![]() I have many friends from South Tyrol in Italy. ![]() Despite not being related linguistically, the similarities are surprising: agglutination and suffixes, vowel harmony, consonant gradation, genderless pronouns and more. Apart from Estonian, Turkish is the only language which gives you an advantage in learning Finnish. Chinese speakers struggle with cases and pronunciation. Speakers of Indo-European languages find the case inflection hard, while Arabic speakers have only three vowels (Finnish is rich in vowels and diphthongs). I’ve taught Finnish to foreigners, and Arabic and Chinese native speakers struggle with it just as much as Europeans, but for different reasons. My local contacts find it amusing that a native Mandarin speaker can converse in their language, at least to some extent. Recently, I have undertaken the study of Swahili, due to potential clients based in that region. Additionally, finding learning resources in Mandarin for specific languages such as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian can prove difficult.Ĭertain languages present difficulties to learners regardless of their native tongue. If a learner lacks proficiency in English, mastering European languages becomes incredibly challenging. I am learning Swedish, solely relying on English as my medium of instruction. If Mandarin speakers possess a command of English, they will find it considerably easier to learn some European languages, such as French and Spanish. Are they exceptionally difficult for Mandarin speakers? The answer depends on certain factors. ![]() Furthermore, Mandarin differs significantly from other Asian languages, including Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. While a typical Japanese text does incorporate kanji (Chinese characters), they adhere to an entirely distinct pronunciation and grammatical structure. Some individuals may argue that Mandarin is similar to Japanese, but this is incorrect. Mandarin speakers encounter challenges when learning various languages, given the stark differences between Mandarin and other languages. Mandarin is my first language, although I rarely use it nowadays as I am employed by a Swedish company. bcpMartinĪ former Chinese-English translator and interpreter here. Kalaallisut and Pirahã have always topped my list of languages I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole I doubt they would be much easier for an Arabic or Mandarin speaker. Some languages just look hard for anyone. Polish speakers are often clear speakers of Mandarin because they have a similar retroflex/palatal distinction in their affricates that often throws learners. The further the distance from what one is used to, the harder to learn, I suppose. Phonology (Chinese: tones Arabic: back-of-the-throat stuff) and writing systems present extra challenges. Mandarin is highly analytical ( very little morphology or grammar to remember words don’t generally change sound) and Arabic is highly agglutinative (words consist of multiple morphemes and change a lot lots of grammar to learn), so they are probably mutually even more difficult than either is for an English speaker (English being somewhere between synthetic and analytic). nina1414Īs someone whose second language is Mandarin, I would dispute it is hard to learn, but Mandarin and Arabic are sort of opposites syntactically. ![]() You don’t generally use the definite article with abstract nouns in English, but you do with German, eg “ Er wartete auf den tod” - “He waited for death”. Mind you, Russian has six cases and Finnish 16, so it could be worse.) In Russian, you can just say: “Book on table.” There’s no need to write: “The book is on the table.”Įven though English and German have articles, they don’t use them in the same way. When they learn German – I live in Germany – they also have three versions of “the” (der, die, das), and then four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative). Their biggest problems were articles, ie “the” or “a”/“an”. I’ve had students who spoke those languages. I don’t know enough about Arabic, but Chinese, Japanese and Russian have no articles.
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