Only a handful have ever learned Navajo as a second language – which is why the code-talkers were so effective – the enemy knew it was Navajo, but none of them knew the language to translate, then there were code words on top of that. Pigin is mostly English with Chinese syntax. Like most trade languages is very easy to learn. Reading Chinese (one squiggle, one word) is hard to learn.
The latinos I speak to don’t seem to have much trouble learning English, by their own account. I took one semester of Chinese in college. I’ve had 8000 level engineering courses I’d rather take than that again. It was logical in sentence structure, but learning to read the characters was tough because you had to learn new ones every day and they just piled up, and the tones gave me fits.
BlueRaven over 12 years ago
English is the second hardest language for a non-speaker to learn. The hardest? Chinese.
dblstf over 12 years ago
Except there is no language called “Chinese”. The most commonly spoken language in China (and the world) is Mandarin.
gopuppy over 12 years ago
No conjugation, no past/present/future tense – 4 tomes to worry about. Not too bad. Reading characters is another story.
hippogriff over 12 years ago
Only a handful have ever learned Navajo as a second language – which is why the code-talkers were so effective – the enemy knew it was Navajo, but none of them knew the language to translate, then there were code words on top of that. Pigin is mostly English with Chinese syntax. Like most trade languages is very easy to learn. Reading Chinese (one squiggle, one word) is hard to learn.
flummili over 12 years ago
English is very easy to learn as a second language, Chinese would be much harder.
Iwa Iniki over 12 years ago
I speak Hawaiian.
bobviously over 12 years ago
The latinos I speak to don’t seem to have much trouble learning English, by their own account. I took one semester of Chinese in college. I’ve had 8000 level engineering courses I’d rather take than that again. It was logical in sentence structure, but learning to read the characters was tough because you had to learn new ones every day and they just piled up, and the tones gave me fits.