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by sedansesame
751 days ago
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Most of the article talks about characters, but in my experience, they are the easy part. Unlike Japanese and its 15 ways to pronounce 生, Chinese is "easy" by comparison, with most characters mapping only to one sound. The death blow is the tones. For the Anglo-centric, not only are you unable to "read out" the characters like you can Latin-based scripts (let alone the "cursive script"), but if the tones are off, you'll accidentally call your mother (妈 mā) a horse (马 mǎ). Japanese is a lot more straightforward in this regard. On its own, each challenge is surmountable. English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]). But when the whole language is like that, it becomes a lot harder. --- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/221b2t/read... |
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