I am native Cantonese speaker. A few years ago I used to spend a bit of time answering questions on the Duolingo forum from people learning Japanese and Chinese. One funny fact I found was that having no tense in Chinese is unexpectedly a difficulty to English and European language speakers. They have been so used to embedding the time element in their languages and once it's not required any more they are super uncomfortable about if they say something correctly.
@S-fi5ox Жыл бұрын
We just use other constructs like auxiliary word/verb or time phrase to accomplish the task
I think it depends on your mother tongue. I do speak Korean fluently but that thanks to my Cantonese hat so basically I can understand a vast majority of C1 - C2 level vocabulary. It sounds great to have people being supportive but at the same time I don’t want people to feel very “foreign”, so I won’t really express any excitement if I see people started learning any Asian language. I would also love to mention that random languages coming from your mouth! My parents speak Shanghainese to me since I was small and I found it interesting when I stopped using it for some period of time, Korean would popped up in the middle of the conversation between me and my cousins!
@sleepysam2015 Жыл бұрын
I speak two and a half languages (English, Mandarin and Taiwanese) as I was born in Taiwan, and have lived in the United States for 2 years. Now I am in the UK (in Leeds, Yorkshire for the past 20 years!) I have tried to learn Italian, Spanish, Persian and Danish. Persian is hard, although the numbers are not that difficult to learn. Danish sometimes can be easy and hard as the grammar and vocabularies can be different from English. Take the word "carrot" for instance, in Danish it is "gulerroder". There are 29, and some times 30 letters in Danish because they have 3 extra vowels on top of the "a, e, I, o, u". Their "e, I" can also sound quite different, depending on the vocabularies themselves. I did enjoy learning Danish at the beginning, then I find it less and less enjoyable. Also, due to Brexit and family argument, I have lost my chances of forming a family and settling down in Denmark. Still, I carry on keeping up my language skills ( Japanese for me is easier to learn than French). Keep posting the talks about language learning experiences. It's good for our brains.
@momo-xh3bm Жыл бұрын
As a learner of Korean, Spanish and French, the way of how you speak in English accent fascinates me in a deep sense. ❤❤❤ just cant resist it.
I have learned English at school, majored in Japanese and taken Spanish course during college. One of the best things of learning more than one foreign language is that the more I master one, the easier for me to get resources from all over the world to help improve the others. For example, as a native speaker of Taiwanese Mandarin, I learn English through it; and then when it comes to Japanese, I get to use both Taiwanese Mandarin and English to help myself understand the contents better since sometimes it might be difficult to tell the difference between some vocabularies if you translate them to only one language. However, the downside of learning multiple languages is that they sometimes put up a fight in my brain and make me struggle with conveying my point in just one language--like I'm talking in English and all of a sudden my brain decides to switch to Japanese mode and my tongue just can't catch up with it😂
@RespectOthers1 Жыл бұрын
What a fun sharing of experience. I dabbled in German at school many years ago. Didn't learn a lot but amazed how much I still remember...like Mittwoch is the odd day of the week, a number no matter how long is written as one word and any two-digit number is somewhat spoken backwards.
I often see many Greek letters in science books.📚 Greek culture is as great as others.⭐️ Thanks.👏
@minkeiken1283 Жыл бұрын
I really like watching this kind of native-to-native series where the speed is pushed to max 😂. This showed us the pace which should be regarded as usual and normal, rather than that of Susie when teaching
@shukrimahmood Жыл бұрын
It's a great pleasure to watch and listen to such wonderful young, beautiful Ladies, with such a level of excellence in acquiring languages, especially the "challenging" ones, and sharing their much valued experiences... 👍🌹🌷🌹
@g1263004 Жыл бұрын
I learned Russian in university, and I can totally understand the difficult process of learning a new language with word genders and strict tense. Thank you and I do enjoy this conversation from two intellectual girls. Keep it on.
@SunLi-abc5 күн бұрын
Happy New Year to you and your family!
