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.

This page has a parent: https://polyglotclub.com/wiki/Language/Multiple-languages/Culture/Techniques-for-learning-languages

Abjad

In Abjad, short vowels are expressed by diacritics, which are often omitted.

• Read dictionaries entry by entry to get familiar with the pattern of vowels.

Article

The usage of grammatical articles in different languages are different.

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

Classifier

Every noun needs a classifier in some languages when counting.

• 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

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

• Find the most frequent words/characters and write down their homophones. Practise recalling them as many as possible (except those obsolete ones).
• Practise recalling all common characters of a reading: Use phonetic-based input methods to input random reading and memorise the result.
• For learning Korean and 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.

Gender

There are genders for nouns in some languages.

• Focus on the exceptions.
• Replace a noun in a sentence with a noun with different gender, and modify the sentence to make it grammatically correct. So you are familiar with the process of correcting a gender.

Inflection

The conjugation and declension tables look irregular.

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

There are many forms of an adjective

• Memorise all inflected words together
• Say a sentence without adjective or article, then say the sentence with an article added, then say the sentence with an adjective add; try to change its case, tense, etc. and say again

Letter Form

In some writing systems, a letter may have different forms, depending on its position.

• Write a fabricated word consisting of the same letter like ههه multiple times.

Logogram

The number of characters to remember is discouragingly large.

• Divide characters into different groups with pronunciation, radical, frequency level. Learn group by group.

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.

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

Other Lessons

• Calendar and Clock
• How to locate the origin of a video or a photo
• Listening material with transcript
• Tabletop Games
• Most Famous Folk Songs
• How to use SR and TTS on Windows
• Data of Living Conditions
• Most Famous Non–Contemporary Artists
• Good Memories
• Video Games with Real‐Life Occupations