RE: How Committed Are You To Making Hive The Best That It Can Be?
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Nowadays, I almost always finds errors I missed after I post, despite a personal proofread and sometimes even after a proofread by a colleague, and I end up making several edits before I don't find any more errors.
Most of my grammar mistakes happen when I go back and edit some sentence I wrote to simplify it or improve it. The original sentence was correct, the new sentence in my head is correct, but when I edit the original sentence I don't just remove the old sentence and write the new one from scratch, and I don't end up making all the correct changes to transform the old sentence into the new sentence in my head.
I also find that I make more spelling errors than I used to since I began studying Mandarin. I think it rewired my brain to be more phonetic, and sometimes I'll write an entirely wrong word that sounds something like the word I intended to write. It's very disconcerting because in the past I could count on my writing to be near perfect in terms of spelling at least on the first draft.
Nothing like choosing an easy one to learn. LOL
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I chose it primarily because I play table tennis and so I have a lot of friends who are Chinese. It's also helpful when playing against Chinese who think you don't understand their spoken comments to each other in doubles :-) It's also very interesting to study a language that isn't a Romance language, to see how a truly distinct language evolved and to see the differences and similarities that still exist.
Spoken Mandarin is actually very reasonable to learn. The grammar is logical and there's not a huge number of words to learn like English. People often make a big deal about the tones, but I think the concern there is overblown. I'm sure I mess up tones all the time, but I'm also sure a native speaker won't be confused by my mistakes (they haven't been so far, at least, as long as I speak a sentence instead of just one word because they can figure it out from context).
The pain comes when you're trying to learn the essentially non-phonetic written language (yes, there are "radicals", but don't get me started on how inferrior that is to a truly phonetic written language). I've studied the written language some, but I don't have any real goal to learn it well, except where it might help me with the spoken language.
I feel like it's something that happens with the english language a lot tho may not be limited to it. Where you decide to reword something and the whole sentence needs to be rewritten. I think swedish and german are more forgiving there but not sure if that's what you meant.
That's really interesting that you're learning mandarin. I feel like I'm way past being able to learn new languages but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough, coding languages would've been a good decision for me and I regret not having stuck with it.
Learning a programming language is much easier than learning a language, so I would say for sure it is not too late to learn programming. Learning a new real language is a lot of work and you need something to keep you motivated. My own study is pretty intermittent.
Most recently I got motivated to study Mandarin some more after watching some Korean shows on Netflix and realizing I was learning a few Korean words, so I decided to see how I would do if I started watching some Chinese shows there as well.
My two biggest weaknesses at present are 1) I have trouble understanding spoken Chinese because my brain translates words too slowly and 2) I sometimes don't know the "normal/common/popular" way to put a set of words together to express a larger concept. Watching the shows is helping with both of those and it's a kind of low-effort way to study, so I can do it when I'm just trying to chill out at the end of a day.