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（原文翻译提供——尚恩教育留学事业部） (CNN) —With so much time on our hands during lockdown, many of us have entertained the idea of expanding our horizons. 在疫情期间，由于时间充裕，我们许多人都愿意去学习一些新东西来拓展自己的见识。 Learning a foreign language is an obvious option. 显而易见的学习外语是一个不错的选择。 It's one that I would personally endorse: My individual circumstances were such that, by the age of 12, I could speak German, Greek and English, so languages became my passion and my hobby. 我个人会赞同这一点：我的个人情况是在我12岁时我会说德语，希腊语和英语，因此语言成为我的激情和爱好。 My advice is that you should learn a language because you're also interested in the culture and the country. 我的建议是，如果你也对这个国家的文化和这个国家感兴趣。你应该学习这跟国家语言。 If you like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, learn Russian. If you're going to live in Bangkok, learn Thai. If your partner is Mexican, learn Spanish. 如果你喜欢托尔斯泰和陀思妥耶夫斯基，请学习俄语。如果你要住在曼谷，请学习泰语。如果你的伴侣是墨西哥人，请学习西班牙语。 And remember: Although you can get by as a tourist in, possibly, weeks, mastering a language is a long-term commitment taking years, not months. 请记住：虽然你可以在几周内学会一名游客需要的语言水平，但是掌握一种语言是一项长期的任务，需要花费数年而不是数月的时间。 Here are a few examples, ranked in order of the number of hours it takes the average learner to master them from lowest to highest: 以下是一些示例，按普通学习者从最低到最高掌握它们所花费的小时数进行排序： （此处我们挑选的最简单的和最难的） Easiest (about 600 hours of study)最简单（大约600个小时的学习时间） After just 600 hours of study, you'll have no trouble fitting in on the streets of Paris. 仅需600个小时的学习，你便可以轻松适应巴黎的生活。 Along with Dutch and Norwegian, the popular Latin languages -- Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese -- require about 600 hours of study to achieve 'general professional proficiency' in speaking and reading. 与荷兰语和挪威语一起，流行的拉丁语-意大利语，法语，西班牙语和葡萄牙语-大约需要600个小时的学习时间，就可以达到口语和阅读的“一般专业水平”。 Of these, Spanish and Italian are the easiest for native English speakers to learn, followed by Portuguese and finally French. 其中，西班牙语和意大利语是母语为英语的人最容易学习的语言，其次是葡萄牙语，最后是法语。 They share many words with English, but it's that common vocabulary that creates 'false friends' -- words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly as meanings have drifted with time. 他们与英语共享许多单词，但是正是这些共同的词汇创造了“虚假的朋友”，即看起来或听起来相似，但随着时间的推移，意思也不尽相同。 While French and Italian are pretty standardized, you must choose whether to learn Latin American Spanish or 'castellano,' which is spoken in Spain; they differ as much as US English and British English. 虽然法语和意大利语非常标准化，但是您必须选择学习拉丁美洲的西班牙语还是“ castellano”；它们与美国英语和英国英语一样有很多差别。 The choice is even more striking with Portuguese; long ago I opted for Brazilian and to this day I still can't properly understand speakers from Portugal. 葡萄牙语的选择更加惊人。很久以前，我选择了巴西语，但直到今天，我仍然无法正确地理解来自葡萄牙的演讲者。 科普：葡萄牙语是继英语和西班牙语之后世界上使用最广泛的语种之一。截止至2013年，全世界共有约230,000,000的人口使用葡萄牙语（Português），是世界流行语种的第6位，仅次于汉语、英语、法语、西班牙语和阿拉伯语。葡萄牙语的使用者绝大部分居住在巴西，而只有1200万左右使用者居住在葡萄牙。 Japanese (2,200 hours)日语（2,200小时） A country that's enriched the world with sushi, karaoke and manga, Japan has many devotees, especially among gamers and geeks. 日本是一个充斥着寿司，卡拉OK和漫画的国家，并拥有许多其爱好者，尤其是在游戏玩家和极客之中。 But they are confronted with an extremely challenging language that uses imported Chinese characters (Kanji) cut off from their original meaning as well as two syllabaries -- Hiragana and Katakana (you must learn when to use which). 但是他们面对的是一种极具挑战性的语言，该语言使用了从其原始含义中截取的进口汉字（汉字）以及两个音节（平假名和片假名）（您必须学习何时使用哪种音节）。 Counting objects depends on whether they are long and thin (roads), small and round (apples), thin and flat (sheets of paper), broad and flat (rugs) and hundreds more varieties. 计数取决于对象是长而细（道路），小而圆形（苹果），薄而扁平（纸片），宽而扁平（地毯）以及上百种。 