On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 01:01:25PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: > > > >In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the > >farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to > >generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European > >languages). > > > > That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker > who's (attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found > german considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just > weird. > > I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more > similar to english (and english makes no sense even to a native > speaker!) The word genders didn't help, either.
Yeah, learning a related language has the pitfall of giving a false sense of familiarity, when the correct approach is to start from a clean slate, make no assumptions, and treat it like the foreign language that it is. My wife, for example, is a native Mandarin speaker, but when she started learning Cantonese, she eventually realized that she had to stop all attempts at generalizing from Mandarin, and treat it as a completely new foreign language. Otherwise she would end up like so many Mandarin speakers who *think* they can speak Cantonese just by warping their pronunciation a little, but actually end up butchering the pronunciation *and* the grammar (and yes, Cantonese grammar *is* different from Mandarin, in spite of similarities) and sounding like an idiot to a native Cantonese speaker. Even though Cantonese does share a lot of common words with Mandarin, they do *not* use them in the same contexts or in the same ways, and naive transliteration often sounds totally weird, or outright wrong. (Ob-ontopic) It's kinda like how you can write C/C++-like code in D, but to a "native" D coder, your code would look pretty weird and very un-idiomatic. (Or, as Larry Wall once said, you can write assembly code in any language. :-P) Fortunately, in the programming world, your code probably would still work, to some extent. But with natural languages that may not be true. :-P To truly learn a language well, programming or natural, you really have to treat it as a language in its own right, rather than just "C with classes" or "C++ with nice template syntax" or "Mandarin with warped vowels". T -- Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.