command line vs gui 6999

So spreads the rumour.

Many Westerners, having lived in Hong Kong for years AND devoted time & effort to learn the local language, have mastered the tone system of Cantonese. It's hard to tell them from native speakers without looking at their face!

There are also people from mainland China, speaking Mandarin or Shanghainese natively, who cannot speak Cantonese without a typical Mandarin- or Shangainese- accent, even after staying in Hong Kong for a few decades.

I learnt German as adult.

You don't learn riding a bike by studying physical laws governing motion, do you? It's like that. Neither can you learn typing by solely studying the keyboard layout for years.

And do you think it's impossible for an adult to learn riding a bike, if he missed it during childhood?

Skill is different from knowledge. Language is a skill. Linguistics is knowledge.

Neither do I.

Me too.

But the same thing happened to me for German when I was already in adulthood. Only through immersion can you master the highly irregular and complicated rules such as when to use which type of articles, which words-phrases to place before others, etc.

Agreed. But I don't think that can only happen to children.

The list is a good way to recap who one has absorbed (subconciously) through immersion. It is not a way to learn the skill.

At 3.

But I learnt German 25 years later.

You're wrong, I'm afraid. At schools, we're taught rules, and forced to memorize length lists of vocabularies (with spellings), irregular verb, prepositions, phrasal verbs, etc. Not very pleasant, but effective!

German.

I have developed such a sense with German, in particular concerning the word order, use of articles, as well as use of tense-mood.

Well... only when the target language is similar to a language that this learn is already familiar with. E.g. knowing English helps learning German. I rote-memorized "see, saw, seen" at school, which turned out to be useful to help me remember "sehe, sah, gesehen" when Also, since I'm already familiar with the concept of article, it helps with understand what functions are served by articles in German. Of course, the rules of using articles are slightly different, which takes effort to learn.

But knowing English won't help me learn Japanese. The grammars are so different. e.g. English doesn't have "past tense" for the adjectives; Japanese does! But the abundance of English loans in modern Japanese does mean the knowledge of English helps -- once you've figured out how the Japanese would convert the English sounds into Japanese syllables.

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