In what ways has learning Chinese improved your life?

[Silent]

 

Fair point, but going by my failed attempts at other things, few alternative pursuits would have affected me to this degree.

I had several failed attempts to learn a non european language before I started out with a (more or less) succeeding attempt of Chinese. It were some chance factor that effected this difference had these chance factors been a little different I might very well have ended up learning another language with comparable effects. The other pursuits may have failed because of some chance factors and the changes may be due to growing older, having a different set of experiences, other motivations etc.

 

Obviously it's just plain speculation, we tend to extrapolate trends and if there is a break we correlate it with what is at the break. However maybe you were just ready to break the trend because of all kind of other reasons and pretty much anything you could have done at that moment would have had a comparable effect.

 

To me it's hard to believe that one is a 'failure', starts to study Chinese and suddenly is successful. There must have been something different otherwise you would have failed in Chinese too. I think there has to be a change in attitude and/or motivation to succeed in Chinese where other pursuits failed and that success may have reinforced the changes in you. Anything that would have come up with the right timing would likely have had a comparable effect on the success factors.

[Flickserve]

Can only say learning Chinese (cantonese) has allowed me to communicate with more people. I haven't seen the other benefits that other people have mentioned.

But knowing cantonese (2nd language) seems to both help and hinder learning mandarin.

[Flickserve]

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