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chinese is probably easy to learn if you already know english and japanese, assuming you can cope with the pronunciation… grammatically it's like a half-way house between those two languages, and the script is actually a lot less complicated than japanese's
@hikari we find Chinese has some surprising similarities to *German* grammar
most notably 把...<verb>了。constructions
@r 了 is such a cool particle, it was actually what prompted this tweet. do you have some examples of the correspondence to german? we can't read them rn but maybe in an hour or two
@hikari just a general correspondence between that and German "verb-final" construction
@hikari it's also pretty cool in Cantonese which doesn't use it as a perfective aspect marker but nonetheless *still* has it (usually in places that would be read as liao3 in Mandarin)
@r wtf?! does it exist in spoken cantonese?
@hikari the normal spoken cantonese perfective aspect marker is 咗
but the (hard to translate!) phrases of "不得了" and "得了" (which, btw, aren't antonyms!) exist in cantonese, as does "了事" which uses 了 much closer to the sense of "to be finished with"