Curious what other languages are represented here. Are you learning a new language? Is anyone here learning any endangered languages?

  • Honestly I’ve just started on Mandarin a couple months ago and the basics really aren’t that bad. The tones are kinda difficult to grasp for me but I dunno reading-wise I’m finding it easier than German was to learn as a second language from English, which should have been a cakewalk. I’ll probably never be completely fluent or have a huge vocabulary but it turns out the majority of communication only uses a relatively small subset of characters anyway. I’d highly recommend giving it a shot, you may be surprised.

    • @33rdJanuary@lemmygrad.ml
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      102 years ago

      Well, “relatively small” being about 2k for causal speech and texting, and 3~5k for texts, depending on the type of literature. Luckily most Chinese characters are phono-semantic, meaning one side gives a pronunciation hint whilst the other gives a meaning hint.