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

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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.

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.

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.

Abjad

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

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

Contributors

GrimPixel and Maintenance script


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