Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Difficulties-of-languages

This article summarises things that language learners find difficult to learn as well as advice for them. Generic solutions like “speak it aloud”, “practise with native speakers” are omitted.

In progress.

(Xuan Zang)

Article

Problem: The usage of grammatical articles in different languages are different.

Solution:

• Read webpages and find grammatical articles with the help of “find in page”, find sentences and comprehend the rules.

Classifier

Problem: Every noun needs a classifier in some languages when counting.

Solution:

• Find the lists: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, create flashcards and practise.
• Write down a lot of lines of “two something”, use a machine translation to see the result.

Homophone

Problem: A pronunciation has a lot of meanings, corresponding to different words. This is particularly often in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese.

Solution:

• Find the most frequent words/characters and write down their homophones. Practise recalling them as many as possible (except those obsolete ones).
• For Chinese, practise recalling all common characters of a sound.
• For Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, learn Han script, understand the etymology behind the pronunciations. Use the input method to see the result in Han script, which is explanatory on the etymology.

Inflection

Problem: The conjugation and declension tables look irregular.

Solution:

• Meditation. Keep your focus on the patterns and think nothing else.
• Mnemonic. Like this image.

Logogram

Problem: There are two sets of reading system for Han script in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese: Native and Sinitic. When practising with flashcards, the readings for a character are too many to be memorised effectively.

Solution:

• Ignore native readings at first. When the flashcard deck learning is finished, reset it and learn the native readings in the second round.