I introduced myself in a group chat for people learning Chinese and a native speaker wrote like ten paragraphs correcting my grammar and it was very helpful but also I now have so much more sympathy for people trying to learn English in America cuz English is even harder to learn than Chinese
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Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.
I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.
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in reply to @shel's post:
I'm a heritage speaker, so maybe my experience is skewed, but Chinese grammar feels so much easier than English and Romance languages. You kind of just put words in an order that feels intuitive and it works. No need to worry about tenses even.
I agree that the grammar is much easier than in English though I think the word order feeling intuitive depends on the language environment you first grow up in. It feels pretty natural to me only because I know ASL which has the same word order. But it's still the case that to me, "I will shop at Aldi tomorrow" is much more intuitive than "I tomorrow at Aldi will shop" and I don't think either option has an innate logic to it that makes it make more sense than the other. Though since Chinese doesn't conjugate verbs by tense, similar to ASL, it does make sense to me that time needs to always be mentioned first. But my brain really really always wants to say "I work at the library" and not "I at the library work"
as my old Japanese teacher would say, "Chinese isn't that hard, even babies can learn it"