Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

I see at least one subtle advantage in being multi-lingual: distinguishing concepts more clearly.

I see monolingual English speakers who confuse to/too/two, there/their/they're, etc. It's hard to blame them because these word triplets are pronounced the same, so why bother distinguishing them in writing.

Knowing how these words map to different languages reinforces their distinctions. There/their/they're in Chinese are 那裏 (na li) / 他們的 (ta men de) / 他們是 (ta men shi).

This goes deeper and works for homonyms like free, which maps to 免費 (no cost / gratuis) vs. 自由 (freedom / liberty). It makes you think harder about what you mean when you use the word free.

Learning different languages challenges your assumptions. An Euro-centric upbringing would assume that spaces are required to separate words. Chinese and Japanese disagree with this and work just fine. 26-letter alphabet vs. thousands of characters. Implicit tones vs. prescriptive tones. Context-dependent letter shapes (Sanskrit). Optional/implied vowels (Arabic). Word order (SVO etc.).

For people who are used to Indo-European languages, the biggest shock while learning Chinese will probably be that it's possible for a language to lack articles, plural forms, conjugation, tense, gender and case.

"I'm going to go buy three loaves of bread tomorrow morning at the bakery." -> "I tomorrow morning go bakery buy three loaf bread." The latter has no articles, tense, conjugation or plural forms, yet it's completely understandable.

Even if you learn all sorts of Indo-European languages, you'll still have a lot of assumptions about what sort of grammar a language should have that are not actually universal. Indo-European languages are quite grammatically complex.

Funny how the Chinese have to use that 26-letter alphabet too, because you can't put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

Smartphones have changed this. You can write characters directly on a touchscreen. It's not as popular of an input method as pinyin, but it's not uncommon either.

There's also Bopomofo, as an alternative to pinyin input.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

Writing characters on a touchscreen seems horrible.

You can write the most sloppy cursive Chinese character and your phone would recognize them just fine. Together with text prediction it's quite easy to get 40 characters per minute (probably equivalent of 80wpm in English), much faster than most people writing on paper.

Chinese doesn't have to use A-to-Z with Pinyin. There are input methods like Cangjie, Wubi, Bopomofo, 1-to-9 stroking on number pads, and handwriting. But yes, pinyin A-to-Z is the most pragmatic for many reasons.

Just a counter example: I live in a multi-lingual area with a big ex-pat population and see english speakers who became multi-lingual with reduced ability to distinguish homophones.

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