It’s always fun when your Chinese teacher is like, “Well this 了 (le) means something already happened, but the second 了 means it hasn’t finished yet. I don’t know why, that’s just what it means. Eventually it will start to make sense”

Our writing text keeps having us write stuff like 中文不太難 (zhōngwén bú tài nán — “Chinese isn’t too hard”) and I’m like 🙃

Yeah I mean, I am enjoying learning Chinese and I think it is fun but yeah, wow, it is pretty hard actually! 很難！ It’s more than just the tonality and the writing system (although that is also hard), it’s just like… this language has basically nothing in common with English so it’s hard to even make guesses about what words mean.

Of course, not that English is particularly easy. For some reason YouTube started recommending these English language learning videos to me? And I watched a few? They are in English and clearly meant for an advanced learner who wants to sound more natural, but the nuances she points out are really interesting. Like she has this whole series about how American English speakers basically smoosh together half the words in our sentences until they are pretty much incomprehensible on their own, but native speakers understand the sentence as a whole perfectly well. This is because there are a few important words that are pronounced relatively clearly and they give us the context to understand the rest of the sentence so well we don’t even notice the slurred words. All that to say, it’s been nice to remind myself how irritating English is so that I don’t get too annoyed at Chinese!