@seanmei3466 Жыл бұрын
I had this similar experience with my Spanish friend as well. I mispronounced the city Málaga into Malága. Then I saw my friend with this most confusing look on her face ever. I had to repeat so many times to her until she finally realized that I was talking about Málaga. Never thought that stress is such an important part in speaking to native speakers
Catherine is so impressive! I feel the same as Susie about learning 2 languages and one pushes out the other. My English is not very well and I struggled when I was learning French, and I gave it up eventually. 😅
@林同恩-x4u Жыл бұрын
超愛與朋友討論主題的影片內容
@NoK920 Жыл бұрын
去賣河粉滑雪😂😂😂😂btw, 你哋學過好多語言,而且掌握得好好,多謝你哋分享咁多學習經驗❤
@kennethho7671 Жыл бұрын
I speak fluent in Mandarin and Japanese because I had my first degree in Tokyo. Ironically I had my lessons all in English. I like to make day dreams in different languages. Furthermore, I will watch international news from locals in three languages from internet sources. I gain more obective view of the facts.
你好!I am originally Chinese but I’m born in England. I learnt Chinese and English when I was 2 at the same time and Chinese always was easier as a toddler but now my Chinese has slipped behind and my English dominates. I relate that speaking Chinese is the easiest but I find writing and reading near impossible, but reading is a bit easier. I’m picking up French and Spanish at the same time and my Spanish always sound so French as my French is definitely better
@inmanlin9051 Жыл бұрын
Being a native Mandarin speaker, I can totally relate to this conversation. Especially I am currently learning German; German grammar, indeed, is very regimented, compared to Mandarin or English. In the conversation, Catherine mentioned that "English is the most forgiving as a second language", I would say it's probably because English is the most powerful language in the world. Most people have to study it for business usage or immigration reasons so native English speakers have a long history of communicating with non-native english speakers. I think this can result in English as the most forgiving second language. On the contrary, I think Germany is a relatively not that opened country so it has a lower tolerance when it comes to German language.
@Shirley86200 Жыл бұрын
Thank you, Susie, for bringing up such an intriguing topic! I’m a Chinese living in Leeds, and I also speak Japanese. I resonate with the feelings you mentioned - speaking a language allows you to delve deeply into another culture. Proficiency in a language not only unveils the intricacies of a culture but also reveals certain aspects of people’s personalities, way of thinking etc. in that country. By comparing Japanese with English, I have to say English is way much easier, as you could feel it is more systematic and consistency in many many ways, whereas Japanese is more flexible and full of “Radom stuff” 😅 sorry I don’t know what word to use. Meanwhile I do feel when you study two languages together, at the beginning you may found yourself mix up things easily, especially when you try to speak without thinking too much, but once when both languages are more settled in your brain, this would happen less, of course this is from my own experience 😊 I have an interesting example here, 13 years ago, when I was preparing IELTS test as well as JPLT, one day I came across a speaking test practice with a word “腰”, there is a very weird sentence flashed through in my mind: my koshi is painful 😂 (koshi is waist in Japanese) I almost spoke this out … that was super funny and I could still remember the experience today
@susiewoo11 ай бұрын
Thank you for sharing your story! It's always enriching to hear about others' language learning journeys and the unique experiences they encounter along the way. 😊
As a native Chinese speaker learning French, I also find the learning process helpful to re-clarify my English a bit.
@lienstanley1 Жыл бұрын
First year in university, I had taken English, French, and Japanese classes at the same time. But that was not my first time to learn English and Japanese, so I was only struggling in learning French, just let me be used to the grammar of Latin languages. Second year, I had taken Italian and Korean classes. Because of the background of learning French and Japanese, I didn't feel there were difficult. Third year, I'd taken Spanish. Fourth year, I'd taken international medical Interpretation and translation coarse In Law school, I'd taken German In the master program of nurse practitioner, I've taken Indonesia, Russian, Thai, Arabic For all the experiences of learning languages, I found that if you're quite getting used to be the language family of target language you learned, the time of achieving fluency is getting shorter.
@chisum02ma-yu3pk Жыл бұрын
早上好Susie😀😀🖐🖐
@Dancinginthesnow737 Жыл бұрын
I’m a native mandarin speaker living in Canada. And I’ve started to learn French for a year. From my observation, although French and English belong to different languages groups, Romance and Germanic languages groups respectively, they’re still quite similar in terms of logic of sentences, vocabulary and grammar systems. And I sometimes tried to firstly organize a sentence from Chinese to English before translating it into French. That’s more easier than directly translated from Chinese to French. Also, since you’ve mentioned that you, as an English native speaker, learned French before, I’m just curious about your viewpoints of learning French, and how it differs from learning mandarin?
