A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to Learn Foreign Languages

Re:A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to ... by closed on Thursday November 30, 2017 @11:38PM (#15821948)

I started learning Cantonese recently, and the thing that struck me is how insane it is just to get started. Half of my books use Yale romanization, but others use jyutping, so I had to pick up both.

Add to that that written Cantonese is Mandarin, but most speakers use traditional characters, and it's a hot stew of pain.

(the grammar is a lot of fun though)

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Re:A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes English-Speakers to ... by martalist on Friday December 01, 2017 @12:23AM (#15822116)

I ended up making my own notation early on, for exactly the same reason.

Adding to the difficulty is that some native speakers will enthusiastically correct your tone by over emphasiszing and embellishing their words (with trailing tones, ah's and lah's, etc). There are some people that I simply can't learn words from because I can never pick the tone. Luckily after a while you can pick those people fairly quickly!

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