I Do this all the time… I Think it really helps~
It also makes watching C-Dramas and T-Dramas (and even sometimes K-dramas) Easy
to Understand because espeacially in Chinese there are a lot of
Language related jokes.
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As Irmar said, there is nothing that is in the same language as Greek, despite Greek giving the western world a lot of words. Spanish and Portuguese are part of the Latin Tree as they are based on Latin. The interesting part of Spanish however, is that it has retained a lot more ancient Greek words and they are still being used today in their correct ancient Greek context.
I’ve been watching mostly C-Dramas for over two years now and just started learning Chinese on Duolingo (it makes it like a game). It is really fun and I’ve accomplished a lot really quickly. I had two years of German in high school and two years of Spanish in college and I find Chinese both more challenging and more fun. I love that the verb doesn’t change with the person, the word order is often very different from English, but I find the differences very interesting.
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I spent 2 years just watching the dramas and mostly focusing on only watching C-dramas as I only wanted to add one language and not get them confused in my head. I did still watch a few K-dramas. Then just recently I started using Duolingo to get the basics of Mandarin Chinese. There are 54 Units right now and I’m on the 17th and already I am recognizing so many words and phrases as I watch the dramas. I’m really enjoying going back to my favorites and watching them again with my new-found knowledge. Duolingo gamified learning languages. It makes it really fun. My kids are also using it. I’m learning Mandarin Chinese, they are learning Japanese, Hindi, and Spanish and we can’t support each other’s progress and even have friend quests with each other. It is so much fun. I still need a lot of work on getting the tones down, but I am learning really fast. I think the two years of watching C-Dramas really helped a lot.
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I am loving learning Mandarin Chinese on Duolingo. I’ve started brushing up on my German and Spanish too. I studied them both for 2 years each when I was in my late teens-early twenties. Chinese is both more challenging and more fun for me. I like that verbs don’t change with the person. Now I can understand the common mistakes I’ve heard native Chinese speakers make when they speak English. Our word order is often the opposite of each other. I love how the word NO is not so much a stand alone word but a multifaceted combination. At first it had me stumped. Why wasn’t I hearing it the same in C-dramas? Then I saw it explained that it goes with whatever you are saying no to.
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