@sherry1227 Жыл бұрын
I’ve learned Korean for four years and recently started to pick up French which I learned in high school and university. I spoke Korean to my French teacher once without notice so I guess my brain was really struggling lol Also when I was learning Korean, I found my English was getter worse 😅 My native languages are Mandarin and Taiwanese but need to use English at work
The difference between languages, is not merely using different way and different word to express the same idea; it is a frame how people perceive the world. Different thinking is the key.😃😅
I've ever learned german in university. Some words from German and English are often similar in their pronunciations. It's amazing. But sometimes I found out one german word has so many letters. It's really difficult to spell it.
@leonardchileungman4925 Жыл бұрын
German words [ nouns ] are extended words which include the relation between two parts…for instance, ‘Gott’ [ god ] and ‘götterfunken’ [ God’s divine sparkling’…
@leonardchileungman4925 Жыл бұрын
besides, there renders confusion as in pronouns as ‘Sie’ and ‘sie’ where the former refers to second person ‘you’ while the latter depicts third person ‘she’ 😞
@leonardchileungman4925 Жыл бұрын
it is because German and English are related--Teutonic
@ambarvalia9757 Жыл бұрын
You ❤ sort of dived deeper to the Chinese radicals 😮in comparison with the hanja sino korean big words in korean being like suffixes prefixes😅 which is just 國+家 level thing. well the radical concept is also the case for korean deep down cuz the the hanja they rarely write now is actually just 99 percent identical to traditional Chinese 😂 although mandarin underwent a lot of sound shift, southern min and cantonese sound very similar to sino korean🎉😅😊
Native Chinese here. As you see I am writing in English because I have been living in America and I have completely forgotten how to write Chinese. My vocab is also shot but pronunciation and grammar are still fine though
7:53 I think Catherine could understand this easily if she could capture the different ways of pronouncing Chinese characters. 國家is 국가 , 火車is 기차 from 汽車, this case is different because it comes from Japanese Chinese characters, 汽車 きしゃ(Even though they don't use this word anymore because it's been electrified so it changed to 電車 でんしゃ 전차)
@酔いザル Жыл бұрын
身為一個中文母語者 (普通話&台灣河洛話) 小時候也有相關為什麼火車叫火車 但小朋友總會天馬行空的亂唸 火車=著火的車 just like car on fire😂 而我的第二外語是日文 第三則是英文 確實多少會互相影響表達的方式及思維
@ifaxntxbgccfac Жыл бұрын
車is more like vehicle than 'car'
@hzhang9718 Жыл бұрын
Hi Susie, do you know a book called Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu? It’s so good the book is about Chinese language modernisation
@javierckyip Жыл бұрын
Yes, English is much easier than the rest of European languages. At least no memorisation of each noun's gender form (esp. German with 3 forms), no "over-"contraction of serial words (like Spanish and French). But as you said, German sentence structure could be satisfying because it is set in several fixed orders like formulations, Verb + Angabe + Ergänzung and so on. I've stopped learning Spanish after learning German (Germanic) for a decade; I can't adapt to the Latinic system.
I used to find conjugating verbs the hardest part of learning Spanish and Portuguese, while for learning English idioms and phrasal verbs is the toughest part..well perhaps not super tough but since there's a ton of them, it takes years to accumulate and become a fluent user - but then I find them very interesting and that keeps me motivated to go on learning and failing and learning again 🥰 Learning Mandarin, however, what confuses me the most has always been memorising whether the word starts with zh or z, xi/shi and so on.😂 And then learning how to spell French words is definitely the biggest nightmare ! 😅 I found myself too dumb for German genders and never really pick it up again after uni.... 😇
@leonardchileungman4925 Жыл бұрын
to Cantonese speakers, you are right that it is very hard to differentiate among ‘x’ , ‘s’ , ‘sh’ ; ‘q’ , ‘z’ , ‘zh’ ; ‘c’ , ‘ch’ 😞
@chiang_paul Жыл бұрын
謝謝你們的分享❤
@juneciel Жыл бұрын
I am a native Mandarin speaker and kind of fluent in English. Now I am learning Norwegian, which also has three genders as German. I suffered so much from Norwegian grammar and am really struggling to memorize the transformation of nouns, verbs, and adj because of the genders.
