Used to think Chinese must be impossible to learn as so much depends on context and very slight “stresses” (forget the word). Now I’m thinking that applies to about any language.
Tones is the word, and while Chinese tones are hard they’re just part of the pronunciation of a word rather than anything context dependent. The English equivalent would be the stressed syllable in a word, and yes every language has something like this.
It does, it just depends on how it’s coded. Like, take word order. If you have a case system with nominative, accusative, etc. your word order can be pretty free, you can move objects to the front of the sentence like ‘food-ACC eat I-NOM’.
Remove the case system and it’s simpler to encode the words, but word order becomes much more fixed.
All languages are equally complex, in theory at least, but where the complexity lies is different.
Used to think Chinese must be impossible to learn as so much depends on context and very slight “stresses” (forget the word). Now I’m thinking that applies to about any language.
Tones is the word, and while Chinese tones are hard they’re just part of the pronunciation of a word rather than anything context dependent. The English equivalent would be the stressed syllable in a word, and yes every language has something like this.
It does, it just depends on how it’s coded. Like, take word order. If you have a case system with nominative, accusative, etc. your word order can be pretty free, you can move objects to the front of the sentence like ‘food-ACC eat I-NOM’.
Remove the case system and it’s simpler to encode the words, but word order becomes much more fixed.
All languages are equally complex, in theory at least, but where the complexity lies is different.