I know for example, Mandarin (Chinese) has it like from this sentence: 我睡了八個小時 (I slept for 8 hours), the hanzi: 覺 is omitted in this sentence because 睡 is already a word with its own meaning “sleep” which in itself conveys the meaning of the verb. There are “Euro” languages where separable verbs exist such as Dutch or German for example. Is there an equivalent of that in the English language though?

  • kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Compared to English, which is three languages in a trenchcoat, or Mandarin, which is tonal and has ~100k characters, ~3k of which is considered the minimum to know for fluency, or Japanese, which has three different writing systems, one of which even high-schoolers aren’t expected to know well?

    • cattywampas@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 days ago

      I hate this “three languages in a trenchcoat” analogy. English is very much a Germanic language with some vocabulary from French. And it’s not unique in that regard either.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      2 days ago

      Compared to English: yes, definitely. English doesn’t really have case markings outside of pronouns, nor adjectival declensions, not even grammatical gender.

      Compared to Mandarin: probably German is easier, I agree on that.

      Compared to Japanese: I don’t know enough about Japanese to know for sure, but by the standards by which it has “three writing systems”, the Latin (and Cyrillic and Greek) alphabet also has two (uppercase and lowercase). :P