats a whole other ball game)... but seriously, i'm not doubting it, since i know a lot of Filipinos actually living in Hong Kong for say 10+ years that can speak very basic cantonese if the put their minds to it... But tell them to actually read a local News Paper or hold a full on conversation with some one in Cantonese only and they'll fall apart...

I've met plenty of people who've tried to learn Cantonese, especially later on in life and most if not all gave up and turned to Mandarin since its literally 100X easier to learn than Cantonese due to the fact you can actually write down how a word would sound...

She can carry a good conversation with Chinese people. I don't know about writing...and yes she did live in Hong Kong for 10 years