What Japanese you speak also depends on your gender. There's a 'rough' language for men and a more 'ladylike' language for women, but you must understand both. 你的性别也决定了你说什么日语。男性有一种“粗俗”的语言，女性有一种“淑女”的语言，但是你必须同时理解这两种语言。 By all means start a course of Japanese at home, but if you want to progress at all, pencil in a month of intensive practice in the Land of the Rising Sun. 你可以在家用各种办法学习日语，但是如果你想完全掌握日语，那么你需要在日本刻苦学习。 Cantonese/Mandarin (2,200 hours each)粤语/普通话（每个2,200小时） One of the challenges of learning Mandarin is learning all of the characters. 学习普通话的挑战之一是学习所有偏旁。 Each Chinese dialect is effectively another language but Mandarin (Putonghua in Chinese, which means the common language) is considered the official tongue in modern China.They all share (roughly) one evolving writing system, referred to as 書面語 (or written language) invented for administering a large, diverse empire. 每个汉语方言实际上都是另一种语言，但普通话（普通话就是被大家都说的话）被认为是现代中国的官方语言，它们都（大致）共享一种不断发展的书写系统，普通话会被称为书面语言，这种被发明的书面语掌管着这个巨大复杂的语言系统。 To complicate the matter further, there are two main types of written Chinese characters under the same writing system: the traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the simplified Chinese in mainland China (standardized and simplified in the 1950s to increase literacy in the country). 使问题更加复杂的是，在相同的书写系统下，主要有两种类型的书面汉字：在香港和台湾使用的繁体中文和在中国大陆使用的简体中文（简体字：在1950年代进行标准化和简化以提高该国的识字率） ）。 For example, fly is written as 飛 in traditional Chinese and 飞 in simplified Chinese. They're basically the same character written in two different ways but pronounced differently when spoken in different dialect. 例如，fly用繁体中文写成“飛”，用简体中文写成“飞”。它们基本上是以两种不同的方式书写的相同的字符，但是用不同的方言说出的发音却不同。 Confused yet? 感到困惑了吗？ Each written word when spoken is mutually incomprehensible between a Mandarin speaker in Beijing and a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. If you think that's odd, consider our number system: the symbol '9' is universally recognized but it's pronounced 'nine' in English and 'devet' in Slovenian. 在北京说普通话的人和在香港说广东话的人他们都是互相不能理解的。如果你认为这很奇怪，请考虑我们的数字系统：符号“ 9”是公认的，但英语中的发音为“ NINE”，斯洛文尼亚语的发音为“ devet”。 Every word must be memorized separately as you can't guess its pronunciation from the script -- but one could say the same of English if you consider plough, dough and tough. 每个字都必须单独记住，因为你无法从它的构造去猜出它的发音-这时你可以想象一下英文中的plough, dough and tough，你根据他们的构造无法知道他们的意思。 Meanwhile, dictionaries list words according to stroke count. 同时，词典是根据字的笔划计数来排列的。 These go from one to over 60 strokes. The archaic character zhé -- which, appropriately, means 'verbose' -- has 64 strokes. 这些从1到60多个笔画。古老的字符zhé（适当地表示“冗长”）具有64个画。 And then there are the pronunciation challenges. 然后是发音方面的挑战。 In the days of the British Empire, if you were going to be sent to Hong Kong as a civil servant, you had to pass a musical test first because all Chinese languages are tonal. 在大英帝国时代，如果你要以公务员的身份被送往香港，那么你必须首先通过音乐测试，因为所有中文都具有音调。 There are four tones in Mandarin: high pitch (say G in a musical scale), rising pitch (like from C to G), falling (from G to C) and falling low then rising (C to B to G) -- and if you think that's difficult, there are nine tones in Cantonese. 普通话有四个音调：高音（例如，以音乐为单位表示G），高音（从C到G），低音（从G到C），低音然后高音（从C到B到G）–和如果您认为这很困难，那么广东话有九种音调。
In Mandarin, there is a whole poem, 'The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den' with just the syllable 'shi' repeated 107 times in various intonations. 在普通话中，有一首完整的诗《石窟里的狮子吃诗人》，其中的音节“ shi”在各种语调中重复了107次。
我们总结下来就是如果想学习一门语言，那么一定不要脱离这门语言所涵盖的文化背景， 这样学习起来就更加有趣也更容易哦！ |
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