It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.

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3 points

Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.

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Hell yes

Just use one character and there you have your plural

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3 points
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They lose out in that any time you refer to something that can be counted, you have an irregular counting word before it. Each word doesn’t get its own counting word though, and there’s a generic, ge you can always use if you have the vocabulary of a 3 year old, so it’s not that bad, but it’s still completely unnecessary memorization.

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Here I agree, it’s an unnecessary pain, and the counting words are often super counter-intuitive

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