@MetaMario:
How do you and the others do it? Languages like Chinese and Japanese seem like a nightmare to learn because of the numerous symbols. It seems too easy to draw something wrong and mean [insert profanity] than oh say…."fish".
Learning Mandarin has been made easier with a system called "pinyin", where Roman letters are assigned phonetic sounds from the Chinese language, and the 4 tones are assigned numbers or accents. So the normal "hello" would look like ni1 hao3. Learning the characters is just complete memorization though, which I kind of find fun due to the funny little pictures you can imagine to put meaning to that symbol.
I was in China two weeks ago at this restaurant and this older man took interest in me and my husband and wanted to have small talk, I was able to use google translate to say "what is your name?" correctly from reading the pinyin :) felt great!
@Massimo:
Yeah, quite easy. I didn't even know that at first. So a few years ago some Korean students came to my university. There was this cute girl and I used "I want to learn Korean alphabet" as an excuse to talk to her lol. To my surprise, in about two hours I knew all alphabets and read them albeit very
That's hilarious lol! Wish I knew reading Korean was easy, would've helped immensely when I was in Korea since I had to use the Korean maps app so much >_<