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Comment by InsideOutSanta | Hacker News Reader

As a native German speaker, I think it's fair to say that German is a comparatively poorly designed* language. It has too many needless concepts. I envy Chinese and Japanese; I feel like these languages have got it almost right. If they eliminated measure words, they'd probably be as perfect as a language can reasonably be.

* I know languages aren't "designed" for the most part, but I find it helpful to compare them as if they were.

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> I envy Chinese and Japanese;

Up until the point you have to read and write them.

Especially written Japanese, which is a giant mess of stuff they borrowed from the west, china as well as native stuff.

Hangul fits Korean like a glove, at least.

At least with traditional Chinese, reading isn't as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of characters are pictophonetic characters(形聲), where one element describes the sound and the other meaning. While not perfect they allow a reader to guess with decent accuracy the meaning and pronunciation of a character they have never seen before.

Measure words in Chinese are great. They provide so much descriptive capacity in such a short simple way. 一棍棒, 一把棒, 一根盪, 一條棒, all would translate to English as "a stick", but they convey different perspectives about what that stick is. I can appreciate the frustration with learning words that only have one specific measure word that only really describes it, but even then you can honestly get away with 個.

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