@S-fi5ox Жыл бұрын
I think train is 火車 in Chinese as in the old steam driven trains, you needed to burn coal to run it and there's a furnace (火爐) in the driving compartment
@barelybear5489 Жыл бұрын
請問 furnance 和 boiler 的區別? 😆
@S-fi5ox Жыл бұрын
@@barelybear5489 furnace boiler whatever. You won't survive when you're there 🤣
Pragmatics - Chinese is most difficult in common seen languages, such as "when you free come for dinner" however this is not an invitation. Typically only people asking "do you have time this Friday for dinner", most likely that is eligible to be considered as an invitation. Worst of all, you have no book and no where to learn. People may argue that you may learn from locals or so. Here is the flaw - learning is meaningful when you learn before. I expect someone may say " learning is a process spanning over time, balabala" 😉
@Wooloomulooo10 ай бұрын
It's kinda like English asking "how are you doing?" It's not like you really care about that person having a good or bad life. It's a way to say hello in another way.
Speaking of learning two languages at the same time, in Taiwan and some Asian countries, bilingual education is being promoted, do you think it's helpful to learn multiple languages in elementary or middle school?
Chinese is not just about the syntax but a lot more tied to the history and culture behind in the semantics and usage it seems
@OliviaChen_private Жыл бұрын
影片末段的現象我覺得我比較像舒萱,尤其是當third language並不同為歐語系的時候 但如果兩種語言出自同一個系統,就會像Catherine那樣,感覺兩種語言一起進步: 我之前自學法文的時候 就感覺英文基礎在學習法文上幫助很多; 但現在在倫敦念書,大量接觸英文的狀況下,我發現我的中文能力(even though it's one of my mother tongue)以一個非常快的速度在下降、而英文能力卻因為每天仍然會用中文跟台灣的朋友聊天(即使比例已經非常低), 仍然進步的速度非常有限...
@dianefu6372 Жыл бұрын
Hi Susie, I think AI (?) translated the word "prospectus" in your video as "招股說明書‘’. It should be "科系/學程簡介" instead. 😅
@barelybear5489 Жыл бұрын
Semantics - that is more serious in the enemy side 😃 for example, H K is "highly autonomous".... basically that means "not autonomous but something 'very much' close to autonomous", not to mention all those invented party language system - virtually "1984"😛
From linguistic science view, 3 important factors for a given language. Grammar, Semantics, Pragmatics. After your learn that 20 or so special Chinese characters, you finished learning all. Asia language, pronunciation is difficult; while the total phonetic combination of Chinese are just above 100, considerinng the different ton; 400-500 that's all; No more.
@l5342034 Жыл бұрын
We do (maybe I should use “did”) have 敬語 in Mandarin Chinese and also use them in our daily life😂 but it is getting weakened and non-predominant etiquette in speaking.
I would like to say "fire car" because long time ago, train is driven by fire, at least some smoke at the front, therefore, we say train as a "fire car"😂
We learn some languages because of several motivations. For me, I just wanna chat with others and maybe therefore I can be another group of people in the world. Maybe I can be accepted.(likewise)
@rollingdownfalling Жыл бұрын
German is so darn challenging, the sentence structures is just so alien to me. Something as simple as going to your house could be = bei dir zu Hause (notice there is no 'your'). I really dislike the word come and go, because I find description in motion is difficult, and a combination of reflexive, preposition and verb is very confusing such as Es gibt nichts, woüber man sich Sorgen machen müsste (Something as simple as "there is nothing to worry about"). Additionally there are reverse order of subject and object such as: Ich habe den Job gekündigt (I quit the job) Mir wurde der Job gekündigt (the job terminated me) Especially where thing like a dative case right Infront of a sentence needs practice and getting used to. I really don't believe there is such a thing in West and East anymore. I find learning the German culture just as different and a world of its own as well. However their younger generation are Americanizing, because of the media influences and the pop culture.
@chachacha5223 Жыл бұрын
❤❤❤
@jerometsowinghuen Жыл бұрын
I would say, the grammar of German is pretty difficult to understand than Chinese and English. I learned that the grammar of Japanese is straightforward, very swift.
@Relaxthemusic11 ай бұрын
您好戴小姐
@liwen7252 Жыл бұрын
One question, please ? Why the girl Catherine uses both “because” and “so” at the same time ? I suppose she is a native English speaker …
@TonyChu777 Жыл бұрын
Because English is the most forgiving language
@li-dj8jq Жыл бұрын
火車之所以叫火車,是因為最早的火車是蒸汽機推動,燃燒煤產生蒸汽來推動,所以叫火車.
@kueh-a-tiau Жыл бұрын
I am suffering from German pushing out my English proficiency as well... Nein always come out faster than no lol