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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

Being a programmer who's into 4th month of learning Mandarin I didn't really get the analogy. You need persistence and practice, yes, but it applies to any non-trivial undertaking.

I think the conclusion is, hard stuff is hard, and you have to try hard.

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I think it's more that there can be some complete reorganizations that go on.

For example, if you know Italian and you want to learn Spanish you can translate a lot of your prior learning. The sounds are the same, the sentence structure, and many of the words even. Even English to Spanish isn't that different.

When you know English and you want to learn Chinese you have to learn a completely different way of pronouncing and listening to language.

I think her point is that non-technical people don't realize that there are a lot of fundamentals and basic principles that you need to learn to code well that you can't just pick up in your non-technical life.

Yes, but I think the total-wiring you describe is how language is DIFFERENT from programming.

This might be a bit of extrapolation but while all human languages are very different, they all have recursion and learning to program is more or less harnessing the mastery of recursion that we language speaking humans already have. I've been terrible at learning learning but I can pick a programming language reasonably quickly, I don't need to rewire to anywhere the same degree.

Well, in fact learning Chinese pronunciation for English (and Western in general) speakers is much easier than for Chinese learning English. Most of the sounds already can be found in English, the tones are perhaps the only hard part. The structure and grammar are incredibly simple (albeit the writing system isn't).

I agree to your point about programming for non-techies though. And unlike with natural languages, you can't hand-wave your way out when you stuck..

Are you sure you're not confusing the phonology of Chinese with that of Japanese? Because I have studied both, and what you say is true of Japanese, but most English-speaking people seem to find the Chinese consonants represented in pinyin by zh, ch, q, x and r quite challenging. In addition, the tones have no English equivalent, and are a bit of a bear for an English speaker to keep straight.

I think it depends on the accent. Many speakers of non-Beijing dialects carry a regional accent that are usually flatter on the consonants.

For example, if he learned Mandarin in Taiwan he could've picked up a southern accent.

Well, see e.g. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Chinese_(Mandarin)/Pinyin_Pronu... - under 'Pronounciation Basics'. I'm not a native English speaker, but speaking Russian, English and Norwegian I find it generally true.

(And yes as remarked below my first exposure to the language was in Taiwan, but the courses I follow are not Taiwan specific)

Re: Most of the sounds can already be found in English

8 years into the language, I still have real difficulties with some of the r's at the end of words, "有空儿吗?" (you kongr ma?)

I always wondered how well speakers of other tonal languages manage Mandarin, such as Swedish speakers.

yeah I remember when taking my intro programming class that the instructor said something like 2/3rds of people can't get over the basic hurdle of how variable assignment works. I think that's because its a concept that has essentially nothing in common with an average person's every-day life, so they can't relate. Programming has a lot of hurdles like that when just learning the basics. God forbid she actually get into the "fundamentals" and learn assembly.

Three years into studying Chinese and noting her non-technical background, I think I disagree. I think it's a great metaphor.

The strength of the comparison doesn't come from the need for persistence, which is truly critical to either undertaking, but instead the kind of mental reformatting that needs to go on before either mode of expression is going to make sense.

I liked her bopomofo example because it highlights the fact that there is a level below programming can even begin --- it's the level that "your grandmother" can't even see --- and if you think you can just dive into an intro to Python (sorry Mark Pilgrim) and hope you'll be sadly, sadly mistaken.

Both endeavors require a great deal of tedious study of minor detail. You need to unlearn a lot and relearn it more generally. You can't program if the idea that computers run instructions isn't implicit; you can't speak Mandarin if you don't speak and hear tones without thinking twice.

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