Very good point. If I hadn’t learned English (and I learned it late, when I was about 14-15 -- am now 27), I probably wouldn’t know a fraction of what I now know.
This makes me wonder if I should start learning Chinese...
Chinese isn’t that bad to learn to speak. The tones are a little tricky, but the grammar is simplicity itself after you’ve learned a handful of quirks. It’s literacy that presents an enormous challenge: thousands and thousands of characters! However, literacy will also allow you to read things written by a speaker of any Chinese dialect, while the same is not true of learning only to speak Mandarin or Cantonese or what have you.
Very good point. If I hadn’t learned English (and I learned it late, when I was about 14-15 -- am now 27), I probably wouldn’t know a fraction of what I now know.
This makes me wonder if I should start learning Chinese...
Chinese is a lot tougher I hear.
Chinese isn’t that bad to learn to speak. The tones are a little tricky, but the grammar is simplicity itself after you’ve learned a handful of quirks. It’s literacy that presents an enormous challenge: thousands and thousands of characters! However, literacy will also allow you to read things written by a speaker of any Chinese dialect, while the same is not true of learning only to speak Mandarin or Cantonese or what have you.