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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/08/19 in all areas

  1. 1 point
    I mentioned in another thread that I have coworkers who argue which is the best/easiest East Asian language (from the big three of Chinese (specifically Mandarin), Japanese and Korean). I decided to make an honest attempt at each language to try to get an objective opinion on this. Now I can't say this for 100% certain since I've spent about 50 times more effort learning it than the other two, but I'm pretty sure that Japanese is by far the easiest. Korean may be easier in theory to learn the writing system for (though there's so many vowels/consonants which are just barely different from each other that I'm not convinced even of that), but the politeness system is a nightmare. Mandarin has the problem of being a tonal language, too few conjugations to easily figure out how to say things, and the fact that you have to learn hundreds of Chinese characters just to get started. In contrast Japanese has a reasonable number of conjugations, only two major politeness levels to worry about for 95% of interactions, and if you learn Hiragana (which should take about as much time as learning Hangul) you can ease your way into the Kanji. But then again I'm a huge weeb so this may not be entirely unbiased.
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