• hes_fired [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's honestly not as hard as people make out after the first few months. Yeah, mastering the sounds is hard; but:

    • the grammar is easy -- as a beginner you can basically use any fucking word order and it makes enough sense to be understood by native speakers
    • numbers are a piece of piss -- if you know 1-10, 100, 1000, etc. you know the entire system -- there's non of that "thirteen, twenty-one" bollocks like English, let alone German or French nonsense (wtf is a quatre-vingt-dix-sept???)
    • actual words tend to be pretty simple and reusable to mean similar things as descriptors when you're starting out
    • the characters aren't anywhere near as hard as Japanese/Thai

    Give it a shot on duolingo for a couple of weeks and if you don't click then it might not be for you, but I found it easier than Korean, Thai, Japanese etc that I've dabbled in a bit for holidays

    Also the range of sounds you use in speech I swear improved my singing voice by miles but YMMV

      • hes_fired [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Might be worth starting a (new) Duolingo account so you can get a 14 day free trial. Unlimited retries to just repeat it until you get it. It didn't click for me for about 10 days of 15 mins a day, but after that I basically didn't need to pay for retries etc.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      it is hard but the fact there are only 214 radicals helps you figure out roughly what a word means

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The hard thing for me is the script. I actually found Vietnamese easier because it has a phonetic alphabet