colourlessidea@sopuli.xyztoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Learning a new language is easy!English
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3 days agoGerman infamously has a lot of long compound words but for those who struggle with them I have a question (I’m curious and there’s no judgment here - I totally understand that it’s hard): Canyoureadthissentenceeventhoughtherearenospaces? What about Orangecatsittingonamat? If yes, is it difficult in German due to having a smaller vocabulary in a new language, or something else?
Yes that’s a good example too! (I don’t know of any language where that’s a possibility but I agree it’s similar)
That’s the thing though - my hypothesis is that it’s based on what one is familiar with. There are languages/scripts where spaces don’t indicate word boundaries (e.g. Chinese), or that are rather agglutinative (e.g. Finnish), or somewhere in between (like German), or on the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hindi/Devanagari where a space and an overline marks a word. Totally understandable that it feels perhaps rot13-ish due to unfamiliarity but I would be surprised if native users of those languages share that sentiment.