Random observations make a posting
Mar. 16th, 2018 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mangosteenMeta: Part of posting more is taking things that I'd normally put on Facebook, give them a little bit more development, and then posting them here. I can't promise profundity, but journals never do.
Part of my job is reviewing/editing design documents. I'm currently proofreading a design document written by someone whose first language is Mandarin. 26 pages of adding definite articles and noun/verb agreement.
This is not unexpected. It's an interesting exercise in “These are exactly the things that I’d expect to be hard for native Mandarin speakers.” To wit, Mandarin has no verb conjugation, no declensions, no word gender, and no plurals. To balance that out, word order is exceedingly strict, and you have particles everywhere, among other things.
What this all means is that there are typically many missing instances of 'the' and 'a/an', along with 'is' where 'are' should be, and vice versa.
Observation: I took a semester of Mandarin ~12 years ago, and I surprise myself with how consistently I've reserved part of my brain for keeping that knowledge active since then. My written notes have random Chinese characters in them as a form of shorthand, e.g. “电” for "electricity and/or electrical", and so on. Not complaining... just rather fascinated at how well this stuck.
Part of my job is reviewing/editing design documents. I'm currently proofreading a design document written by someone whose first language is Mandarin. 26 pages of adding definite articles and noun/verb agreement.
This is not unexpected. It's an interesting exercise in “These are exactly the things that I’d expect to be hard for native Mandarin speakers.” To wit, Mandarin has no verb conjugation, no declensions, no word gender, and no plurals. To balance that out, word order is exceedingly strict, and you have particles everywhere, among other things.
What this all means is that there are typically many missing instances of 'the' and 'a/an', along with 'is' where 'are' should be, and vice versa.
Observation: I took a semester of Mandarin ~12 years ago, and I surprise myself with how consistently I've reserved part of my brain for keeping that knowledge active since then. My written notes have random Chinese characters in them as a form of shorthand, e.g. “电” for "electricity and/or electrical", and so on. Not complaining... just rather fascinated at how well this stuck.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-16 09:58 pm (UTC)