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Comment by KennyCason | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your sentiment. I do prefer studying from books, but really try to just take a multifaceted approach: speak everyday, watch movies/tv, read native materials/bed/etc, also use chinese language study books.

I was curious though, when you said Chinese grammar was tough, what specifically did you think was tough? I always sell Chinese grammar as being super simple. It’s the easiest grammar of any language I’ve ever studied so far. I understand how depending on what language you come from other languages can be easier or harder of course. (E.g. Koreans can learn japanese easier than Americans, etc.)

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> I understand how depending on what language you come from other languages can be easier or harder of course

Definitely. For me (native speaker of an Indo-European language), learning Chinese is like learning a functional programming language when you only know C. Give me a subject, a verb, and some objects and I can build you a more or less natural sounding sentence in five different European languages (two of them I have never used in an oral conversation). When I tried the same in Chinese, I would first have to consult my grammar book to see what specific pattern to use, decide whether it would be more natural to have a topic in front of the sentence, check the previous sentence to see whether I need the subject at all or whether I can just attach the verb to the previous sentence, and then finally add a couple of "le" here and there :) and still have a result that is wrong because "that's not how you say it".

> decide whether it would be more natural to have a topic in front of the sentence

A grammar book can't tell you this, because it's a style choice. All the grammar book will tell you is how to do it. For what it's worth, topic fronting is a standard feature of English too.

> and then finally add a couple of "le" here and there

Yeah... I feel your pain there.

That makes sense. I probably overlooked the difference between grammatically correct and sounding natural. Chinese (and Japanese) have such a different cultural background that I also find the "natural way" to speak is quite different than English for example. The natural way to speak takes many many years. I've only ever seriously studied East Asian languages so have been able to build on top of each other to some degree. I just assumed this would be an issue in all languages, though now I could see how learning Spanish for example, is likely far less "eccentric" for a native English speaker than something like Chinese/Japanese.

Thanks for your response!

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