Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.
The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.
This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.
Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见
Litterally: “good time not see”
But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.
Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.
Only a little.
Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.
The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.
This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.
Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.
Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.