A simple example would be counters in Japanese. In European languages, a counter is just a number, so you would say, "three birds, three peanuts, three sheets of paper, three pens, three cars". In Japanese, a counter conveys not just quantity but also various object properties
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So you would say, sanba (birds and bunnies), sanko (generic small thing), sanmai (flat thing), sanbon (cylindrical thing), sandai (large vehicle), etc. In fact there are more distinct counters than I can count. It takes a long time to get used to these distinctions
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There's even a counter specifically for chopsticks. Even though they're cylindrical objects, chopsticks are their own semantic category within cylinder-like things
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Also birds and bunnies are a distinct category within animals, so while there's an animal counter, birds and bunnies have their own specific counter. Bunnies are a type of bird
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Or you come from a language that is so rich that you can't properly express yourself in new one... (Turkish to English for example)
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How is this different than simply discovering a more nuanced interpretation of a concept that you thought you knew? It seems the foreign language aspect is incidental to that primary learning task.
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It’s not just more nuanced; it’s orthogonal. In this case that all flat things should be enumerated deeply and fundamentally together, or all full receptacles. Language contains categorisations that shape our thought, and are generally unacknowledged.
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Even more troublesome is when the foreign language makes phonological or tonal distinctions that one's childhood languages don't make.
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Hahaha, this!


«want» vs. «won't» They will always sound the exact same, even though I can reproduce the “different” sounds.
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A simple example of this for German natives speaking English is distinguishing “this” from “that” (both generally “das” in German).
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I think the case of "the" vs "der, die, das, dem, der, dem, den, die, das, des, der, des" is more well known...
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