Comment by broken_clock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by broken_clock | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

How many of these languages do you speak?

I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees.

I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm.

I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words.

> there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual

There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.

I have learned to varying degrees Mandarin Teochew Cantonese Japanese Spanish French German (and Latin lol) I was shocked at how intuitive Italian was when simply walking around Italy after having a grounding in so many adjacent languages (and learning classical music).

Admittedly I am atypical in my exposure to languages and I do enjoy linguistics but it seems to me there's a high initial barrier to the dialects but after the initial wall is overcome it just becomes a mapping exercise and a handful of idioms.

I'd be curious to know which bits of Mandarin you find difficult? Vocab? The grammar is close enough that you have a huge advantage over almost every other language in the world especially for the everyday stuff. Reading and writing, if you know traditional you'll pick up simplified in no time (speaking from experience backpacking through China armed with only a paper dictionary we didn't have smartphones back in my day) the Cantonese tones are quite wild but if you can do tones you have a huge advantage of languages which don't have tones.

If I'm allowed an uncharitable take, my experience has been that a lot of people from China don't feel a drive to learn more languages maybe with the sole exception of English. Maybe it's the result of being in a country of a billion+ that all ostensibly speak the same language. I've always found it so frustrating encountering people who move to the UK to study and they can barely hold a conversation in English despite doing A levels, Bachelor's and Masters in the UK sometimes. For all the complaints that dialects are hard a lot of south east Asian people back in the day would pick up a handful of them and often learn the basics of other languages like Bahasa. This kind of mindset and interaction reminds me more of Europe in the sense that people are more adaptable out of necessity

Reply on news.ycombinator.com